![]() Boas remains an inescapable, fundamental figure in the history of anthropology and an inexhaustible subject of reassessment and controversy. Herskovits – went on to be leaders in the field themselves, a number of them founding departments of anthropology at leading universities. Kroeber, Edward Sapir, Paul Radin, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead and Melville J. ![]() Many of his students at Columbia University – such as Alfred L. In dialogue with African-American intellectuals, he was a leading moral figure in anthropology and an activist against racism, ethnocentrism and Nazism. ![]() In 1883 Boas undertook his first ethnographic-geographic field research among the Eskimo (Inuit) of Baffin Island in Canada, which resulted in his classic anthropological monograph. At the age of twenty he enrolled in college at Heidelberg. Interested in the pre-colonial past and the historical development of cultures and languages, Boas also dedicated himself to Anthropology and Modern Life (1928). Franz Boas (1858-1942) Boas was born in Minden, Westphalia (now part of Germany). Focused on salvaging for posterity “the culture as it appears to the Indian himself”, he published extensively, particularly on the “Kwakiutl” (Kwakwa’wakw) and other peoples of the Northwest Coast, including the bilingual edition of vernacular texts collected by Indigenous collaborators. Both a museum curator at the American Museum of Natural History (1896) and a professor of anthropology at Columbia University (1899), he was himself a fieldworker from the 1880s to the 1930s. Focusing on Boass ethnographic practice rather than his theoretical and programmatic statements, I first find an ‘atomistic’ (opposite of holistic) ethnographer, and a deep convergence between this atomism and Linnaean-type natural history. Boas was a central figure in the professionalization of anthropology and ethnography in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. ![]() In works such as The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) or his collection of essays on Race, Language and Culture (1940), he gave a scientific basis to cultural relativism. He challenged both cultural evolutionism and racial determinism by putting a plural notion of culture at the center of the discipline. Franz Boas professionalized the holistic study of anthropology from the 1880s into the twentieth century.American anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942), born in Germany into a Jewish family, is considered to be one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology in the United States and worldwide. Leibniz, researchers in these fields categorized peoples primarily according to their languages. Ethnography and ethnology focused not on “other” cultures but on all peoples of all eras. Before Boas delves deeper into issues concerning anthropology’s academic origins to present a groundbreaking study that reveals how ethnology and ethnography originated during the eighteenth rather than the nineteenth century, developing parallel to anthropology, or the “natural history of man.”īefore Boas argues that anthropology and ethnology were separate sciences during the Age of Reason, studying racial and ethnic diversity, respectively. The history of anthropology has been written from multiple viewpoints, often from perspectives of gender, nationality, theory, or politics. Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press
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