Franz Boas- 1858-1942

Born in Minden, Germany, Franz Boas earned his Baccalaureate from the University of Heidelberg in 1881 and in that same year, earned his Ph.D. from the University of Kiel, Germany. In 1899, he became a Professor at Columbia University.

Franz Boas is best known for his work with the Kwakiutl Indians from Northern Vancouver and the adjacent mainland of British Columbia, Canada. While studying the Kwakiutl, he established a new concept of culture and race. He decided that everything was important to the study of culture. In his view, collecting data on everything was important.

Boas added cultural relativism to the body of anthropological theory and believed in historical particularism. In addition his cultural relativism pointed out that the differences in peoples were the results of historical, social and geographic conditions and all populations had complete and equally developed culture. Historical particularism deals with each culture as having a unique history and one should not assume universal laws govern how cultures operate. This view countered the early evolutionist view of L.H. Morgan who had developed stages that each culture went through during their development.

The views of Franz Boas who was called the “Father of American Anthropology”, and some of his students changed American anthropology forever. He was one of the first anthropologists that did field work, gathering information about their culture and all their components.
Boas had many students that went on to become some of anthropology's most famous names.

Boas wrote many books during his lifetime:Growth of Children (1896 - 1904)The Mind of Primitive Man, 1938Primitive Art, 1927Anthropology and Modern Life, 938Race, Language, and Culture, 1940Dakota Grammar, 1941.

One of the greatest accomplishments of Boas and his students was their critique of theories of physical, social, and cultural evolution current at that time. This critique is central to Boas's work in museums, as well as his work in all four fields of anthropology.
For this reason, some people have argued that Boasian anthropology is at odds with Darwin’s theory of Evolution. This argument is unfounded, and mistakenly assumes that people using the word "evolution" always mean the same thing. In fact, Boas supported Darwinian theory, although he did not assume that it automatically applied to cultural and historical phenomena. He ridiculed many of the social approaches to the evolutionism perspective. However, if we analyze from the current athropological perspective we have to consider his historical context and we can claim that he was not isolated from the theories of evolution.

His studies about languages helped many other scientists of his time, particularly Sapir-Whorf and their studies about the languages learning among the Inuits in North America. In addition, some of his students continued to studying those cultures, achieving great data and information about them. If we consider those studies today, we can value them not only by their detailed descriptions and ethnographical work, but also by their “natural state”.

Today, it is practically impossible to find cultures without western culture like those described by Boas and his students. However, many of his ethnographical descriptions can still be applied in our culture or sub-cultures. One of the examples is the behavior of communities (about the Inuits) about migration and the search of natural resources. Nowadays, there are many anthropological and ecological works that describe the same patterns for modern communities which directly depend on the extraction of natural resources.