Franz Boas: Biography Of This Influential American Anthropologist
Franz Boas (1958-1942) is known as the father of American anthropology. He has also been considered one of the four fathers of anthropology, for having laid the foundations of one of its branches: cultural anthropology.
In this article we will see a biography of Franz Boas very summarized, as well as some of the main characteristics of his life and work.
Biography of Franz Boas: life and work of this anthropologist
Franz Boas was born on July 9, 1858 in Minden, Germany. His grandparents were Jewish and his parents had assimilated some of the German values of the Enlightenment era, as well as liberal ideas from the 1848 revolution.
Inevitably Franz Boas developed sensitivity towards both groups, while at the same time he did not subscribe strongly to either and was able to develop a critical awareness towards anti-Semitism and nationalism Likewise, from a very young age, he developed a great interest in the natural sciences, and shortly after he became interested in studies in cultural history.
Some time after having participated in the military services, Boas studied geography in Berlin, where his interest in cultural processes beyond demographic ones grew. In 1886 he visited Kwakiutl and other Canadian tribes, and upon his return to the United States he was editor of the magazine Science. Later he collaborated in the preparations for the anthropological exhibitions of 1893 at the National Museum of History in Chicago, where he exhibited part of his work.
Finally he worked as a professor at different universities in the United States and as curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where he was also director and editor of the research reports of different studies that analyzed non-Western cultures and societies.
Beginnings of cultural anthropology
Like many of the pioneers of anthropology, Franz Boas began his training in mathematics and physics, which he complemented through different studies that finally allowed him to develop his main works. For example, received training in philosophy, where he was especially interested in Kant’s thought. From there he came to psychophysics and soon became interested in addressing some problems in the epistemology of physics.
In other words, there was concern about how the knowledge that said discipline validated and disseminated was being constructed. Subsequently, Franz Boas specialized in geography, a field that allowed him to explore the relationships between subjective experiences and the material conditions of the world. In this context there was an important debate about whether the determining factors were physical or cultural, and Boas interacted closely with other researchers who analyze this debate based on migration processes.
For its part, anthropology was developing around an evolutionary perspective on culture. This means that the studies that were developed justified cultural differences based on biological arguments that said that some human “races” have greater or better capacities to adapt, or not, to certain contexts.
In general and in that historical context, These arguments supported racist and exclusionary practices that affect people whose skin is not white. From here and from his interest in migratory processes, Boas studied how new environments affect migrants, and no longer the other way around, as had been suggested by some studies.
One of Franz Boas’s main contributions to modern anthropology was the shift towards a relativist perspective on culture. What he broadly proposed was that cultural differences are mediated by culture, and not so much by biology, as he had been maintaining in the evolutionary approach.
In other words, Boas argued that the origin of cultural difference was not given by biology, which inevitably must be taken into account to analyze the processes of racialization. Based on his research, Franz Boas positioned himself as one of the greatest representatives of the questioning of white supremacy that permeated the anthropologist’s studies.
This was one of the origins of cultural anthropology, I understand that culture is the local context where human action occurs, which was added to the other three branches of anthropology that were already developing: linguistics, physics and archeology.
Finally, Boas approached ethnography maintaining that all cultural phenomena had to be considered as worthy of being studied in their specificity and particularity, which led him to establish a break with the cultural laws that science formulated. He developed a preference for empiricist practices, and was eventually able to develop cultural relativism as an important methodological and theoretical tool, serving both data collection and analysis.
Legacy and notable works
Franz Boas taught in Massachusetts and Chicago and founded the American Anthropological Association, as well as the journal of American Anthropology, since 1898.
Some of the most notable works of Franz Boas They are the following books: Race, Language and Culture (race, language and culture), 1940; Anthropology and Modern Life (Anthropology and modern life) from 1928; The Relation of Darwin to Anthropology (The relationship between Darwin and anthropology), a text published posthumously.
