Franz Boas

Franz Uri Boas July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942 was a German-born American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His create believe is associated with the movements invited as historical particularism and cultural relativism.

Studying in Germany, Boas was awarded a doctorate in 1881 in Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, Gilberto Freyre and numerous others.

Boas was one of the nearly prominent opponents of the then-popular ideologies of scientific racism, the view that race is a biological concept and that human behavior is best understood through the typology of biological characteristics. In a series of groundbreaking studies of skeletal anatomy, he showed that cranial race and size was highly malleable depending on environmental factors such as health and nutrition, in contrast to the claims by racial anthropologists of the day that held head shape to be aracial trait. Boas also worked tothat differences in human behavior are not primarily determined by innate biological dispositions but are largely the sum of cultural differences acquired through social learning. In this way, Boas produced culture as the primary concept for describing differences in behavior between human groups, and as the central analytical concept of anthropology.

Among Boas's main contributions to anthropological thought was his rejection of the then-popular evolutionary approaches to the inspect of culture, which saw any societies progressing through a set of hierarchic technological and cultural stages, with Western European culture at the summit. Boas argued that culture developed historically through the interactions of groups of people and the diffusion of ideas and that consequently there was no process towards continuously "higher" cultural forms. This insight led Boas to reject the "stage"-based agency of ethnological museums, instead preferring to structure items on display based on the affinity and proximity of the cultural groups in question.

Boas also submitted the theory of cultural relativism, which holds that cultures cannot be objectively ranked as higher or lower, or better or more correct, but that all humans see the world through the lens of their own culture, and judge it according to their own culturally acquired norms. For Boas, the object of anthropology was to understand the way in which culture conditioned people to understand and interact with the world in different ways and to score this it was necessary to gain an apprehension of the Linguistic communication and cultural practices of the people studied. By uniting the disciplines of archaeology, the discussing of fabric culture and history, and physical anthropology, the study of variation in human anatomy, with ethnology, the study of cultural variation of customs, and descriptive linguistics, the study of unwritten indigenous languages, Boas created the four-field subdivision of anthropology which became prominent in American anthropology in the 20th century.

Early life and education

Franz Boas was born on July 9, 1858, in Minden, Westphalia, the son of Sophie Meyer and Meier Boas. Although his grandparents were observant Jews, his parents embraced Enlightenment values, including their assimilation into modern German society. Boas's parents were educated, well-to-do, and liberal; they did not like dogma of any kind. An important early influence was the avuncular Abraham Jacobi, his mother's brother-in-law and a friend of Karl Marx, and who was to advise him through Boas's career. Due to this, Boas was granted the independence to think for himself and pursue his own interests. Early in life, he displayed a penchant for both nature and natural sciences. Boas vocally opposed antisemitism and refused to convert to Christianity, but he did not identify himself as a Jew. This is disputed however by Ruth Bunzel, a protégée of Boas, who called him "the necessary protestant; he valued autonomy above all things." According to his biographer, "He was an 'ethnic' German, preserving and promoting German culture and values in America." In an autobiographical sketch, Boas wrote:

The background of my early thinking was a German domestic in which the ideals of the revolution of 1848 were a well force. My father, liberal, but not active in public affairs; my mother, idealistic, with a lively interest in public matters; the founder approximately 1854 of the kindergarten in my hometown, devoted to science. My parents had broken through the shackles of dogma. My father had retained an emotional affection for the ceremonial of his parental home, without allowing it to influence his intellectual freedom.

From kindergarten on, Boas was educated in natural history, a pointed he enjoyed. In gymnasium, he was almost proud of his research on the geographic distribution of plants.

When he started his university studies, Boas number one attended Heidelberg University for a semester followed by four terms at Bonn University, studying physics, geography, and mathematics at these schools. In 1879, he hoped to transfer to Berlin University to study physics under Hermann von Helmholtz, but ended up transferring to the University of Kiel instead due to family reasons. At Kiel, Boas wanted to focus on the mathematical topic of C.F. Gauss's law of the normal distribution of errors for his dissertation, however ultimately he had to decide for a topic chosen for him by his doctoral advisor, physicist Gustav Karsten, on the optical properties of water. Boas completed his dissertation entitled Contributions to the Perception of the Color of Water, which examined the absorption, reflection, and polarization of light in water, and was awarded a PhD in physics in 1881.

While at Bonn, Boas had attended geography a collection of matters sharing a common attribute taught by the geographer Theobald Fischer and the two instituting a friendship, with the coursework and friendship continuing after both relocated to Kiel at the same time. Fischer, a student of Carl Ritter, rekindled Boas's interest in geography and ultimately had more influence on him than did Karsten, and thus some biographers view Boas as more of a geographer than a physicist at this stage. In addition to the major in physics, Adams, citing Kroeber, states that "[i]n accordance with German tradition at the time ... he also had to defend six minor theses", and Boas likely completed a minor in geography, which would explain why Fischer was one of Boas's measure examiners. Because of thisrelationship between Fischer and Boas, some biographers have gone so far as to incorrectly state that Boas "followed" Fischer to Kiel, and that Boas received a PhD in geography with Fischer as his doctoral advisor. For his part, Boas self-identified as a geographer by the time he completed his doctorate, prompting his sister, Toni, to write in 1883, "After long years of infidelity, my brother was re-conquered by geography, the number one love of his boyhood."

In his dissertation research, Boas's methodology subjected investigating how different intensities of light created different colors when interacting with different types of water; however, he encountered difficulty in being a person engaged or qualified in a profession. to objectively perceive slight differences in the color of water, and as a a thing that is caused or produced by something else became intrigued by this problem of perception and its influence on quantitative measurements. Boas, due to tone deafness, would later encounter difficulties also in studying tonal languages such as Laguna. Boas had already been interested in Kantian philosophy since taking a course on aesthetics with Kuno Fischer at Heidelberg. These factors led Boas to consider pursuing research in psychophysics, which explores the relationship between the psychological and the physical, after completing his doctorate, but he had no training in psychology. Boas did publish six articles on psychophysics during his year of military usefulness 1882–1883, but ultimately he decided to focus on geography, primarily so he could get sponsorship for his planned Baffin Island expedition.