Cultural anthropologist, born in Minden, NW Germany. A merchant's son, raised in a liberal environment, he became interested in natural history as a boy and studied geography at the universities of Heidelberg, Bonn, and Kiel. On his first field trip, to the Canadian Arctic (18834), he studied Eskimo tribes, and from then on his intellectual interests turned to ethnology and anthropology. He emigrated to the USA (1886), where he studied the Indian tribes of the Pacific Northwest, and worked in Massachusetts and Illinois before obtaining a post as lecturer at Columbia University in New York City. Promoted to full professor in 1899, he trained several generations of anthropologists. As a scholar, his emphasis was to draw on ethnology, physical anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics, and to collect data about cultures, especially those passing from the scene. With his students he established new and more complex concepts of culture and race, as outlined in his collection of papers, Race, Language and Culture (1940). With the rise of Hitler in Germany he began to speak out against racism and intolerance, and he wrote and lectured widely in opposition to the Nazis. His other works include The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) and Anthropology and Modern Life (1928).
Franz Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942) was one of the pioneers of modern anthropology and is often called the "Father of American Anthropology". Born in Germany, Boas worked for most of his life in North America.
Early life and education
Franz Boas was born in Minden, Westphalia. 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. In an autobiographical sketch, Boas wrote:
The background of my early thinking was a German home in which the ideals of the revolution of 1848 were a living force.From his early experience at the Froebel kindergarten in Minden, to his studies at Gymnasium, Boas was exposed to, and interested in, natural history. Nevertheless, when Boas attended university — first at Heidelberg, then Bonn — he focused on mathematics and physics (although he also attended a few courses in geography, including one taught by Theobald Fischer). 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.
Boas received his doctorate in physics from the university at Kiel in 1881. Boas had developed an interest in Kantian thought when he took a course on aesthetics with Kuno Fischer at Heidelberg, and at Bonn took courses with Benno Erdmann, leading Kantian philosophers. 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. In 1883 Boas went to Baffin Island to conduct geographic research on the impact of the physical environment on native Inuit migrations. The first of many ethnographic field trips, Boas culled his notes to write his first monograph titled The Central Eskimo (1888).
Boas lived and worked closely with the Inuit peoples on Baffin Island, and he developed an abiding interest in the way people lived.
In the perpetual darkness of the arctic winter, Boas reported, that he and his traveling companion became lost and were forced to keep sledding for twenty-six hours through ice, soft snow, and temperatures that dropped below -46°C. Eventually, they secured shelter to rest and recuperate from being “half frozen and half starve.” The following day, Boas penciled in his letter diary:
"I often ask myself what advantages our “good society” possesses over that of the 'savages'and find, the more I see of their customs, that we have no right to look down upon them. Franz Boas to Marie Krackowizer, December 23, 1883.
Boas went on to explain in the same entry that “all service, therefor, which a man can perform for humanity must serve to promote truth.” Boas was forced to depend on various Inuit groups for everything from directions and food to shelter and companionship. Boas successfully searched for areas not yet surveyed and found unique ethnographic objects, but the long winter and the lonely treks across perilous terrain forced him to search his soul to find a direction for his life as a scientist and a citizen
Boas interest in indigenous communities grew as he worked at the Royal Ethnological Museum in Berlin where he was introduced to members of the Nuxálk Nation of British Columbia, which sparked a lifelong relationship with the first nations of the Pacific Northwest.
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.
But Boas worked more closely with Bastian, who was noted for his antipathy to environmental determinism. 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. 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.
Aside from his editorial work at Science, Boas secured an appointment as dozent in anthropology at Clark University, in 1888. 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. 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 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
Fin de Siècle Debates
Science versus History
Some scholars, like Boas's student Alfred Kroeber, believed that Boas used his research in physics as a model for his work in anthropology. Many others, however — including Boas's student Alexander Lesser, and later researchers such as Marian W. Lewis, and Matti Bunzl — have pointed out that Boas explicitly rejected physics in favor of history as a model for his anthropological research.
This distinction between science and history has its origins in 19th century German academe, which distinguished between Naturwissenschaften (the sciences) and Geisteswissenschaften (the humanities), or between Gesetzwissenschaften (the law-giving sciences) and Geschichtswissenschaften (history). Boas's students Alfred Kroeber and Edward Sapir relied extensively on this work in defining their own approach to anthropology.)
Although Kant considered these two interests of reason to be objective and universal, the distinction between the natural and human sciences was institutionalized in Germany, through the organization of scholarly research and teaching, following the Enlightenment. Humboldt founded the University of Berlin in 1809, and his work in geography, history, and psychology provided the milieu in which Boas's intellectual orientation matured.
Historians working in the Humboldtian tradition developed ideas that would become central in Boasian anthropology. Leopold von Ranke defined the task of the historian as "merely to show as it actually was," which is a cornerstone of Boas's empiricism. For Boas, both values were well-expressed in a quote from Goethe: "A single action or event is interesting, not because it is explainable, but because it is true."
The influence of these ideas on Boas is apparent in his 1887 essay, "The Study of Geography," in which he distinguished between physical science, which seeks to discover the laws governing phenomena, and historical science, which seeks a thorough understanding of phenomena on their own terms. Boas argued that geography is and must be historical in this sense. In 1887, after his Baffin Island expedition, Boas wrote "The Principles of Ethnological Classification," in which he developed this argument in application to anthropology:
Ethnological phenomena are the result of the physical and psychical character of men, and of its development under the influence of the surroundings...'Surroundings' are the physical conditions of the country, and the sociological phenomena, i.e., the relation of man to man. These are the hallmarks of Boasian anthropology (which Marvin Harris would later call "historical-particularism"), would guide Boas's research over the next decade, as well as his instructions to future students. (see Lewis 2001b for an alternative view to Harris'.)Although context and history were essential elements to Boas's understanding of anthropology as Geisteswissenschaften and Geschichtswissenschaften, there is one essential element that Boasian anthropology shares with Naturwissenschaften: empiricism. In 1949 Boas's student, Alfred Kroeber summed up the principles of empiricism that define Boasian anthropology as a science:
The method of science is to begin with questions, not with answers, least of all with value judgements.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. In fact, Boas supported Darwinian theory, although he did not assume that it automatically applied to cultural and historical phenomena. 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.
Furthermore, Darwin built up his theory through a careful examination of considerable empirical data. As Boas's student Robert Lowie remarked, "Contrary to some misleading statements on the subject, there have been no responsible opponents of evolution as scientifically proved, though there has been determined hostility to an evolutionary metaphysics that falsifies the established facts."
In an unpublished lecture, 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 reasoningThus, 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. Boas concluded his lecture by acknowledging the importance of Darwin's work:
I hope I may have succeeded in presenting to you, however imperfectly, the currents of thought due to the work of the immortal Darwin which have helped to make anthropology what it is at the present time. (Boas, 1909 lecture; see Lewis 2001b.)Early career: Museum Studies
In the late 1800s anthropology in the United States was dominated by the Bureau of American Ethnology, directed by John Wesley Powell, a geologist who favored Lewis Henry Morgan's theory of cultural evolution.
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.
Boas initially broke with evolutionary theory over the issue of kinship. Boas focused on the Kwakiutl, who lived between the two clusters. At first, Boas — like Morgan before him — suggested that the Kwakiutl had been matrilineal like their neighbors to the north, but that they were beginning to evolve patrilineal groups.
Boas's rejection of Morgan's theories led him, in an 1887 article, to challenge Mason's principles of museum display. Boas, however, felt that the form an artefact took reflected the circumstances under which it was produced and used. Arguing that "[t]hough like causes have like effects, like effects have not like causes," Boas realized 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 Frederic 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.
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. 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.
During this time Boas played a key role in organizing the American Anthropological Association as an umbrella organization for the emerging field. Boas originally wanted the AAA to be limited to professional anthropologists, but W.J. 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; he personally contributed to physical anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, as well as 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 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 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 characterize American anthropology against that of England, France, or Germany. This focus did not lead Boas to seek to reduce all forms of humanity and human activity to some lowest common denominator;
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?"
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. Thus, in his 1904 article, "The History of Anthropology", Boas wrote that
The historical development of the work of anthropologists seems to single out clearly a domain of knowledge that heretofore has not been treated by any other science.Historians and social theorists in the 18th and 19th centuries had speculated as to the causes of this differentiation, but Boas dismissed these theories, especially the dominant theories of Social evolution and Cultural evolution as speculative.
One of his most important books, The Mind of Primitive Man (published in 1911), he integrated these various concerns and established a program that would dominate American anthropology for the next fifteen years.
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. Boas's primary interest — in symbolic and material culture and in language — was the study of processes of change; Boas studied 17,821 people, divided into seven ethno-national groups. 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. Boas did not deny that physical features such as height or cranial size were inherited;
These findings were radical at the time and continue to be debated. They 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 ). However Jonathan Marks — a well-known physical anthropologist and former president of the General Anthropology section of the American Anthropological Association – has remarked that this revisionist study of Boas's work "has the ring of desperation to it (if not obfuscation), and has been quickly rebutted by more mainstream biological anthropology." Leonard reanalyzed Boas's data and concluded that Boas's original findings were correct. Moreover, they applied new statistical, computer-assisted methods to Boas's data and discovered even stronger evidence for cranial plasticity. They argue that Sparks and Jantz misrepresented Boas's claims, and that Sparks' and Jantz's data actually support Boas. Boas, however, looked at changes in cranial size in relation to how long the mother had been in the United States. They argue that Boas's method is more useful, because the prenatal environment is a crucial developmental factor. (See .)
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. In 1888 he declared that "the development of ethnology is largely due to the general recognition of the principle of biological evolution;" 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; Boas's biometric studies, however, led him to question the use of this method and kind of data. In a speech to anthropologists in Berlin in 1912, Boas argued that at best such statistics could only raise biological questions, and not answer them.
Linguistics
Although Boas published descriptive studies of Native American languages, and wrote on theoretical difficulties in classifying languages, he left it to colleagues and students such as Edward Sapir to research the relationship between culture and language.
His 1889 article "On Alternating Sounds," however, made a singular contribution to the methodology of both linguistics and cultural anthropology.
Boas was familiar with what Brinton was talking about; Rather than take alternating sounds as objective proof of different stages in cultural evolution, Boas considered them in terms of his longstanding interest in the subjective perception of objective physical phenomena.
In short, he shifted attention to the perception of different sounds. Boas begins by raising an empirical question: when people describe one sound in different ways, is it because they cannot perceive of the difference, or might there be another reason? (in this point, Boas anticipates and lays the groundwork for the distinction between Phonemics and Phonetics.) People may pronounce a word in a variety of ways and still recognize that they are using the same word.
Boas applies these principles to studies of British Columbian Inuit languages. Boas argues an alternative explanation: that the difference is not in how Inuit pronounce the word, but rather in how English-speaking scholars perceive the pronunciation of the word.
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. As in his critique of Otis Mason's museum displays, Boas demonstrated that what appeared to be evidence of cultural evolution was really the consequence of unscientific methods, and a reflection of Westerners beliefs about their own cultural superiority. 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 (or take on a radically different meaning) in another culture.
Cultural Anthropology
The essence of Boas's approach to ethnography is found in his early essay on "The Study of Geography."
When Boas's student Ruth Benedict gave her presidential address to the American Anthropological Association in 1947, she reminded anthropologists of the importance of this idiographic stance by quoting literary critic A.C.
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.Boas argued that in order to understand "what is" — in cultural anthropology, the specific cultural traits (behaviors, beliefs, and symbols) – one had to examine them in their local context. He also understood that as people migrate from one place to another, and as the cultural context changes over time, the elements of a culture, and their meanings, will change, which led him to emphasize the importance of local histories for an analysis of cultures.
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. Thus, Boas's student Robert Lowie once described culture as a thing of "shreds and patches." Boas and his students 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.
During Boas's lifetime, as today, many Westerners saw a fundamental difference between modern societies, which are characterized by dynamism and individualism, and traditional societies which are stable and homogeneous. Boas's empirical field research, however, led him to argue against this comparison. For example, his 1903 essay, "Decorative Designs of Alaskan Needlecases: A History of Conventional Designs, Based on Materials in a U.S. Museum," provides another example of how Boas made broad theoretical claims based on a detailed analysis of empirical data. After establishing formal similarities among the needlecases, Boas shows how certain formal features provide a vocabulary out of which individual artisans could create variations in design. Thus, his emphasis on culture as a context for meaningful action made him sensitive to individual variation within a society (William Henry Holmes suggested a similar point in an 1886 paper, "Origin and development of form and ornament in ceramic art," although unlike Boas he did not develop the ethnographic and theoretical implications).
In a programmatic essay in 1920, "The Methods of Ethnology," Boas argued that instead of "the systematic enumeration of standardized beliefs and customs of a tribe," anthropology needs to document "the way in which the individual reacts to his whole social environment, and to the difference of opinion and of mode of action that occur in primitive society and which are the causes of far-reaching changes." Boas argued that attention to individual agency reveals that "the activities of the individual are determined to a great extent by his social environment, but in turn his own activities influence the society in which he lives, and may bring about modifications in form." Consequently, Boas thought of culture as fundamentally dynamic: "As soon as these methods are applied, primitive society loses the appearance of absolute stability.... (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. 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. In order to do this, Boas relied heavily on the collaboration of literate native ethnographers (among the Kwakiutl, most often George Hunt), and he urged his students to consider such people valuable partners, inferior in their standing in Western society, but superior in their understanding of their own culture. (see Bunzl 2004: 438-439)
Using these methods, Boas published another article in 1920, in which he revisited his earlier research on Kwakiutl kinship. in the late 1890s Boas had tried to reconstruct transformation in the organization of Kwakiutl clans, by comparing them to the organization of clans in other societies neighboring the Kwakiutl to the north and south. As in his work on alternating sounds, Boas had come to realize that different ethnological interpretations of Kwakiutl kinship were the result of the limitations of Western categories. (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. 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.
This emphasis on the relationship between anthropologists and those they study -- the point that, while astronomers and stars; 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. 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." 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. 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.
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.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.
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.
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.
Although Boas did not name the spies in question, he was referring to a ring led by Sylvanus G.
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). Boas's rival, W.H.
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; 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.
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. MacDonald resurrected the notion of a "Jewish science" to critique Boas's work;
Students and influence
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, Berkeley. 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. Alexander Goldenweiser (1910), who, with Elsie Clews Parsons (who received her doctorate in sociology from Columbia in 1899, but then studied ethnology with Boas), started the anthropology program at the New School for Social Research; Leslie Spier (1920) who started the anthropology program at the University of Washington, and Melville Herskovits (1923) who started the anthropology program at Northwestern University. Swanton (who studied with Boas at Columbia for two years before receiving his doctorate from Harvard in 1900), Paul Radin (1911), Ruth Benedict (1923), Gladys Reichard (1925) who had begun teaching at Barnard College in 1921 and was later promoted to the rank of professor, Ruth Bunzel (1929), Alexander Lesser (1929), Margaret Mead (1929), and Gene Weltfish (who defended her dissertation in 1929, although she did not officially graduate until 1950 when Columbia reduced the expenses required to graduate).
His students at Columbia also included Mexican anthropologist Manuel Gamio, who earned his MA after studying with Boas from 1909-1911, and became the founding director of Mexico's Bureau of Anthropology in 1917; Esther Goldfrank, who travelled with Boas to New Mexico in 1919 to conduct research among the Pueblo Indians;
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.
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. For example, Boas originally defended the cephalic index (systematic variations in head form) as a method for describing hereditary traits, but came to reject his earlier research after further study;
Encouraged by this drive to self-criticism, as well as the Boasian commitment to learn from one's informants and to let the findings of one's research shape one's agenda, Boas's students quickly diverged from his own research agenda. Several of his students soon attempted to develop theories of the grand sort that Boas typically rejected. 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. 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."
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