Franz Boas (1858–1942)
● Pivotal influence in moving anthropology into academia, in establishing associations and journals, and by creating essential networks of
institutional support from the public, policy makers, and other scientists.
● The fact that American anthropology has included sociocultural anthropology, linguistics, physical anthropology, and archaeology — the
so-called four fields approach — is partly a reflection of Boas’s broad interests.
● He was born in Germany into a prosperous Jewish family that was committed to progressive education, politics and liberal democratic
reforms.
● “My university studies were a compromise,” Boas re- called, between an “emotional interest in the phenomena of the world,” which led to
geography, and an “intellectual interest” in the formal analyses of mathematics and physics (1939:20). His training “as a physicist heavily
determined his whole intellectual career,” creating his “gifts for dealing with abstract form or structure and of intellectual precision and
rigor” (1943:7).
Franz Boas (1858–1942)
● Short term employment at the Clark University and then at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition who were working
on displaying Native American materials.
● Boas finally obtained a permanent position at the American Museum of Natural History in December 1895.
● He was a committed, public intellectual
● Throughout his career, Boas attacked racist pseudoscientific studies linking race and intelligence. He drew on his personal
experience of anti-Semitism; these factors produced an informed and fervent rejection of racism. He wrote anti-Nazi
polemics that the Allied underground sources smuggled into Germany.
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Background
● In Boas’s work we observe a paradigm shift from a universal evolutionary approach to context specific cultural
approach.
● He dedicated himself in pursuing the question “what determines the behavior of human beings” (1939:20–21).
● His research on the Inuit was “to discover how far one can get, by studying a very special and not simple case, in
determining the relationship between the life of a people and environment” (Boas 1974:44).
● “biological differences between races are small. There is no reason to believe that one race is by nature so much
more intelligent, endowed with great will power, or emotionally more stable than another”
Boas demonstrated that traits thought to be fixed (genetically inherited) traits were actually modified by
environment. All other racial classifications and characterizations soon became suspect.
Background
● Boas and the anthropologist O. T. Mason engaged in a spirited debate about the organization of ethnographic materials in museum
displays. Instead of being presented in technological stages,ethnographic collections should be “arranged according to tribes, in
order to teach the peculiar style of each group. The art and characteristic style of a people can be understood only by studying its
productions as a whole.”
● Boas authored six books and more than seven hundred articles; his bibliography records his diverse research (Andrews 1943).
Most numerous are his articles and reports on his investigations in the Arctic and Northwest Coast; Boas’s publications on the
Kwakiutl, Tsimshian, and other Northwest Coast societies total over ten thousand printed pages (Codere 1959). Boas made major
contributions in the study of language. For four decades Boas taught two seminars at Columbia University: one on statistical
methods, the other on North American Indian languages. Boas published extensively on Northwest Coast Indian languages and
established a research agenda for recording Native American languages (Boas 1966d).
The Integration of Cultures
● Boas argues that cultures were integrated wholes produced by specific historical processes rather than reflections of universal evolutionary stages.
● The comparative approaches of Morgan and Tylor were undercut by three flaws:
○ The assumption of unilineal evolution
○ The notion of modern societies as evolutionary survivals
○ The classification of societies based on weak data and inappropriate criteria.
● There is no evidence indicating that matrilineal kin systems preceded patrilineal kin systems or that religions based on animism developed before polytheistic
religions. Therefore, he argues, evolutionary frameworks were unproven assumptions imposed on the data, not theories derived from ethnographic data.
The Integration of Cultures
● “A detailed study of customs in their bearings to the total culture of the tribe practicing them, and in connection with an investigation of their geographical distribution among
neighboring tribes, affords us almost always a means of determining with considerable accuracy the historical causes that led to the formation of the customs in question and
to the psychological processes that were at work in their development. The results of inquiries may be three-fold. They may reveal the environmental conditions which have
created or modified elements; they may clear up psychological factors which are at work in shaping culture; or they may bring before our eyes the effects that historical
connections have had upon the growth of the culture.” (Boas 1896:905)
Thus he suggests that lawlike generalizations can be based on adaptational, psychological, or historical factors, but only if documented by well-
established ethnographic cases.
Conclusion
● America, anthropological research took a decidedly anti theoretical turn in the early twentieth century, when research began to focus on the differences rather
than the similarities between societies. When cultural elements were held in common, they were interpreted as evidence of historical contact and diffusion and
not unilineal evolution. Thanks to Boas’s work the concepts of anthropological holism and cultural particularism became twin tenets of American anthropology.
● “Cultural phenomena are of such complexity that it seems to me doubtful whether valid cultural laws can be found. The causal conditions of cultural happenings
lie always in the interaction between individual and society, and no classificatory study of societies will solve this problem.”
Boas did not articulate the relationship between cultural elements and cultural wholes. Stocking poses the unresolved paradox: “On the one hand,
culture was simply an accidental accretion of individual elements. On the other, culture — despite Boas’ renunciation of organic growth — was at the same time
an integrated spiritual totality that somehow conditioned the form of its elements” (1974:5–6).
