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Franz Boas
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Franz Boas was the first distinguished social scientist in the United States to challenge the prevailing concept of racial inferiority. He actively campaigned on behalf of black people in America in the early part of the 20th century. Considered the founding father of American anthropology, Boas taught at Columbia University for fifty years, encouraging his students to follow his example by actually working in the field. Among those who did so was Margaret Mead.
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Franz Boas (1858-1942) was the single most influential anthropologist in North America in the twentieth century. He immigrated to the United States from Germany in the 1880s, taught briefly at Clark University, then in 1896 took a position at Columbia University, where he remained for the rest of his career. He was trained originally in physics and geography, but by the time he came to this country his interests had already turned to anthropology.
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Bio: Born in Germany in 1858, Franz Boas received his PhD. for the University of Kiel in 1881. Early in his career he studied the culture of Native Americans, first in British Columbia and later in the Southwestern United States. In 1899 he became the first professor of anthropology at Columbia where he played an important role in the development of this new discipline with his theory of cultural relativism.
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During the half century leading up to the Second World War, Franz Boas helped to define academic anthropology in the United States. Trained as a geographer at the University of Heidelberg, Boas worked initially on the Inuit of Baffin Island and subsequently on the cultures of the Indians of the Northwest Pacific Coast, becoming a leading figure in American anthropology by the first decade of the twentieth century. As Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, Boas made significant theoretical contributions to ethnology, linguistics, and physical anthropology, helping to ingrain the four fields approach in his discipline and introducing the concept of cultural relativism into wide currency. He was, as well, a committed Socialist and an ardent opponent of both racism and fascism.
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Franz Boas is considered both the founder of modern anthropology as well as the father of American Anthropology. It was Boas who gave modern anthropology its rigorous scientific methodology, patterned after the natural sciences, and it was Boas who originated the notion of "culture" as learned behaviors. His emphasis on research first, followed by generalizations, stood in marked contrast to the British school of anthropology which emphasized the creation of grand theories (which were only after tested through field work). As a teacher, principally at Columbia Univesity, he served as mentor to many of the top names in American anthropology, including such luminaries as Alfred Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Robert Lowie, and Edward Sapir. Many of these went on to found, or profoundly influence, departments of anthropology at other universities. Boas further extended his influence through such important works as The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), Anthropology and Modern Life (1928), and Kwakiutl Ethnography (1966).
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Franz Boas was born at Minden, Westphalia, Germany, July 9, 1858. After studying at the Universitites of Heidelberg, Bonn, and Kiel, he received a Ph.D. in physics with a minor in geography from the University of Kiel in 1881. His first fieldwork experience was among the Eskimo in Baffinland, Canada, 1883-4. From 1885 to 1896, Boas conducted fieldwork under the auspices of several museums on the North Pacific Coast of North America. During this time he was ... involved in an important project to bring the cultures of Native Americans to the general pubic as part of the Chicago World's Fair in 1892-3. Boas pioneered the concept of life group displays, commonly now as diaramas, and, as part of his argument that racial distinctions among humans are not valid he exhibited skulls of various peoples to demonstrate the irrelevance of brain size.
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Franz Boas