BOAS, FRANZ

BOAS, FRANZ (1858–1942), U.S. anthropologist who established anthropology as an academic discipline in the U.S.A. Born in Minden, Germany, he taught geography at the University of Berlin, which led to his Arctic expedition to Baffin Island in 1883–84. Gradually his interest in anthropology overtook his interest in cultural geography and in 1885 he became assistant in Bastian's Museum fuer Voelkerkunde in Berlin. Boas developed a major interest in North Pacific culture, which in 1886 took him to British Columbia where he began the study of the Kwakiutl Indians, a subject in which he retained a lifelong interest. In 1887 he settled in New York City, and worked as an assistant editor of Science primarily in geography. After some teaching he became affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History, where he served as curator of ethnology 1901–05. In 1899 he was appointed professor of anthropology at Columbia University. After his monograph on the Central Eskimo (1888) he planned and participated in the Jesup North Pacific expedition. He developed into an authority on the Northwest Pacific coast, the Eskimo and Kwakiutl cultures, American Indian languages, and Mexican archaeology where he was among the first to apply stratographic excavations. In effect he restructured anthropology into a modern science committed to rigorous empirical method and the fundamental idea of the relative autonomy of the phenomena of culture. In Boas' view, neither race nor geographical setting have the primary role in forming human beings. Culture is the behavioral environment which forms the patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior, producing habits which are an internalization of traditional group patterns. In the field of linguistics his studies of American Indian languages and his contributions to modern linguistic techniques in both phonetics and morphology virtually defined American linguistic anthropology. Boas' studies of race and environmental factors, employing innovative biometric techniques, moved physical anthropology from static taxonomy to a dynamic biosocial perspective. Proceeding to refine the concept of race based on the notion of a permanent stability of bodily forms, he stressed the influence of environmental factors of human cultural life in modifying anatomy and physiology. In this labor his early training in physics and mathematics was of great use to him in his important investigations of changes in cranial and other measurements in children of immigrants. Thus his Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants (1912), which measured some 18,000 individuals, comparing European immigrant parents and their children in New York City, demonstrated significant changes in cephalic measurements. He also carried forward pioneer longitudinal studies in human growth and biometrical genetics. After a lifetime in scientific endeavor and public teaching regarding the dangers of racism, he participated in various efforts on behalf of intellectuals persecuted by the Nazi regime   and personally made it possible for many refugees to escape to freedom, while emigration was still possible. His major works include: Anthropology and Modern Life (19322); Race, Language and Culture (1940); Race and Democratic Society (1945); Primitive Art (1951); The Mind of Primitive Man (19653); The Central Eskimo (U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology, Sixth Annual Report 1884–85 (1888), 399–669; issued in paperback, 1964); and Ethnology of the Kwakiutl (35th Annual Report 1913–14 (1921), 41–1481). -BIBLIOGRAPHY: M.J. Herskovitz, Franz Boas, the Science of Man in the Making (1953), incl. bibl.; R.H. Lowie, in: National Academy of Sciences, Washington, Biographical Memoirs, 24 (1947), 303–22, incl. bibl.; A. Kardiner and E. Preble (eds.), They Studied Man (1961), 134–59; A. Lesser, in: IESS, 2 (1968), 99–110, incl. bibl.; M.B. Emeneau, in: T.A. Sebeok (ed.), Portraits of Linguists (1966), 122–7; R. Jakobson, in: ibid., 127–39. (Ephraim Fischoff)