Franz Boas

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Franz Boas
BirthplaceMinden, Westphalia, Germany
EducationPh.D. in physics, University of Kiel (1881)

Boas, Franz

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Boas, Franz


Born July 9, 1858, in Minden, Westphalia; died Dec. 21, 1942, in New York. American linguist, and social and physical anthropologist; a specialist in the languages and culture of American Indians, principally of the northwest coast, and of the Eskimos.

Boas took part in Arctic expeditions in 1883–84. He moved to the USA in 1886 and began teaching at Columbia University in 1896. He was a founder and president (1928) of the American Linguistics Society. As one of the founders of American descriptive linguistics and of a very significant school in American ethnography (social anthropology), Boas developed a procedure for formal descriptions of native American languages.

Boas’ work on the physical anthropology and archaeology of North America is of great importance. While criticizing various trends in the bourgeois ethnography of his time, Boas often took stands reflecting a spontaneous materialist outlook in his analysis of concrete social phenomena. He unmasked and denounced racist teachings. Boas was known as an antifascist and was an active participant in various organizations of the US liberal intelligentsia that fought for democratic reforms.


Handbook of American Indian Languages, vols. 1–2. Washington, D.C., 1911–22.
Anthropology and Modern Life. London, 1929.
Race, Language, and Culture, 2nd ed. New York, 1948.
Race and Democratic Society. New York, 1946.
In Russian translation:
“Vvedenie k ’Rukovodstvu po iazykam amerikanskikh indeitsev.’” In V. A. Zvegintsev, Istoriia iazykoznaniia XIX i XX vekov v ocherkakh i izvlecheniiakh, 2nd ed., part 2. Moscow, 1965. 2nd ed., part 2. Moscow, 1965.
Um pervobytnogo cheloveka. Moscow-Leningrad, 1926.


Osnovnye napravleniia strukturalizma. Moscow, 1964.
Averkieva, Iu. P. “F. Boas (1858–1942).” Kratkie soobshcheniia In-ta etnografii AN SSSR, vol. 1, 1946.


Boas, Franz

(1858–1942) cultural anthropologist; born in Minden, Germany. A merchant's son, raised in a liberal environment, he became interested in natural history as a boy and studied geography at the universities of Heidelberg, Bonn, and Kiel. On his first field trip, to the Canadian Arctic (1883–84), he studied Eskimo tribes; from then on his intellectual interests turned to ethnology and anthropology. He emigrated to the United States in 1886, studied the Indian tribes of the Pacific Northwest, and worked in Massachusetts and Illinois before obtaining a post as a lecturer at Columbia University in New York City. Promoted to full professor in 1899, he trained several generations of anthropologists. As a scholar, his emphasis was to draw on ethnology, physical anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics, and to collect data about cultures, especially those passing from the scene. He and his students established new and more complex concepts of culture and race, as outlined in his collection of papers, Race, Language and Culture (1940). With the rise of Hitler in Germany he began to speak out against racism and intolerance, and he wrote and lectured widely in opposition to the Nazis. His other works include The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) and Anthropology and Modern Life (1928).
References in periodicals archive ?
El hecho de retomar una concepcion de nacion--primordialmente francesa y alemana--fundada en un proceso de unificacion y estandarizacion de corte demografico, etnico, social, cultural y linguistico resultaba en obvia contraposicion con el culturalismo y el particularismo historico del que Gamio se habia nutrido y abrevado en el periodo que estuvo estudiando en Columbia con Franz Boas.
22) Franz Boas, "On Alternating Sounds", American Anthropologist, A2, 1, (1889), 47-54.
In his lifetime, Franz Boas, the pioneer anthropologist who has been called "the father of American anthropology," produced a remarkable total of 725 publications of widely varying length.
Franz Boas, The Religion of the Kwakiutl Indians: Texts (Columbia University Press, 1930), 178.
In 1911, with the publication of Changes in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants, Franz Boas effectively eliminated the role of genetic inheritance in human behavior from the debates of the day.
While conducting research for Mules and Men from December 1927 until February 1930 Zora Neale Hurston reported on her progress, goals, and methodologies via letters written to three very distinct audiences: "Papa" Franz Boas, her mentor at Columbia, who was ardently seeking to establish anthropology as a science; "Godmother" Charlotte Osgood Mason, the wealthy patron of the primitive, the source of Hurston's financial support and the legal owner of all the material Hurston collected; and her "pal," Langston Hughes, who introduced Hurston to Mason and with whom Hurston corresponded the most frequently and familiarly.
In 1886, Franz Boas was fascinated by the many Indigenous people he met on the streets of Victoria, British Columbia.
1) Si bien uno de los promotores de estas obras, Franz Boas, llevo a cabo algunos trabajos en Mexico a principios del siglo XX--recopilo, por ejemplo, interesantes narraciones en nahuatl en Milpa Alta (D.
He did have supporters, among them Franz Boas who was also convinced that Indian music did indeed exhibited "natural harmonies" and any notes that sounded out of tune were due to "secondary causes," not a different sense of tonality (Boas 1894, 170-171).
The intersecting worlds of Harris's intellectual and political activities were populated by such figures as Louis Brandeis, Albert Einstein, Franz Boas, Nathan Glazer, and Noam Chomsky.
Morton and other skull collectors, naturalists, and scientists "choreographed a new dance of death" during which even the father of American anthropology, Franz Boas, sold skulls to finance his research (76).
It widens the view by looking through the eyes of a servant, young Wilhelm Weike, who accompanied equally young anthropologist-to-be Franz Boas to the Arctic in the late nineteenth century.