Franz Boas

Franz Boas

Franz Boas (born July 9, 1858 in Minden, Westphalia; died December 22, 1942) was one of the pioneers of modern anthropology and is often called the "Father of American Anthropology". A German by birth, Boas worked for most of his life in North America. Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines, receiving his doctorate in physics, and his post-doctoral work in geography.

Early life and education

Franz Boas was born in Minden, Westphalia. Although his grandparents were observant Jews, his parents, like most German Jews, embraced Enlightenment values, including their assimilation into modern German society. Boas was sensitive about his Jewish background, and while he vocally opposed anti-Semitism, and refused to convert to Christianity, he did not identify himself as a Jew.

From his early experience at the Froebel kindergarten in Minden, to his studies at Gymnasium, Boas was exposed to, natural history. Of his work at Gymnasium, he was most excited by and proud of his research on the geographic distribution of plants. Nevertheless, when Boas attended university, first at Heidelberg, then Bonn, he focused on mathematics and physics. He intended to study physics at Berlin, but chose to attend the university at Kiel, in order to be closer to his family. There he studied physics with Gustav Karsten. Boas wished to conduct research concerning Gauss's law of the normal distribution of errors, but Karsten instructed him to research the optical properties of water instead. That research became the basis of his doctoral dissertation.

Boas received his doctorate in physics from the university at Kiel in 1881. He was unhappy with his dissertation, but intrigued by the problems of perception that plagued his research. He had developed an interest in Kantian thought, and took a course on aesthetics with Kuno Fischer at Heidelberg, and with Benno Erdmann at Bonn, two leading Kantian philosophers. This interest led him to "psychophysics," which addressed psychological and epistemological problems in physics. He again considered moving to Berlin to study psychophysics with Hermann von Helmholtz, but psychophysics was of dubious status, and Boas had no training in psychology.

Post-Graduate Studies: from Geography to Anthropology

Coincidentally, Theobald Fischer had moved to Kiel, and Boas took up geography as a way to explore his budding interest in the relationship between subjective experience and the objective world. At the time, German geographers were divided over the causes of cultural variation. Many argued that the physical environment was the principal determining factor, but others (notably Friedrich Ratzel) argued that the diffusion of ideas through human migration is more important. In 1883 Boas went to Baffin Island to conduct geographic research on the impact of the physical environment on native (Inuit) migrations. He returned to Berlin to finish his studies, and in 1886 (with Helmholtz' support) he successfully defended his habilitation thesis, Baffin Land, and was named privatdozent in geography.

While on Baffin Island he began to develop his interest in studying non-Western cultures (in 1888 he published a book, The Central Eskimo). Moreover, in 1885 Boas went to work with physical anthropologist Rudolf Virchow and Ethnologist Adolf Bastian at the Royal Ethnological Museum in Berlin. Boas had studied anatomy with Virchow two years earlier, while preparing for the Baffin Island expedition. At the time, Virchow was involved in a vociferous debate with his former student, Ernst Haeckel, over evolution. Haeckel had abandoned his medical practice to study comparative anatomy after reading Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, and vigorously promoted Darwin's ideas in Germany. Virchow favored Lamarckian models of evolution. This debate resonated with debates among geographers. Lamarckians believed that environmental forces could precipitate rapid and enduring changes in organisms that had no inherited source; thus, Lamarckians and environmental determinists often found themselves on the same side of debates.

But Boas worked more closely with Bastian, who was noted for his antipathy to environmental determinism. Instead, he argued for the "psychic unity of mankind;" a belief that all humans had the same intellectual capacity, and that all cultures were based on the same basic mental principles. Variations in custom and belief, he argued, were the products of historical accidents. This view resonated with Boas's experiences on Baffin Island, and drew him towards anthropology.

While at the Royal Ethnological Museum Boas became interested in the Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, and after defending his habilitation thesis, he left for a three month trip to British Columbia via New York. In January, 1887, he was offered a job as assistant editor of the journal Science, in New York. Alienated by growing anti-Semitism and nationalism, as well as the very limited academic opportunities for a geographer, in Germany, Boas decided to stay in the United States. He continued to teach at Clark University. Boas's opportunities at Clark were limited, however, because the university did not have an anthropology department. Moreover, Boas was concerned about University president G. Stanley Hall's interference in his research. In 1892 Boas joined a number of other Clark faculty in resigning, to protest Hall's infringement on academic freedom. Boas was then appointed chief assistant in anthropology at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Early career: Museum Studies

In the late 1800s anthropology in the United States was dominated by the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE), directed by John Wesley Powell, a geologist who favored Lewis Henry Morgan's theory of cultural evolution. The BAE was housed at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. The Peabody Museum at Harvard University was an important, though lesser, center of anthropological research).

It was while working on museum collections and exhibitions that Boas formulated his basic approach to culture, which led him to break with museums and seek to establish anthropology as an academic discipline.

During this period Boas made five more trips to the Pacific Northwest. His continuing field research led him to think of culture as a local context for human action. His emphasis on local context and history led him to oppose the dominant model at the time - cultural evolution. Boas initially broke with evolutionary theory over the issue of kinship. Lewis Henry Morgan had argued that all human societies move from an initial form of matrilineal organization to patrilineal organization. Indian groups on the northern coast of British Columbia, like the Tsimshian and Tlingit, were organized into matrilineal clans. Indians on the southern coast, like the Nootka and the Salish, however, were organized into patrilineal groups. Boas focused on the Kwakiutl, who lived between the two clusters. The Kwakiutl seemed to have a mix of features. Prior to marriage, a man would assume his wife's father's name and crest. His children took on these names and crests as well, although his sons would lose them when they got married. Names and crests thus stayed in the mother's line. Boas argued that the Kwakiutl were changing from a prior patrilineal organization to a matrilineal one, as they learned about matrilineal principles from their northern neighbors.

Boas's rejection of Morgan's theories led him, in an 1887 article, to challenge Mason's principles of museum display. At stake, however, were more basic issues of causality and classification. The evolutionary approach to material culture led museum curators to organize objects on display according to function or level of technological development. Curators assumed that changes in the forms of artefacts reflect some natural process of progressive evolution. Boas, however, felt that the form an artefact took reflected the circumstances under which it was produced and used. He claimed that even artefacts that were similar in form might have developed in very different contexts, for different reasons.

Boas had a chance to apply his approach to exhibits when he was hired to assist Frederick Ward Putnam, director and curator of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, who had been appointed as head of the Department of Ethnology and Archeology for the Chicago Fair in 1892. Boas arranged for fourteen Kwakiutl Indians from British Columbia to come and reside in a mock Kwakiutl village, where they could perform their daily tasks in context.

After the Exposition Boas worked at the newly-created Field Museum in Chicago until 1894, when he was replaced (against his will) by BAE archeologist William Henry Holmes. In 1896 Boas was appointed Assistant Curator of Ethnology and Somatology of the American Museum of Natural History. In 1897 he organized the Jesup Expedition, a five-year long field-study of the natives of the Pacific Northwest, whose ancestors had migrated across the Bering Strait from Siberia. He attempted to organize exhibits along contextual, rather than evolutionary, lines. His approach brought him into conflict with the President of the Museum, Morris Jesup, and its Director, Hermon Bumpus. He resigned in 1905, never to work for a museum again.

Later Career: Academic Anthropology

Boas had been appointed lecturer in physical anthropology at Columbia University in 1896, and had been promoted to professor of anthropology in 1899. Nevertheless, the various anthropologists teaching at Columbia had been assigned to different departments. When Boas left the Museum of Natural History, he negotiated with Columbia University to consolidate the various professors into one department, of which Boas would take charge. Boas's program at Columbia became the first Ph.D. program in anthropology in America.

During this time Boas played a key role in organizing the American Anthropological Association (AAA) as an umbrella organization for the emerging field. Boas originally wanted the AAA to be limited to professional anthropologists, but W.J. McGee (another geologist who had joined the BAE under Powell's leadership) argued that the organization should have an open membership. McGee's position prevailed and he was elected the organization's first president in 1902; Boas was elected a vice-president, along with Putnam, Powell, and Holmes.

At both Columbia and the AAA, Boas encouraged the "four field" concept of anthropology -physical anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, and cultural anthropology. His work in these fields was pioneering: in physical anthropology he led scholars away from static taxonomical classifications of race to an emphasis on human biology and evolution; in linguistics he broke through the limitations of classic philology and established some of the central problems in modern linguistics and cognitive anthropology; in cultural anthropology he (along with Bronislaw Malinowski) established the contextualist approach to culture, cultural relativism, and the participant-observation method of fieldwork.

The four-field approach was understood not merely as bringing together different kinds of anthropologists into one department, but as reconceiving anthropology through the integration of different objects of anthropological research into one over-arching object, was one of Boas's fundamental contributions to the discipline, and came to differentiate American anthropology from English, French, or German.

In his 1907 essay, Anthropology, Boas identified two basic questions for anthropologists: "Why are the tribes and nations of the world different, and how have the present differences developed?" Amplifying these questions, he explained the object of anthropological study:

We do not discuss the anatomical, physiological, and mental characteristics of man considered as an individual; but we are interested in the diversity of these traits in groups of men found in different geographical areas and in different social classes. It is our task to inquire into the causes that have brought about the observed differentiation, and to investigate the sequence of events that have led to the establishment of the multifarious forms of human life. In other words, we are interested in the anatomical and mental characteristics of men living under the same biological, geographical, and social environment, and as determined by their past.

These questions signal a marked break from then-current ideas about human diversity, which assumed that some people have a history, evident in a historical (or written) record, while other people, lacking writing, also lack history. For some, this distinction between two different kinds of societies explained the difference between history, sociology, economics and other disciplines that focus on people with writing, and anthropology, which was supposed to focus on people without writing. Boas rejected this distinction between kinds of societies, and this division of labor in the academy. He understood all societies to have a history, and all societies to be proper objects of anthropological society. In order to approach literate and non-literate societies the same way, he emphasized the importance on studying human history through the analysis of other things besides written texts, pointing to biology, linguistic and ethnology.

In one of Boas' most important books, The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), he integrated these various concerns and established a program that would dominate American anthropology for the next fifteen years. In this study he established that in any given population, biology, language, material and symbolic culture are autonomous; that each is an equally important dimension of human nature, but that no one of these dimensions is reducible to another. In other words, he established that culture does not depend on any independent variables. He emphasized that the biological, linguistic, and cultural traits of any group of people are the product of historical developments involving both cultural and non-cultural forces. He established that cultural plurality is a fundamental feature of humankind, and that the specific cultural environment structures much individual behavior.

Boas also presented himself as a role-model for the citizen-scientist, who understand that even were the truth pursued as its own end, all knowledge has moral consequences. The Mind of Primitive Man ends with an appeal to humanism:

"I hope the discussions outlined in these pages have shown that the data of anthropology teach us a greater tolerance of forms of civilization different from our own, that we should learn to look on foreign races with greater sympathy and with a conviction that, as all races have contributed in the past to cultural progress in one way or another, so they will be capable of advancing the interests of mankind if we are only willing to give them a fair opportunity".

Physical Anthropology

Boas's work in physical anthropology brought together his interest in Darwinian evolution with his interest in migration as a cause of change. His most important research in this field was his study of changes in body form among children of immigrants in New York. Other researchers had already noted differences in height, cranial measurements, and other physical features between Americans and people from different parts of Europe. Many used these differences to argue that there is an innate biological difference between races. Boas's primary interest in symbolic and material culture and in language was the study of processes of change. He therefore set out to determine whether bodily forms are also subject to processes of change. Boas found that average measures of cranial size of immigrants was significantly different from members of these groups who were born in the United States. Moreover, he discovered that average measures of cranial size of children born within ten years of their mothers' arrival were significantly different from those of children born more than ten years after their mothers' arrival. Boas did not deny that physical features such as height or cranial size were inherited; he did, however, argue that the environment has an influence on these features, which is expressed through change over time. This work was central to his influential argument that differences between races were not immutable.

These findings were radical at the time and continue to be debated. Many argued that their results contradicted Boas's original findings and demonstrated that they may no longer be used to support arguments of plasticity in cranial morphology (see [1]). The others claimed that Boas's original findings were correct (see [2]).

Although some sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists have suggested that Boas was opposed to Darwinian evolution, Boas in fact was a committed proponent of Darwinian evolutionary thought. Since Boas's times, physical anthropologists have established that the human capacity for culture is a product of human evolution. In fact, Boas's research on changes in body form played an important role in the rise of Darwinian theory. It is crucial to remember that Boas was trained at a time when biologists had no understanding of genetics; Mendelian genetics became widely known only after 1900.

Linguistics

Although Boas published descriptive studies of Native American languages, and wrote on theoretical difficulties in classifying languages, he left it to his colleagues and students to research the relationship between culture and language.

His 1889 article On Alternating Sounds, made a singular contribution to the methodology of both linguistics and cultural anthropology. It is a response to a paper presented in 1888 by Daniel Garrison Brinton, at the time a professor of American linguistics and archeology at the University of Pennsylvania. Brinton observed that in the spoken languages of many Native Americans certain sounds are regularly alternated. Brinton added that there were many words that, even when repeated by the same speaker, varied considerably in their vocalization. Using evolutionary theory, Brinton argued that this pervasive inconsistency was a sign of linguistic inferiority, and evidence that Native Americans were at a low stage in their evolution.

Boaz objected such conclusion. He instead shifted attention to the perception of different sounds. When people describe one sound in different ways, is it because they cannot perceive the difference, or might there be another reason? He immediately establishes that he is not concerned with cases involving perceptual deficit - the aural equivalent of color-blindness. He points out that the question of people who describe one sound in different ways is comparable to that of people who describe different sounds in one way. This is crucial for research in descriptive linguistics: when studying a new language, how are we to note the pronunciation of different words? People may pronounce a word in a variety of ways and still recognize that they are using the same word. The issue, then, is not that such sensations are not recognized in their individuality, but that sounds are classified according to their similarity. In other words, people classify a variety of perceived sounds into one category. The English word "green" can be used to refer to a variety of shades, hues, and tints. But there are some languages that have no word for "green." In such cases, people might classify what we would call "green" as either "yellow" or "blue". People categorize similar colors in a different way than English speakers.

Although Boas was making a very specific contribution to the methods of descriptive linguistics, his ultimate point is far reaching - observer bias need not be personal, it can be cultural. In other words, the perceptual categories of Western researchers may systematically cause a Westerner to misperceive or to fail to perceive entirely a meaningful element in another culture. This point provides the methodological foundation for Boas's cultural relativism - elements of a culture are meaningful in that culture's terms, even if they may be meaningless in another culture.

Cultural Anthropology

The essence of Boas's approach to ethnography is found in his early essay on The Study of Geography. There he argued for an approach that considers every phenomena as worthy of being studied for its own sake. This orientation led Boas to promote a cultural anthropology characterized by a strong commitment to

• empiricism (with a resulting skepticism of attempts to formulate "scientific laws" of culture)
• a notion of culture as fluid and dynamic
• ethnographic fieldwork, in which the anthropologist resides for an extended period among the people being researched, conducts research in the native language, and collaborates with native researchers, as a method of collecting data, and
• cultural relativism as a methodological tool while conducting fieldwork, and as heuristic tool while analyzing data.

Although other anthropologists at the time, such as Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown focused on the study of societies, which they understood to be clearly bounded, Boas's attention to history, which reveals the extent to which traits diffuse from one place to another, led him to view cultural boundaries as multiple and overlapping, and as highly permeable. Boas understood that as people try to make sense of their world they seek to integrate its disparate elements, with the result that different cultures could be characterized as having different configurations or patterns. But Boasians also understood that such integration was always in tensions with diffusion, and any appearance of a stable configuration is contingent (see Bashkow 2004: 445).

Boas thought of culture as fundamentally dynamic: "As soon as these methods are applied, primitive society loses the appearance of absolute stability.... All cultural forms rather appear in a constant state of flux...." (see Lewis 2001b)

Having argued against the relevance of the distinction between literate and non-literate societies as a way of defining anthropology's object of study, Boas argued that non-literate and literate societies should be analyzed in the same way. Nineteenth century historians had been applying the techniques of philology to reconstruct the histories of, and relationships between, literate societies. In order to apply these methods to non-literate societies, Boas argued that the task of fieldworkers is to produce and collect texts in non-literate societies. This took the form not only of compiling lexicons and grammars of the local language, but of recording myths, folktales, beliefs about social relationships and institutions, and even recipes for local cuisine. (see Bunzl 2004: 438-439)

Orthogenetic versus Darwinian Evolution

One of the greatest accomplishments of Boas and his students was their critique of theories of physical, social, and cultural evolution current at that time. This critique is central to Boas's work in museums, as well as his work in all four fields of anthropology.

For this reason, some people have argued that Boasian anthropology is at odds with Darwin's theory of evolution. This argument is unfounded, and mistakenly assumes that people using the word "evolution" always mean the same thing. In fact, Boas supported Darwinian theory, although he did not assume that it automatically applied to cultural and historical phenomena. The notion of evolution that the Boasians ridiculed and rejected was the then dominant belief in orthogenesis - a determinate or teleological process of evolution in which change occurs progressively regardless of natural selection. Boas rejected the prevalent theories of social evolution developed by Edward Burnett Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Herbert Spencer not because he rejected the notion of "evolution" per se, but because he rejected orthogenetic notions of evolution in favor of Darwinian evolution.

The difference between these prevailing theories of cultural evolution and Darwinian theory cannot be overstated. These theorists argued that all societies progress through the same stages in the same sequence. Thus, although the Inuit with whom Boas worked at Baffin Island, and the Germans with whom he studied as a graduate student, were contemporaries of one another, evolutionists argued that the Inuit were at an earlier stage in their evolution, and Germans at a later stage. This echoed a popular misreading of Darwin that suggested that human beings are descended from chimpanzees. In fact, Darwin argued that chimpanzees and humans are equally evolved. What characterizes Darwinian theory is its attention to the processes by which one species transforms into another; "adaptation" as a key principle in explaining the relationship between a species and its environment; and "natural selection" as a mechanism of change. In contrast, Morgan, Spencer, and Tylor had little to say about the process and mechanics of change.

Furthermore, Darwin built up his theory through a careful examination of considerable empirical data. Boasian research revealed that virtually every claim made by cultural evolutionists was contradicted by the data, or reflected a profound misinterpretation of the data.

Boas characterized his debt to Darwin thus:

Although the idea does not appear quite definitely expressed in Darwin's discussion of the development of mental powers, it seems quite clear that his main object has been to express his conviction that the mental faculties developed essentially without a purposive end, but they originated as variations, and were continued by natural selection. This idea was also brought out very clearly by Wallace, who emphasized that apparently reasonable activities of man might very well have developed without an actual application of reasoning

Thus, Boas suggested that what appear to be patterns or structures in a culture were not a product of conscious design, but rather the outcome of diverse mechanisms that produce cultural variation (such as diffusion and independent invention), shaped by the social environment in which people live and act. (see Lewis 2001b.)

Scientist as Activist

There are two things to which I am devoted: absolute academic and spiritual freedom, and the subordination of the state to the interests of the individual; expressed in other forms, the furthering of conditions in which the individual can develop to the best of his ability — as far as it is possible with a full understanding of the fetters imposed upon us by tradition; and the fight against all forms of power policy of states or private organizations. This means a devotion to principles of true democracy. I object to teaching of slogans intended to befog the mind, of whatever kind they may be. (letter from Boas to John Dewey, 11/6/39)

Many social scientists in other disciplines often agonize over the legitimacy of their work as "science," and consequently emphasize the importance of detachment, objectivity, abstraction, and quantifiability in their work. Perhaps because Boas, like other early anthropologists, was originally trained in the natural sciences, he and his students never expressed such anxiety. Moreover, he did not believe that detachment, objectivity, and quantifiability were required to make anthropology scientific. Since the object of study of anthropologists is different from the object of study of physicists, he assumed that anthropologists would have to employ different methods and different criteria for evaluating their research. Thus, Boas used statistical studies to demonstrate the extent to which variation in data is context-dependent, and argued that the context-dependent nature of human variation rendered many abstractions and generalizations that had been passing as scientific understandings of humankind (especially theories of social evolution popular at the time) in fact unscientific. His understanding of ethnographic fieldwork began with the fact that the objects of ethnographic study (for example, the Inuit of Baffin Island) were not just objects, but subjects, and his research called attention to their creativity and agency. More importantly, he viewed the Inuit as his teachers, thus reversing the typical hierarchical relationship between scientist and object of study.

This emphasis on the relationship between anthropologists and those they study — the point that, while astronomers and stars; chemists and elements; botanists and plants are fundamentally different, anthropologists and those they study are equally human — implied that anthropologists themselves could be objects of anthropological study. Although Boas did not pursue this reversal systematically, his article on alternating sounds illustrates his awareness that scientists should not be confident about their objectivity, because they too see the world through the prism of their culture.

This emphasis also led Boas to conclude that anthropologists have an obligation to speak out on social issues. Boas was especially concerned with racial inequality, which he had demonstrated was not biological in origin, but rather social. An early example of this concern is evident in his 1906 commencement address to Atlanta University, at the invitation of W. E. B. DuBois. Boas began by remarking that "If you did accept the view that the present weakness of the American Negro, his uncontrollable emotions, his lack of energy, are racially inherent, your work would still be noble one." He then went on, however, to argue against this view. To the claim that European and Asian civilizations are, at the time, more advanced than African societies (a claim still dominant today, see Guns, Germs, and Steel), Boas objected that against the total history of humankind, the past two thousand years is but a brief span. Moreover, although the technological advances of our early ancestors (such as taming fire and inventing stone tools) might seem insignificant when compared to the invention of the steam engine or control over electricity, we should consider that they might actually be even greater accomplishments. Boas then went on to catalogue advances in Africa, such as smelting iron, cultivating millet, and domesticating chickens and cattle, occurred in Africa well before they spread to Europe and Asia. He then described the activities of African kings, diplomats, merchants, and artists as evidence of cultural achievement. From this, he concluded, any social inferiority of Negroes in the United States cannot be explained by their African origins:

If, therefore, it is claimed that your race is doomed to economic inferiority, you may confidently look to the home of your ancestors and say, that you have set out to recover for the colored people the strength that was their own before they set foot on the shores of this continent. You may say that you go to work with bright hopes, and that you will not be discouraged by the slowness of your progress; for you have to recover not only what has been lost in transplanting the Negro race from its native soil to this continent, but you must reach higher levels than your ancestors ever had attained.

Boas proceeds to discuss the arguments for the inferiority of the Negro race, and calls attention to the fact that they were brought to the Americas through force. For Boas, this is just one example of the many times conquest or colonialism has brought different peoples into an unequal relation, and he mentions "the conquest of England by the Normans, the Teutonic invasion of Italy, [and] the Manchoo conquest of China" as resulting in similar conditions. But the best example, for Boas, of this phenomenon is that of the Jews in Europe:

Even now there lingers in the consciousness of the old, sharper divisions which the ages had not been able to efface, and which is strong enough to find — not only here and there — expression as antipathy to the Jewish type. In France, that let down the barriers more than a hundred years ago, the feeling of antipathy is still strong enough to sustain an anti-Jewish political party.

Boas's closing advice is that Negroes should not look to Whites for approval or encouragement, because people in power usually take a very long time to learn to sympathize with people out of power. "Remember that in every single case in history the process of adaptation has been one of exceeding slowness. Do not look for the impossible, but do not let your path deviate from the quiet and steadfast insistence on full opportunities for your powers."

Despite Boas's caveat about the intractability of White prejudice, he also considered it the scientist's responsibility to argue against White myths of racial purity and racial superiority, and to use the evidence of his research to fight racism.

Boas was also critical of one nation imposing its power over others. In 1916 Boas wrote a letter to The New York Times which was published under the headline, "Why German-Americans Blame America." Although Boas did begin the letter by protesting bitter attacks against German-Americans at the time of the war in Europe, most of his letter was a critique of American nationalism. "In my youth I had been taught in school and at home not only to love the good of my own country, but also to seek to understand and to respect the individualities of other nations. For this reason one-sided nationalism, that is so often found nowadays, is to me unendurable." He writes of his love for American ideals of freedom, and of his growing discomfort with American beliefs about its own superiority over others.

I have always been of the opinion that we have no right to impose our ideals upon other nations, no matter how strange it may seem to us that they enjoy the kind of life they lead, how slow they may be in utilizing the resources of their countries, or how much opposed their ideals may be to ours .... Our intolerant attitude is most pronounced in regard to what we like to call "our free institutions." Modern democracy was no doubt the most wholesome and needed reaction against the abuses of absolutism and of a selfish, often corrupt, bureaucracy. That the wishes and thoughts of the people should find expression, and that the form of government should conform to these wishis is an axiom that has pervaded the whole Western world, and that is even taking root in the Far East. It is a quite different question, however, in how far the particular machinery of democratic government is identical with democratic institutions .... To claim as we often do, that our solution is the only democratic and the ideal one is a one-sided expression of Americanism. I see no reason why we should not allow the Germans, Austrians, and Russians, or whoever else it may be, to solve their problems in their own ways, instead of demanding that they bestow upon themselves the benefactions of our régime.

Although Boas felt that scientists have a responsibility to speak out on social and political problems, he was appalled that they might involve themselves in disingenuous and deceitful ways. Thus, in 1919, when he discovered that four anthropologists, in the course of their research in other countries, were serving as spies for the American government, he wrote an angry letter to The Nation. It is perhaps in this letter that he most clearly expresses his understanding of his commitment to science:

A soldier whose business is murder as a fine art, a diplomat whose calling is based on deception and secretiveness, a politician whose very life consists in compromises with his conscience, a business man whose aim is personal profit within the limits allowed by a lenient law — such may be excused if they set patriotic deception above common everyday decency and perform services as spies. They merely accept the code of morality to which modern society still conforms. Not so the scientist. The very essence of his life is the service of truth. We all know scientists who in private life do not come up to the standard of truthfulness, but who, nevertheless, would not consciously falsify the results of their researches. It is bad enough if we have to put up with these, because they reveal a lack of strength of character that is liable to distort the results of their work. A person, however, who uses science as a cover for political spying, who demeans himself to pose before a foreign government as an investigator and asks for assistance in his alleged researches in order to carry on, under this cloak, his political machinations, prostitutes science in an unpardonable way and forfeits the right to be classed as a scientist.

Although Boas did not name the spies in question, he was referring to a ring led by Sylvanus G. Morley, who was affiliated with Harvard University's Peabody Museum. While conducting research in Mexico, Morley and his confederates looked for evidence of German submarine bases, and collected intelligence on Mexican political figures and German immigrants in Mexico.

Boas's stance against spying took place in the context of his struggle to establish a new model for academic anthropology at Columbia University. Previously, American anthropology was based at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and the Peabody Museum at Harvard, and these anthropologists competed with Boas's students for control over the American Anthropological Association (and its flagship publication American Anthropologist). When the National Academy of Sciences established the National Research Council in 1916 as a means by which scientists could assist the United States government prepare for entry into the war in Europe, competition between the two groups intensified. Boas's rival, W.H. Holmes, was appointed to head the NRC; Morley was a protegé of Holmes.

When Boas's letter was published, Holmes wrote to a friend complaining about "the Prussian control of anthropology in this country" and the need to end Boas's "Hun regime." The Anthropological Society of Washington passed a resolution condemning Boas's letter for unjustly criticizing President Wilson; attacking the principles of American democracy; and endangering anthropologists abroad, who would now be suspected of being spies. This resolution was passed on to the American Anthropological Association and the National Research Council. Members of the American Anthropological Association (among whom Boas was a founding member in 1903), meeting at the Peabody Museum, voted by 20 to 10 to censure Boas. As a result, Boas resigned as the AAA's representative to the NRC, although Boas remained an active member of the AAA. This censure was rescinded in 2004.

Boas continued to speak out against racism and for intellectual freedom. When the Nazi Party in Germany denounced "Jewish science" (which included not only Boasian Anthropology but Freudian psychoanalysis and Einsteinian physics), Boas responded with a public statement signed by over 8,000 other scientists, declaring that there is only one science, to which race and religion are irrelevant. (In his 1998 book The Culture Of Critique, Kevin B. MacDonald resurrected the notion of a "Jewish science" to critique Boas's work; this book has been criticized for shoddy scholarship and anti-Semitism).

Legacy

Between 1901 and 1911, Columbia University produced only 7 PhD.s in anthropology. Although by today's standards this is a very small number, at the time it was sufficient to establish Boas's Anthropology Department at Columbia as the preeminent anthropology program in the country. Moreover, many of Boas's students went on to establish anthropology programs at other major universities.

Boas's first doctoral student was Alfred L. Kroeber (1901), who, along with fellow Boas student Robert Lowie (1908), started the anthropology program at the University of California at Berkeley. He also trained William Jones (1904), one of the first Native American Indian anthropologists. Boas also trained a number of other students who were influential in the development of academic anthropology: Frank Speck (1908) who trained with Boas but received his PhD. from the University of Pennsylvania and immediately proceeded to found the anthropology department there; Edward Sapir (1909) and Fay-Cooper Cole (1914) who developed the anthropology program at the University of Chicago; Leslie Spier (1920) who started the anthropology program at the University of Washington; Melville Herskovits (1923) who started the anthropology program at Northwestern University. He also trained John Reed Swanton, Paul Radin (1911), Ruth Benedict (1923), Gladys Reichard (1925), Alexander Lesser (1929), and Margaret Mead (1929). He was also an influence on Claude Lévi-Strauss, whom he met during the latter's stay in New York in the 1940s.

Several of Boas's students went on to serve as editors of the American Anthropological Association's flagship journal, American Anthropologist: John R. Swanton (1911, 1921-1923), Robert Lowie (1924-1933), Leslie Spier (1934-1938), and Melville Herskovits (1950-1952). Edward Sapir's student John Alden Mason was editor from 1945-1949, and Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie's student, Walter Goldschmidt, was editor from 1956-1959.

Most of Boas's students shared his concern for careful, historical reconstruction, and his antipathy towards speculative, evolutionary models. Moreover, Boas encouraged his students, by example, to criticize themselves as much as others. Several of his students soon attempted to develop theories of the grand sort that Boas typically rejected. Kroeber called his colleagues' attention to Sigmund Freud and the potential of a union between cultural anthropology and psychoanalysis. Ruth Benedict developed theories of "culture and personality" and "national cultures", and Kroeber's student, Julian Steward developed theories of "cultural ecology" and "multilineal evolution."

Nevertheless, Boas has had an enduring influence on anthropology. Virtually all anthropologists today accept Boas's commitment to empiricism and his methodological cultural relativism. Moreover, virtually all cultural anthropologists today share Boas's commitment to field research involving extended residence, learning the local language, and developing social relationships with informants. Finally, anthropologists continue to honor his critique of racial ideologies. In his 1963 book, Race: The History of an Idea in America, Thomas Gossett wrote that "It is possible that Boas did more to combat race prejudice than any other person in history."

Sources/Further Reading

Writings by Boas

• Boas n.d. "The relation of Darwin to anthropology," notes for a lecture; Boas papers (B/B61.5) American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. Published on line with Herbert Lewis 2001b.
• Boas, Franz 1911 The Mind of Primitive Man ISBN 0313240043
• Boas, Franz 1940 Race, Language, and Culture ISBN 0-226-06241-4
• Stocking, George W., Jr., ed. 1974 A Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883-1911 ISBN 0-226-06243-0
• Boas, Franz 1928 "Anthropology and Modern Life" (2004 ed.) ISBN 0-7658-0535-9

Writings on Boas and Boasian Anthropology

• Bashkow, Ira 2004 "A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries" in American Anthropologist 106(3): 443-458
• Bunzl, Matti 2004 "Boas, Foucault, and the 'Native Anthropologist,'" in American Anthropologist 106(3): 435-442
• Cole, Douglas 1999 Franz Boas: The Early Years, 1858-1906 ISBN 1-55054-746-1
• Darnell, Regna 1998. “And Along Came Boas: Continuity and Revolution in Americanist Anthropology.” ISBN 1556196237
• Kuper, Adam 1988 The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion ISBN 0-415-00903-0
• Kroeber, Alfred 1949 "An Authoritarian Panacea" in American Anthropologist 51(2) 318-320
• Lesser, Alexander 1981 "Franz Boas" in Sydel Silverman, ed. Totems and Teachers: Perspectives on the History of Anthropology ISBN 0-231-05087-9
• Lewis, Herbert 2001a "The Passion of Franz Boas" in American Anthropologist 103(2): 447-467
• Lewis, Herbert 2001b "Boas, Darwin, Science and Anthropology" in Current Anthropology 42(3): 381-406 (On line version contains transcription of Boas's 1909 lecture on Darwin.)
• Stocking, George W., Jr. 1968 "Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology" ISBN 0-226-77494-5
• Stocking, George W., Jr., ed. 1996 Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition ISBN 0-299-14554-9

Boas, Anthropology, and Jewish Identity

• Glick, Leonard B. 1982 "Types Distinct from Our Own: Franz Boas on Jewish Identity and Assimilation" in American Anthropologist 84(3) pp. 545-565.

• Frank, Gelya 1997 "Jews, Multiculturalism, and Boasian Anthropology" in American Anthropologist 99(4), pp. 731-745.

• Mitchell Hart 2003 "Franz Boas as German, American, Jew." In German-Jewish Identities in America, eds. C. Mauch and J. Salomon (Madison: Max Kade Institute), pp. 88-105.

• Kevin MacDonald 1998 The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements — chapter 2 provides a critique of Boas, by resurrecting the Nazi notion of "Jewish science".

External links

• A reassessment of human cranial plasticity: Boas revisited — Summary of critical paper by Corey S. Sparks and Richard L. Jantz.
• Heredity, Environment, and Cranial Form — article confirming Boas's research, by Clarence C. Gravlee, H. Russell Bernard, and William R. Leonard
• Franz Boas Out of the Ivory Tower — essay on the relationship between the academy and politics, drawing on the example of Boas
• The Culture Cult: a web site about romantic primitivism

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