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Franz Boas (1858–1942)

Boas challenged the evolutionary scheme that nineteenth-century anthropology had built, in which every society climbed the same ladder from savagery through barbarism to civilisation. He argued that the ethnographic record did not show it, that similar customs could arise in different ways in different places, and that each culture had to be understood through its own history, its contacts and borrowings, before any general law could be proposed. The position, which Marvin Harris later called historical particularism (1968), became the founding stance of American anthropology, which Boas built at Columbia. He applied the same scepticism to race, arguing from measurement that the physical and mental differences taken to rank human groups were neither fixed nor a basis for ranking.

Franz Boas was born on 9 July 1858 in Minden, Westphalia, into a liberal Jewish family. He studied physics, geography and mathematics at Heidelberg, Bonn and Kiel, taking his doctorate at Kiel in 1881 with a dissertation on the optical properties of water. A year among the Inuit of Baffin Island in 1883–84, intended as geographical research, turned him toward the study of culture; he qualified in geography at Berlin in 1886 and in 1887 emigrated to the United States. He taught at Clark University, worked on the Northwest Coast, above all among the Kwakwaka’wakw with his collaborator George Hunt, and joined the American Museum of Natural History, where he organised the Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1897–1902). He became professor of anthropology at Columbia in 1899 and trained there the first generation of American anthropologists, among them Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Melville Herskovits and Zora Neale Hurston. He died in New York on 21 December 1942.

Key concepts

Against the comparative method. The evolutionists of his youth, Edward Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan among them, arranged the customs of living peoples in a single sequence and read the sequence as history. In “The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology” (1896) Boas argued that the method assumed what it set out to prove: that like customs have like causes and the same place in one scheme of development. Similar forms can arise from different origins, and a custom’s meaning depends on the culture it belongs to. He did not deny that laws of cultural development might exist, but held that they could only be found after the history of particular cultures had been reconstructed, by diffusion, migration and contact as well as independent invention.

Culture in the plural. Where the evolutionists spoke of culture as a single ladder with higher and lower rungs, Boas and his students spoke of cultures, each an integrated way of life to be understood in its own terms. The principle that a culture’s practices are to be judged by its own standards before being compared, later called cultural relativism, became a method of fieldwork as well as a moral stance.

The four fields. Boas organised anthropology as the study of human beings in four branches, physical anthropology, linguistics, archaeology and ethnology, on the view that questions about any one of them required the others. His linguistic work, with its insistence on describing each language in its own categories, shaped American linguistics through Sapir.

Race and the immigrant study. For the United States Immigration Commission, Boas measured nearly eighteen thousand immigrants and their children and reported in Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants (1910–12) that the head form of children born in America differed from that of their parents, a sign that traits treated as fixed racial markers changed with environment. The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) argued against any ranking of races by innate mental capacity, and Boas spent the rest of his life opposing scientific racism.

Where Boas stops

The evolutionists he displaced pressed back. Leslie White, who revived the idea of cultural evolution in the 1940s, attacked the Boasian school as anti-evolutionist and anti-theoretical, a programme that collected particulars and refused the generalisations a science needs. Marvin Harris, in The Rise of Anthropological Theory (1968), made the same charge in more measured form: historical particularism had been a necessary corrective, but it left anthropology without a theory of why cultures change as they do. The immigrant study has had its own reception. Corey Sparks and Richard Jantz (2002) reanalysed Boas’s data and found the changes in head form small beside the differences between groups; Clarence Gravlee and colleagues (2003) reanalysed the same data and supported Boas’s conclusion.

His record also includes the case of the Greenland Inuit, documented by Kenn Harper in Give Me My Father’s Body (1986). Boas had asked Robert Peary to bring an Inuk from northern Greenland to the American Museum of Natural History; Peary brought six in 1897, and four of them died of tuberculosis within months. The museum’s staff then staged a burial for the son of one of them, Qisuk, while Qisuk’s skeleton was prepared and kept for the museum’s collection. The remains were returned to Greenland in 1993.

Key works

See also: Evolution · The stage schemes · Philosophy of history · Deep time and evolution · L. H. Morgan · L. White