Boas, Franz (1858–1942)

Franz Boas, born in Minden, Westphalia, is commonly regarded as the most influential figure of American anthropology in the first third of the twentieth century. Raised in an assimilated Jewish family, which had strong sympathies for the liberal ideals of the revolution of 1848, Boas studied natural sciences and mathematics at the universities of Heidelberg, Bonn, and Kiel, graduating in 1881. In a complex intellectual “odyssey” he abandoned his materialistic Weltanschauung and, under the influence of neo‐Kantianism, shifted his attention from the field of physics to Fechnerian psychophysics to Ratzel's anthropogeography, and finally, several years after graduating from university, to ethnology (Stocking 1982: 133–60). In 1883–4 he spent a year among the Inuit of Baffinland to examine the influence of the natural environment on the life of the people. Upon his return to Germany Boas published the results of his first fieldwork, obtained the docentship for geography at the University of Berlin, intensified his relationship with the leading German physical anthropologist, pathologist, and liberal politician R. Virchow, and worked as an assistant of A. Bastian at the Royal Ethnographical Museum at Berlin. Fascinated by the museum's collection of North Pacific Coast culture, Boas went to do fieldwork in British Columbia in 1886. The culture of the Native Americans of the Northwest Coast was to remain at the center of Boas's ethnographic research throughout his life. Returning to New York in 1887, Boas accepted the position as an assistant editor of the journal Science and, for political, professional, and personal reasons, decided to settle in the New World. From 1889 to 1892 he taught anthropology at Clark University, supervising the first American PhD in anthropology. From 1892 to 1894 he worked as an anthropologist at the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago. While serving as a curator of the American Museum of Natural History (1896–1905) Boas organized the famous Jesup North Pacific Expedition, which set out to study the historical relationships between Asian and North American peoples. In 1896 he became a lecturer of physical anthropology and in 1899 was appointed the first full professor of anthropology at Columbia University, a post he held until his retirement in 1936–7.

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