Franz Boas

Franz Boas (born July 9, 1858 at Minden, Westphalia, in Germany; died December 21, 1942, New York City, United States of America) was a German-American cultural anthropologist. He was born into a secular Jewish family.

Franz Boas is said to have established ethnology as a serious social science in the United States, especially during his time at New York's Columbia University. Among the anthropologists trained by Boas were Alfred Louis Kroeber. Robert H. Lowie, Paul Radin, Alexander A. Goldenweiser, Edward Sapir, Melville Jean Herskovits, Ruth Bendict and Margaret Mead. Boas strongly opposed evolutionism, the leading theory of the day and favored diffusionism.

Franz Boas studied mathematics, physics, geography and other natural sciences at Heidelberg, Bonn, and Kiel universities. In 1881 he earned his doctorate in physics with a study of the colour of water. He served as a soldier and then, in 1883, he undertook an expedition to Baffin Island to do research for his Habilitationsschrift. Beside his scientific work he got interested in the Inuit (or Eskimo) there. In 1886/87 and later, until 1896, he conducted fieldwork with various Northwestcoast societies, most famously the Kwakwaka'wakw (or Kwakiutl).

From 1884 Boas worked as an assistant (wissenschaftlicher Hilfsarbeiter) at the Royal Anthropological Museum (the Königlichen Museum für Völkerkunde) at Berlin. In 1886 he received the right to teach at University, with a thesis based on his Baffin Island research. For a short time he was a Privatdozent at Berlin's Friedrich-Wilhelms University. In 1886/87 he went on his first expedition to British Columbia. Boas emigrated to the United States of America in 1887. His future wife was an American and he also thought about his career.

Boas taught at Clark University, Worchester from 1892 until 1896 and at Columbia University, from 1896 as lecturer and since 1899 as its first professor of anthropology. In the next decades Boas and his pupils would teach most leading American anthropologists. Boas was emeritated in 1937.

Boas worked for the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. He was curator at Chicago's Field Museum and from 1896 to 1905 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He also organized the famous Jessup Expedition(s).

Outside the profession Franz Boas was known because of his stance against racism. Boas also organized financial support for German science after the lost World War I.