BOAS, FRANZ (1858–1942)

BOAS, FRANZ (1858–1942)

Boas is widely regarded as the founder of twentieth-century US cultural anthropology. He is lauded as the man whose ‘scientific activism’ successfully fought off the white supremacist Nordicism of the US physical anthropological tradition (epitomized by Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard) by demonstrating the cultural achievements of African Americans and showing in his renowned paper ‘Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants’ (1910–13) that, contrary to received wisdom about the permanency of skull shape (and hence the skull as a marker of racial difference), the children of immigrants to the USA had larger heads than their parents. Yet the nineteenth-century foundation of Boas’s thought must not be overlooked. His studies focused on three key areas: race, language and culture, and it is the former that is key. Boas trained as a physicist (like that other émigré founder of modern anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski) and geographer, and worked in Berlin with Rudolf Virchow, the well-known anti-Darwinian physical anthropologist. He only moved to the USA in 1885 when his Jewish origins prevented him from working in Germany, a country to which he felt a life-long attachment, as manifested in his protests against US involvement in the Great War, for which he was branded a traitor and removed from office in the American Anthropological Association. In other words, Boas trained and thought as a physical anthropologist, shared its assumptions about racial classification, and provides a classic example of how a discipline is reshaped not by outside criticism but by someone on the inside, deeply immersed in its traditions and methods. Thus, he shared many assumptions about the degenerate condition of blacks, but claimed that this was a result not of innate racial characteristics but was ‘due to social surroundings for which we are responsible’; and he believed the main problem facing the USA was the possibility of assimilating immigrants and different racial groups to US life. Always convinced of the relevance of science for politics, Boas’s public activities culminated in vigorous anti-Nazi campaigning in the last years of his life, centred on the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom, which he founded in 1939.

But whilst he was an insider to the physical anthropological tradition, Boas’s critique of evolutionism marked him out. Like Malinowski, he insisted on the importance of fieldwork, and spent numerous periods among Native Americans such as the Kwakiutl. He also focused on language, art and mythologies as key tools for understanding human societies, and proposed the concept of Geist (spirit) or ‘the genius of a people’ in unifying culture as a counterweight to biological determinism. His The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) brought these themes together, though his wide-ranging research is best approached through his numerous essays.

Boas’s stance can be seen as a commitment to scientific rationalism, empiricism and universalism, combined, as with Malinowski, with a Central European romanticism that sought to validate cultures that resisted absorption, like the Inuit of Baffinland whom he first studied in 1883. Along with a belief in universalism, progress and scientific truth went a sense of the intrinsic worth of alternative cultures. In this sense he was very much

a product of the nineteenth century: the term ‘culture’ for which Boas is so famous was, in the relativistic sense that anthropologists use it today, developed less by him than by his students, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Alfred Kroeber, Clyde Kluckhohn, Melville

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Herskovits and others. It also enormously influenced post-Second World War US sociology in the shape of Talcott Parsons, David Riesman and the ‘Culture and Personality’ school. Yet without his lead, the internal critique of anthropology that he pioneered, which ended in the overturning of the discipline’s fundamental presuppositions about race, might not have taken place.