Franz Boas

Works

• 1896The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology

  Lecture published in Science: similar customs among different peoples need not have the same cause or mark the same stage of development; before laws of cultural growth are proposed, the history of each culture in its region must be reconstructed.

• 1911The Mind of Primitive Man

  Book based on lectures in Boston and Mexico City in 1910–11, revised in 1938: Boas finds no evidence that any human group is innately inferior in mind; differences of culture follow from history and contact, and even bodily form changes with environment.

Position

Boas is on the map as the founder of cultural anthropology in the United States and as a scientific critic of the racial theories of his time. Against evolutionist schemes that ranked all societies on one ladder from “savagery” to “civilisation”, he argued in 1896 that similar customs can arise from different histories, so that general laws may be sought only after the history of each culture has been studied. In “The Mind of Primitive Man” (1911) he held that the mental capacities of all human groups are the same and that differences of achievement reflect history and contact; his measurements of immigrants’ children were meant to show that even head form, then taken as a fixed racial marker, changes with environment. In his work and that of his students, among them Alfred Kroeber, Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston, culture became a plural: each people has its own way of life, to be studied through long fieldwork and in its own language, whose categories, like grammar, work largely unconsciously. Du Bois and Alain Locke drew on these arguments against racism, and Lévi-Strauss credited Boas with recognising the unconscious nature of cultural phenomena. Critics such as Marvin Harris objected that his caution about general laws left anthropology without theory. His collecting of human remains from graves and his part in bringing Inughuit to New York in 1897 belong to the discussion of his legacy.

Life & context

Franz Boas was born on 9 July 1858 in Minden, Westphalia. He studied physics and geography in Heidelberg, Bonn and Kiel, where he took his doctorate in 1881 with a thesis on the colour of water. A year among the Inuit of Baffin Island (1883–84) turned him towards ethnology; in Berlin he worked at the Royal Ethnological Museum under Adolf Bastian and in 1886 qualified as a lecturer in geography. In the same year he made his first journey to the Northwest Coast of America, where he later worked for decades with the Kwakwaka’wakw and his collaborator George Hunt. In 1887 he settled in New York. After posts at Clark University, the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the American Museum of Natural History (1896–1905), he taught at Columbia University, as professor from 1899 until 1936. He died in New York on 21 December 1942.

Further main works

• The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians (1897)
• Handbook of American Indian Languages (ed., 1911)
• Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants (1911)
• Race, Language and Culture (1940)