Biography franz boas

His most important research in this field was his study of changes in the body from among children of immigrants in New York.

Biography franz boas

Other researchers had already noted differences in height, cranial measurements, and other physical features between Americans and people from different parts of Europe. Many used these differences to argue that there is an innate biological difference between races. Boas's primary interest—in symbolic and material culture and in language—was the study of processes of change; he therefore set out to determine whether bodily forms are also subject to processes of change.

Boas studied 17, people, divided into seven ethno-national groups. Boas found that average measures of the cranial size of immigrants were significantly different from members of these groups who were born in the United States. Moreover, he discovered that average measures of the cranial size of children born within ten years of their mothers' arrival were significantly different from those of children born more than ten years after their mothers' arrival.

Boas did not deny that physical features such as height or cranial size were inherited; he did, however, argue that the environment has an influence on these features, which is expressed through change over time. This work was central to his influential argument that differences between races were not immutable. The head form, which has always been one of the most stable and permanent characteristics of human races, undergoes far-reaching changes due to the transfer of European races to American soil.

The East European Hebrew, who has a round head, becomes more long-headed; the South Italian, who in Italy has an exceedingly long head, becomes more short-headed; so that both approach a uniform type in this country, so far as the head is concerned. These findings were radical at the time and continue to be debated. In , the anthropologists Corey S.

Sparks and Richard L. Jantz claimed that differences between children born to the same parents in Europe and America were very small and insignificant and that there was no detectable effect of exposure to the American environment on the cranial index in children. 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.

Gravlee, H. Russell Bernard, and William R. Leonard reanalyzed Boas's data and concluded that most of Boas's original findings were correct. Moreover, they applied new statistical, computer-assisted methods to Boas's data and discovered more evidence for cranial plasticity. They argue that Sparks and Jantz misrepresented Boas's claims and that Sparks's and Jantz's data actually support Boas.

For example, they point out that Sparks and Jantz look at changes in cranial size in relation to how long an individual has been in the United States in order to test the influence of the environment. 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.

A further publication by Jantz based on Gravlee et al. He commented, "Using the recent reanalysis by Gravlee et al. It shows that long-headed parents produce long headed offspring and vice versa. To make the argument that children of immigrants converge onto an "American type" required Boas to use the two groups that changed the most.

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 , 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. Prior to that time biologists relied on the measurement of physical traits as empirical data for any theory of evolution. Boas's biometric studies led him to question the use of this method and kind of data. In a speech to anthropologists in Berlin in , Boas argued that at best such statistics could only raise biological questions, and not answer them.

Boas also contributed greatly to the foundation of linguistics as a science in the United States. He published many descriptive studies of Native American languages, wrote on theoretical difficulties in classifying languages, and laid out a research program for studying the relations between language and culture which his students such as Edward Sapir , Paul Rivet , and Alfred Kroeber followed.

His article "On Alternating Sounds", however, made a singular contribution to the methodology of both linguistics and cultural anthropology. Brinton observed that in the spoken languages of many Native Americans, certain sounds regularly alternated. Brinton argued that this pervasive inconsistency was a sign of linguistic and evolutionary inferiority.

Boas had heard similar phonetic shifts during his research in Baffin Island and in the Pacific Northwest. Nevertheless, he argued that "alternating sounds" is not at all a feature of Native American languages—indeed, he argued, they do not really exist. 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.

He also considered his earlier critique of evolutionary museum displays. There, he pointed out that two things artifacts of material culture that appear to be similar may, in fact, be quite different. In this article, he raises the possibility that two things sounds that appear to be different may, in fact, be the same. 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 the difference, or might there be another reason? He immediately establishes that he is not concerned with cases involving perceptual deficit—the aural equivalent of color-blindness. He points out that the question of people who describe one sound in different ways is comparable to that of people who describe different sounds in one way.

This is crucial for research in descriptive linguistics : when studying a new language, how are we to note the pronunciation of different words? 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.

The issue, then, is not "that such sensations are not recognized in their individuality" in other words, people recognize differences in pronunciations ; rather, it is that sounds "are classified according to their similarity" in other words, that people classify a variety of perceived sounds into one category. A comparable visual example would involve words for colors.

The English word green can be used to refer to a variety of shades, hues, and tints. But there are some languages that have no word for green. This is not an example of color-blindness—people can perceive differences in color, but they categorize similar colors in a different way than English speakers. Boas applied these principles to his studies of Inuit languages.

Researchers have reported a variety of spellings for a given word. In the past, researchers have interpreted this data in a number of ways—it could indicate local variations in the pronunciation of a word, or it could indicate different dialects. 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.

It is not that English speakers are physically incapable of perceiving the sound in question; rather, the phonetic system of English cannot accommodate the perceived sound. 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.

In other words, the perceptual categories of Western researchers may systematically cause a Westerner to misperceive or to fail to perceive entirely a meaningful element in another culture. 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. The essence of Boas's approach to ethnography is found in his early essay on "The Study of Geography".

There he argued for an approach that. Its mere existence entitles it to a full share of our attention, and the knowledge of its existence and evolution in space and time fully satisfies the student. When Boas's student Ruth Benedict gave her presidential address to the American Anthropological Association in , she reminded anthropologists of the importance of this idiographic stance by quoting literary critic A.

Bradley: "We watch 'what is', seeing that so it happened and must have happened". This orientation led Boas to promote a cultural anthropology characterized by a strong commitment to. 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. 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. But Boasians also understood that such integration was always in tensions with diffusion, and any appearance of a stable configuration is contingent see Bashkow 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. 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 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 , "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 a form". Consequently, Boas thought of culture as fundamentally dynamic: "As soon as these methods are applied, primitive society loses the appearance of absolute stability All cultural forms rather appear in a constant state of flux 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.

Nineteenth-century historians had been applying the techniques of philology to reconstruct the histories of, and relationships between, literate societies. 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. This took the form not only of compiling lexicons and grammars of the local language, but of recording myths, folktales, beliefs about social relationships and institutions, and even recipes for local cuisine.

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. Using these methods, Boas published another article in , in which he revisited his earlier research on Kwakiutl kinship.

In the late s, 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. Now, however, he argued against translating the Kwakiutl principle of kin groups into an English word. Instead of trying to fit the Kwakiutl into some larger model, he tried to understand their beliefs and practices in their own terms.

For example, whereas he had earlier translated the Kwakiutl word numaym as "clan", he now argued that the word is best understood as referring to a bundle of privileges, for which there is no English word. Men secured claims to these privileges through their parents or wives, and there were a variety of ways these privileges could be acquired, used, and transmitted from one generation to the next.

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. As in his work on Alaskan needlecases, he now saw variation among Kwakiutl practices as the result of the play between social norms and individual creativity.

Before his death in , he appointed Helen Codere to edit and publish his manuscripts about the culture of the Kwakiutl people. Franz Boas was an immensely influential figure throughout the development of folklore as a discipline. At first glance, it might seem that his only concern was for the discipline of anthropology—after all, he fought for most of his life to keep folklore as a part of anthropology.

Yet Boas was motivated by his desire to see both anthropology and folklore become more professional and well-respected. Boas was afraid that if folklore was allowed to become its own discipline the standards for folklore scholarship would be lowered. This, combined with the scholarships of "amateurs", would lead folklore to be completely discredited, Boas believed.

In order to further professionalize folklore, Boas introduced the strict scientific methods which he learned in college to the discipline. Boas championed the use of exhaustive research, fieldwork, and strict scientific guidelines in folklore scholarship. Boas believed that a true theory could only be formed from thorough research and that even once you had a theory it should be treated as a "work in progress" unless it could be proved beyond doubt.

This rigid scientific methodology was eventually accepted as one of the major tenets of folklore scholarship, and Boas's methods remain in use even today. Boas also nurtured many budding folklorists during his time as a professor, and some of his students are counted among the most notable minds in folklore scholarship. Boas was passionate about the collection of folklore and believed that the similarity of folktales amongst different folk groups was due to dissemination.

Boas strove to prove this theory, and his efforts produced a method for breaking a folktale into parts and then analyzing these parts. His creation of "catch-words" allowed for categorization of these parts, and the ability to analyze them in relation to other similar tales. Boas also fought to prove that not all cultures progressed along the same path, and that non-European cultures, in particular, were not primitive, but different.

Boas remained active in the development and scholarship of folklore throughout his life. He became the editor of the Journal of American Folklore in , regularly wrote and published articles on folklore often in the Journal of American Folklore. There are two things to which I am devoted: absolute academic and spiritual freedom, and the subordination of the state to the interests of the individual; expressed in other forms, the furthering of conditions in which the individual can develop to the best of his ability—as far as it is possible with a full understanding of the fetters imposed upon us by tradition; and the fight against all forms of power policy of states or private organizations.

This means a devotion to principles of true democracy. I object to the teaching of slogans intended to befog the mind, of whatever kind they may be. Boas was known for passionately defending what he believed to be right. 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. Moreover, he did not believe that detachment, objectivity, and quantifiability was required to make anthropology scientific. Since the object of study of anthropologists is different from the object of study of physicists, he assumed that anthropologists would have to employ different methods and different criteria for evaluating their research.

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.

His understanding of ethnographic fieldwork began with the fact that the objects of ethnographic study e. More importantly, he viewed the Inuit as his teachers, thus reversing the typical hierarchical relationship between scientist and object of study. This emphasis on the relationship between anthropologists and those they study—the point that, while astronomers and stars; chemists and elements; botanists and plants are fundamentally different, anthropologists and those they study are equally human—implied that anthropologists themselves could be objects of anthropological study.

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 his research had indicated is not biological in origin, but rather social. Boas is credited as the first scientist to publish the idea that all people—including white and African Americans—are equal. An early example of this concern is evident in his commencement address to Atlanta University , at the invitation of W.

Du Bois. 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". He then went on, however, to argue against this view. To the claim that European and Asian civilizations are, at the time, more advanced than African societies, Boas objected that against the total history of humankind, the past two thousand years is but a brief span.

Moreover, although the technological advances of our early ancestors such as taming fire and inventing stone tools might seem insignificant when compared to the invention of the steam engine or control over electricity, we should consider that they might actually be even greater accomplishments. Boas then went on to catalogue advances in Africa, such as smelting iron , cultivating millet , and domesticating chickens and cattle , that occurred in Africa well before they spread to Europe and Asia evidence now suggests that chickens were first domesticated in Asia; the original domestication of cattle is under debate.

He then described the activities of African kings, diplomats, merchants, and artists as evidence of cultural achievement. From this, he concluded, any social inferiority of Negroes in the United States cannot be explained by their African origins:. If therefore, it is claimed that your race is doomed to economic inferiority, you may confidently look to the home of your ancestors and say, that you have set out to recover for the colored people the strength that was their own before they set foot on the shores of this continent.

You may say that you go to work with bright hopes and that you will not be discouraged by the slowness of your progress; for you have to recover not only what has been lost in transplanting the Negro race from its native soil to this continent, but you must reach higher levels than your ancestors ever had attained. 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 Manchu 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. In France, that let down the barriers more than a hundred years ago, the feeling of antipathy is still strong enough to sustain an anti-Jewish political party.

Boas's closing advice is that African Americans 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. Do not look for the impossible, but do not let your path deviate from the quiet and steadfast insistence on full opportunities for your powers.

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. At the time, Boas had no idea that speaking at Atlanta University would put him at odds with a different prominent Black figure, Booker T.

Du Bois and Washington had different views on the means of uplifting Black Americans. He had many unstable professions in the first decade before he finally developed an interest in anthropology by participating in the Columbia Explosion at the Field Museum of Natural History. He was appointed as a professor of anthropology, specialising in biological aspects, at the Columbia University, New York from He acted as a curator at the American Museum of Natural History between Kroeber, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict.

Franz Boas is credited with developing the four-field approach of American anthropology: 1 Physical or biological anthropology focusses on collecting evidence to explain the biological differences and similarities of the human race. Franz Boas was an influential teacher and researcher. His contributions to the field ranged from physical anthropology, linguistics, archaeology to ethnology, art and folklore studies of the American Indian peoples.

His view on race as a cultural construct remodelled the world of colonial studies. His theory on cultural relativism explained that all these views are ethnocentric and come from a colonial bias of understanding society in hierarchical perspectives and through the use of oppressive power dynamics. His theories enabled future anthropologists 20th century onwards to view the development of races in terms of historical particularism.

His holistic views on scientific method urged the anthropologists to infer the cultures of other people without preconceived notions of judgement. He warned against the generalised understanding of various cultures. It is a socio-cultural reality of individuals living and creating different meanings and experiences, in their own perceptions.

After his retirement, in , Boas responded to the steady rise of the Nazis in Germany and Hitler's thoughts on a "master race" by crystallizing his ideas about racism in articles published in popular scientific journals, some of which were collected after his death in Race and Democratic Society He also lectured widely in an attempt to educate the public on the nature of race and the dangers of Nazi ideology.

To Boas, anthropology was a holistic and eclectic field of study, so to assess theories of cultural differences, one must be familiar with biology, interrelations of humans and their environment and such specific criteria as human migration, nutrition, child-rearing customs and disease, to name a few. What made Boas's theories truly revolutionary, however, was that while anthropologists have generally believed that humans make up a single species, few scholars of his time believed that different races within the species showed equal ability to achieve cultural development.

Because of Boas's influence, anthropologists and other social scientists began to see that differences among the races resulted not from physiological factors, but from historical events and circumstances, and that race itself was a cultural construct. In the end, Boas contributed to all four branches of anthropology, in studies ranging from racial classification to linguistics.

He influenced a wide variety of scholars and researchers that followed, from Margaret Mead to W. Du Bois, and pioneered the study of anthropology across the United States, both before his death in and since. We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Tammy Duckworth. His pioneering work laid the groundwork for understanding race not as a fixed, biological determinant, but rather as a social construct influenced by various environmental factors.

He argued that these traits were not statically inherited or biologically determined, but could change and adapt in response to environmental influences. This perspective was a stark departure from the racial determinism that was widely accepted at the time, which posited that certain races were inherently superior to others based on physical characteristics.

This groundbreaking study significantly challenged prevailing racial theories, highlighting the plasticity of human physical traits and the impact of environmental factors on their development. His research underscored the notion that race is not a rigid biological reality, but a complex interplay of genetics, environment, and culture.

Franz Boas also played a pivotal role in establishing the importance of fieldwork and ethnography in anthropology. He championed the idea that to truly comprehend a culture, anthropologists must immerse themselves in it, living among the people they are studying, learning their language, and participating in their everyday activities. He argued that anthropologists should gather data firsthand, observing cultural practices, rituals, and social interactions directly.

In addition to immersive fieldwork, Boas also stressed the importance of learning the language of the people being studied. Furthermore, Boas placed a high value on ethnography — the systematic recording and analysis of a culture. He believed that detailed, descriptive accounts of cultural practices and beliefs were essential for understanding a society in its full complexity.

Franz Boas was not only an anthropologist but also a linguist, and his contributions to linguistic anthropology were profound. He posited that language is more than just a medium for communication; it is a fundamental aspect of culture and a significant shaper of our perception of reality. He argued that language is not merely a reflection of our thoughts and ideas, but it actively shapes them.

According to Boas, the structure of a language influences how its speakers perceive and categorize the world around them. This idea suggests that different languages lead to different ways of thinking and understanding reality, emphasizing the intimate relationship between language and thought. This focus on the relationship between language and thought laid the groundwork for later developments in linguistics, particularly the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Named after Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, who were both influenced by Boas, this hypothesis posits that the structure of a language determines or greatly influences the modes of thought and behavior characteristic of the culture in which it is spoken. Moreover, Boas believed that each language represents a unique cultural worldview, with its own set of concepts and categories.

He argued that to truly understand a culture, one must understand its language, as it encapsulates the collective knowledge, beliefs, and values of its speakers.