Franz Boas

Franz Uri Boas[a] (July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942) was a

Franz Boas
German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern
anthropology who has been called the "Father of American
Anthropology".[22][23][24] His work is associated with the
movements known as historical particularism and cultural
relativism.[25]

Studying in Germany, Boas was awarded a doctorate in 1881 in

physics while also studying geography. He then participated in a
geographical expedition to northern Canada, where he became
fascinated with the culture and language of the Baffin Island Inuit.
He went on to do field work with the indigenous cultures and
languages of the Pacific Northwest. In 1887 he emigrated to the
United States, where he first worked as a museum curator at the
Smithsonian, and in 1899 became a professor of anthropology at
Columbia University, where he remained for the rest of his career.
Through his students, many of whom went on to found
Born Franz Uri Boas
anthropology departments and research programmes inspired by
July 9, 1858
their mentor, Boas profoundly influenced the development of
American anthropology. Among his many significant students Minden, Kingdom of
were A. L. Kroeber, Alexander Goldenweiser, Ruth Benedict, Prussia
Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gilberto (now in North Rhine-
Freyre.[26] Westphalia,
Germany)
Boas was one of the most prominent opponents of the then-
Died December 21, 1942
popular ideologies of scientific racism, the idea that race is a
biological concept and that human behavior is best understood (aged 84)
through the typology of biological characteristics.[27][28] In a series New York City, New
of groundbreaking studies of skeletal anatomy, he showed that York, US
cranial shape and size was highly malleable depending on Citizenship Germany
environmental factors such as health and nutrition, in contrast to United States
the claims by racial anthropologists of the day that held head shape
Spouse Marie Krackowizer
to be a stable racial trait. Boas also worked to demonstrate that Boas
differences in human behavior are not primarily determined by ​(m. 1887)​
innate biological dispositions but are largely the result of cultural
differences acquired through social learning. In this way, Boas Children Helene · Ernst ·
introduced culture as the primary concept for describing Hedwig · Gertrud ·
differences in behavior between human groups, and as the central Henry · Franziska
analytical concept of anthropology.[26] Parents Meier Boas · Sophie
Meyer Boas
Among Boas's main contributions to anthropological thought was
his rejection of the then-popular evolutionary approaches to the Academic background
study of culture, which saw all societies progressing through a set
Alma mater University of
of hierarchic technological and cultural stages, with Western
European culture at the summit. Boas argued that culture Heidelberg
developed historically through the interactions of groups of people University of Bonn
and the diffusion of ideas and that consequently there was no University of Kiel
process towards continuously "higher" cultural forms. This insight
Thesis Beiträge zur
led Boas to reject the "stage"-based organization of ethnological
museums, instead preferring to order items on display based on the Erkenntniss der
affinity and proximity of the cultural groups in question. Farbe des
Wassers (1881)
Boas also introduced the idea of cultural relativism, which holds
Doctoral Gustav Karsten
that cultures cannot be objectively ranked as higher or lower, or
advisor
better or more correct, but that all humans see the world through
the lens of their own culture, and judge it according to their own Influences Adolf Bastian · Moritz
culturally acquired norms. For Boas, the object of anthropology Lazarus[1] · Heymann
was to understand the way in which culture conditioned people to Steinthal[1] · Rudolf
understand and interact with the world in different ways and to do Virchow[1] · Theodor
this it was necessary to gain an understanding of the language and Waitz[1] · Wilhelm
cultural practices of the people studied. By uniting the disciplines Wundt
of archaeology, the study of material culture and history, and
physical anthropology, the study of variation in human anatomy, Academic work
with ethnology, the study of cultural variation of customs, and Discipline Anthropology
descriptive linguistics, the study of unwritten indigenous
School or Boasian anthropology
languages, Boas created the four-field subdivision of anthropology
tradition
which became prominent in American anthropology in the 20th
century.[26] Institutions Clark University
Columbia University
Early life and education Doctoral Ruth Benedict · A. F.
students Chamberlain[2] ·
Franz Boas was born on July 9, 1858,[29] in Minden, Westphalia, Manuel Gamio[3] ·
the son of Sophie Meyer and Feibes Uri Boas. Although his Alexander
grandparents were observant Jews, his parents embraced Goldenweiser · Irving
Enlightenment values, including their assimilation into modern
Goldman · Herman
German society. Boas's parents were educated, well-to-do, and
liberal; they did not like dogma of any kind. An important early Karl Haeberlin ·
influence was the avuncular Abraham Jacobi, his mother's brother- Melville J.
in-law and a friend of Karl Marx, who was to advise him Herskovits[4] · George
throughout Boas's career. Due to this, Boas was granted the Herzog[5] · E.
independence to think for himself and pursue his own interests. Adamson Hoebel[6] ·
Early in life, he displayed a penchant for both nature and natural Melville Jacobs ·
sciences. Boas vocally opposed antisemitism and refused to William Jones[7][8] ·
convert to Christianity, but he did not identify himself as a Jew.[30] A. L. Kroeber[9] ·
This is disputed however by Ruth Bunzel, a protégée of Boas, Alexander Lesser ·
who called him "the essential protestant; he valued autonomy
Robert Lowie ·
above all things."[31] According to his biographer, "He was an
Margaret Mead[10] ·
'ethnic' German, preserving and promoting German culture and
Ashley Montagu ·
values in America."[32] In an autobiographical sketch, Boas wrote:
Paul Radin · Gladys
Reichard · Edward
The background of my early thinking was a German Sapir · Frank Speck ·
home in which the ideals of the revolution of 1848 Leslie Spier · Günter
were a living force. My father, liberal, but not active Wagner[11] · Ruth
in public affairs; my mother, idealistic, with a lively
Sawtell Wallis
interest in public matters; the founder about 1854 of
the kindergarten in my hometown, devoted to science.
 My parents had broken through the shackles of Notable Fay-Cooper Cole ·
dogma. My father had retained an emotional affection students Erna Gunther · Zora
for the ceremonial of his parental home, without Neale Hurston
allowing it to influence his intellectual freedom.[33]
Notable Cultural relativism ·
ideas four-field approach
From kindergarten on, Boas was educated in natural history, a Influenced Leonard
subject he enjoyed.[34] In gymnasium, he was most proud of his
Bloomfield[12] · Ruth
research on the geographic distribution of plants.
Bunzel[13] · Frederica
When he started his university studies, Boas first attended de Laguna[14] ·
Heidelberg University for a semester followed by four terms at Gilberto Freyre[15] ·
Bonn University, studying physics, geography, and mathematics at Pliny Earle
these schools.[35][36][37] In 1879, he hoped to transfer to Berlin Goddard[16] · Alfred
University to study physics under Hermann von Helmholtz, but Irving Hallowell[17] ·
ended up transferring to the University of Kiel instead due to Otto Klineberg[9] ·
family reasons.[38] At Kiel, Boas had wanted to focus on the Ruth Landes[18] ·
mathematical topic of C.F. Gauss's law of the normal distribution Rhoda Métraux[19] ·
of errors for his dissertation, but he ultimately had to settle for a
Elsie Clews
topic chosen for him by his doctoral advisor, physicist Gustav
Parsons[20] · Ruth
Karsten, on the optical properties of water.[39] Boas completed his
Underhill[21] · Leah
dissertation entitled Contributions to the Perception of the Color of
Water,[40] which examined the absorption, reflection, and Rachel Yoffie
polarization of light in water, and was awarded a PhD in physics in Signature
1881.[41][42][43][44][45]

While at Bonn, Boas had attended geography classes taught by the

geographer Theobald Fischer and the two established a friendship,
with the coursework and friendship continuing after both relocated
to Kiel at the same time.[46][47][48][49][50] Fischer, a student of Carl
Ritter, rekindled Boas's interest in geography and ultimately had
more influence on him than did Karsten, and thus some biographers
view Boas as more of a geographer than a physicist at this
stage.[51][52][50][53] In addition to the major in physics, Adams,
citing Kroeber, states that "[i]n accordance with German tradition at
the time ... he also had to defend six minor theses",[54] and Boas
likely completed a minor in geography,[55] which would explain
why Fischer was one of Boas's degree examiners.[56] Because of
this close relationship between Fischer and Boas, some biographers
have gone so far as to incorrectly state that Boas "followed" Fischer
to Kiel, and that Boas received a PhD in geography with Fischer as
his doctoral advisor.[57][58] For his part, Boas self-identified as a
geographer by the time he completed his doctorate,[59] prompting
his sister, Toni, to write in 1883, "After long years of infidelity, my
brother was re-conquered by geography, the first love of his
boyhood."[60]
Boas's dissertation: Beiträge zur
In his dissertation research, Boas's methodology included Erkenntniss der Farbe des Wassers
investigating how different intensities of light created different
colors when interacting with different types of water;[55] however,
he encountered difficulty in being able to objectively perceive slight differences in the color of water, and as
a result became intrigued by this problem of perception and its influence on quantitative
measurements.[55][61] Boas, due to tone deafness, would later encounter difficulties also in studying tonal
languages such as Laguna.[62] Boas had already been interested in Kantian philosophy since taking a
course on aesthetics with Kuno Fischer at Heidelberg. These factors led Boas to consider pursuing research
in psychophysics, which explores the relationship between the psychological and the physical, after
completing his doctorate, but he had no training in psychology.[63][64] Boas did publish six articles on
psychophysics during his year of military service (1882–1883), but ultimately he decided to focus on
geography, primarily so he could receive sponsorship for his planned Baffin Island expedition.[65]

Post-graduate studies
Boas took up geography as a way to explore his growing interest in the relationship between subjective
experience and the objective world. At the time, German geographers were divided over the causes of
cultural variation.[66]: 11 Many argued that the physical environment was the principal determining factor,
but others (notably Friedrich Ratzel) argued that the diffusion of ideas through human migration is more
important. In 1883, encouraged by Theobald Fischer, Boas went to Baffin Island to conduct geographic
research on the impact of the physical environment on native Inuit migrations. The first of many
ethnographic field trips, Boas culled his notes to write his first monograph titled The Central Eskimo, which
was published in 1888 in the 6th Annual Report from the Bureau of American Ethnology. Boas lived and
worked closely with the Inuit on Baffin Island, and he developed an abiding interest in the way people
lived.[67]

In the perpetual darkness of the Arctic winter, Boas reported, he and his traveling companion became lost
and were forced to keep sledding for twenty-six hours through ice, soft snow, and temperatures that
dropped below −46 °C. The following day, Boas penciled in his diary,[68]: 33

I often ask myself what advantages our 'good society' possesses over that of the 'savages' and
find, the more I see of their customs, that we have no right to look down upon them ... We
have no right to blame them for their forms and superstitions which may seem ridiculous to us.
We 'highly educated people' are much worse, relatively speaking ...

Boas went on to explain in the same entry that "all service, therefore, which a man can perform for
humanity must serve to promote truth." Before his departure, his father had insisted he be accompanied by
one of the family's servants, Wilhelm Weike who cooked for him and kept a journal of the expedition. Boas
was nonetheless forced to depend on various Inuit groups for everything from directions and food to shelter
and companionship. It was a difficult year filled with tremendous hardships that included frequent bouts of
disease, mistrust, pestilence, and danger. Boas successfully searched for areas not yet surveyed and found
unique ethnographic objects, but the long winter and the lonely treks across perilous terrain forced him to
search his soul to find a direction for his life as a scientist and a citizen.[69]

Boas's interest in indigenous communities grew as he worked at the Royal Ethnological Museum in Berlin,
where he was introduced to members of the Nuxalk Nation of British Columbia, which sparked a lifelong
relationship with the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest.

He returned to Berlin to complete his studies. In 1886, Boas defended (with Helmholtz's support) his
habilitation thesis, Baffin Land, and was named Privatdozent in geography.

While on Baffin Island he began to develop his interest in studying non-Western cultures (resulting in his
book, The Central Eskimo, published in 1888). In 1885, Boas went to work with physical anthropologist
Rudolf Virchow and ethnologist Adolf Bastian at the Royal Ethnological Museum in Berlin. Boas had
studied anatomy with Virchow two years earlier while preparing for the Baffin Island expedition. At the
time, Virchow was involved in a vociferous debate over evolution with his former student, Ernst Haeckel.
Haeckel had abandoned his medical practice to study comparative anatomy after reading Charles Darwin's
The Origin of Species, and vigorously promoted Darwin's ideas in Germany. However, like most other
natural scientists prior to the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics in 1900 and the development of the modern
synthesis, Virchow felt that Darwin's theories were weak because they lacked a theory of cellular
mutability. Accordingly, Virchow favored Lamarckian models of evolution. This debate resonated with
debates among geographers. Lamarckians believed that environmental forces could precipitate rapid and
enduring changes in organisms that had no inherited source; thus, Lamarckians and environmental
determinists often found themselves on the same side of debates.

But Boas worked more closely with Bastian, who was noted for his antipathy to environmental
determinism. Instead, he argued for the "psychic unity of mankind", a belief that all humans had the same
intellectual capacity, and that all cultures were based on the same basic mental principles. Variations in
custom and belief, he argued, were the products of historical accidents. This view resonated with Boas's
experiences on Baffin Island and drew him towards anthropology.

While at the Royal Ethnological Museum Boas became interested in the Native Americans in the Pacific
Northwest, and after defending his habilitation thesis, he left for a three-month trip to British Columbia via
New York. In January 1887, he was offered a job as assistant editor of the journal Science. Alienated by
growing antisemitism and nationalism as well as the very limited academic opportunities for a geographer
in Germany, Boas decided to stay in the United States. Possibly he received additional motivation for this
decision from his romance with Marie Krackowizer, whom he married in the same year. With a family
underway and under financial stress, Boas also resorted to pilfering bones and skulls from native burial sites
to sell to museums.[70]

Aside from his editorial work at Science, Boas secured an appointment as docent in anthropology at Clark
University, in 1888. Boas was concerned about university president G. Stanley Hall's interference in his
research, yet in 1889 he was appointed as the head of a newly created department of anthropology at Clark
University. In the early 1890s, he went on a series of expeditions which were referred to as the Morris K.
Jesup Expedition. The primary goal of these expeditions was to illuminate Asiatic-American
relations.[71][72] In 1892 Boas, along with another member of the Clark faculty, resigned in protest of the
alleged infringement by Hall on academic freedom.

World's Columbian Exposition

Anthropologist Frederic Ward Putnam, director and curator of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University,
who had been appointed as head of the Department of Ethnology and Archeology for the Chicago Fair in
1892, chose Boas as his first assistant at Chicago to prepare for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition or
Chicago World's Fair, the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the Americas.[73][74]
Boas had a chance to apply his approach to exhibits. Boas directed a team of about one hundred assistants,
mandated to create anthropology and ethnology exhibits on the Indians of North America and South
America that were living at the time Christopher Columbus arrived in America while searching for India.
Putnam intended the World's Columbian Exposition to be a celebration of Columbus' voyage. Putnam
argued that showing late nineteenth century Inuit and First Nations (then called Eskimo and Indians) "in
their natural conditions of life" would provide a contrast and celebrate the four centuries of Western
accomplishments since 1493.[75]

Franz Boas traveled north to gather ethnographic material for the Exposition. Boas had intended public
science in creating exhibitions for the Exposition where visitors to the Midway could learn about other
cultures. Boas arranged for fourteen Kwakwaka'wakw aboriginals from British Columbia to come and
reside in a mock Kwakwaka'wakw village, where they could perform their daily tasks in context. Inuit
were there with 12-foot-long whips made of sealskin, wearing sealskin clothing and showing how adept
they were in sealskin kayaks. His experience with the Exposition provided the first of a series of shocks to
Franz Boas's faith in public anthropology. The visitors were not there to be educated. By 1916, Boas had
come to recognize with a certain resignation that "the number of people in our country who are willing and
able to enter into the modes of thought of other nations is altogether too small ... The American who is
cognizant only of his own standpoint sets himself up as arbiter of the world."[76][77]: 170

After the exposition, the ethnographic material collected formed the basis of the newly created Field
Museum in Chicago with Boas as the curator of anthropology.[78] He worked there until 1894, when he
was replaced (against his will) by BAE archeologist William Henry Holmes.

In 1896, Boas was appointed Assistant Curator of Ethnology and Somatology of the American Museum of
Natural History under Putnam. In 1897, he organized the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, a five-year-long
field-study of the nations of the Pacific Northwest, whose ancestors had migrated across the Bering Strait
from Siberia. He attempted to organize exhibits along contextual, rather than evolutionary, lines. He also
developed a research program in line with his curatorial goals: describing his instructions to his students in
terms of widening contexts of interpretation within a society, he explained that "... they get the specimens;
they get explanations of the specimens; they get connected texts that partly refer to the specimens and partly
to abstract things concerning the people; and they get grammatical information". These widening contexts
of interpretation were abstracted into one context, the context in which the specimens, or assemblages of
specimens, would be displayed: "... we want a collection arranged according to tribes, in order to teach the
particular style of each group". His approach, however, brought him into conflict with the President of the
Museum, Morris Jesup, and its director, Hermon Bumpus. By 1900 Boas had begun to retreat from
American museum anthropology as a tool of education or reform (Hinsley 1992: 361). He resigned in
1905, never to work for a museum again.

Late 19th century debates

Science versus history

Some scholars, like Boas's student Alfred Kroeber, believed that Boas used his research in physics as a
model for his work in anthropology. Many others, however—including Boas's student Alexander Lesser,
and later researchers such as Marian W. Smith, Herbert S. Lewis, and Matti Bunzl—have pointed out that
Boas explicitly rejected physics in favor of history as a model for his anthropological research.

This distinction between science and history has its origins in 19th-century German academe, which
distinguished between Naturwissenschaften (the sciences) and Geisteswissenschaften (the humanities), or
between Gesetzwissenschaften (the law - giving sciences) and Geschichtswissenschaften (history).
Generally, Naturwissenschaften and Gesetzwissenschaften refer to the study of phenomena that are
governed by objective natural laws, while the latter terms in the two oppositions refer to those phenomena
that have to mean only in terms of human perception or experience.

In 1884, Kantian philosopher Wilhelm Windelband coined the terms nomothetic and idiographic to describe
these two divergent approaches. He observed that most scientists employ some mix of both, but in differing
proportions; he considered physics a perfect example of a nomothetic science, and history, an idiographic
science. Moreover, he argued that each approach has its origin in one of the two "interests" of reason Kant
had identified in the Critique of Judgement—one "generalizing", the other "specifying". (Winkelband's
student Heinrich Rickert elaborated on this distinction in The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural
Science : A Logical Introduction to the Historical Sciences; Boas's students Alfred Kroeber and Edward
Sapir relied extensively on this work in defining their own approach to anthropology.)
Although Kant considered these two interests of reason to be objective and universal, the distinction
between the natural and human sciences was institutionalized in Germany, through the organization of
scholarly research and teaching, following the Enlightenment. In Germany, the Enlightenment was
dominated by Kant himself, who sought to establish principles based on universal rationality. In reaction to
Kant, German scholars such as Johann Gottfried Herder (an influence to Boas)[79] argued that human
creativity, which necessarily takes unpredictable and highly diverse forms, is as important as human
rationality. In 1795, the great linguist and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt called for an anthropology
that would synthesize Kant's and Herder's interests. Humboldt founded the University of Berlin in 1809,
and his work in geography, history, and psychology provided the milieu in which Boas's intellectual
orientation matured.

Historians working in the Humboldtian tradition developed ideas that would become central in Boasian
anthropology. Leopold von Ranke defined the task of the historian as "merely to show as it actually was",
which is a cornerstone of Boas's empiricism. Wilhelm Dilthey emphasized the centrality of "understanding"
to human knowledge, and that the lived experience of a historian could provide a basis for an empathic
understanding of the situation of a historical actor.[80] For Boas, both values were well-expressed in a quote
from Goethe: "A single action or event is interesting, not because it is explainable, but because it is
true."[81]

The influence of these ideas on Boas is apparent in his 1887 essay, "The Study of Geography", in which he
distinguished between physical science, which seeks to discover the laws governing phenomena, and
historical science, which seeks a thorough understanding of phenomena on their own terms. Boas argued
that geography is and must be historical in this sense. In 1887, after his Baffin Island expedition, Boas
wrote "The Principles of Ethnological Classification", in which he developed this argument in application
to anthropology:

Ethnological phenomena are the result of the physical and psychical character of men, and of
its development under the influence of the surroundings ... 'Surroundings' are the physical
conditions of the country, and the sociological phenomena, i.e., the relation of man to man.
Furthermore, the study of the present surroundings is insufficient: the history of the people, the
influence of the regions through which it has passed on its migrations, and the people with
whom it came into contact, must be considered[82]

This formulation echoes Ratzel's focus on historical processes of human migration and culture contact and
Bastian's rejection of environmental determinism. It also emphasizes culture as a context ("surroundings"),
and the importance of history. These are the hallmarks of Boasian anthropology (which Marvin Harris
would later call "historical particularism"), would guide Boas's research over the next decade, as well as his
instructions to future students. (See Lewis 2001b for an alternative view to Harris'.)

Although context and history were essential elements to Boas's understanding of anthropology as
Geisteswissenschaften and Geschichtswissenschaften, there is one essential element that Boasian
anthropology shares with Naturwissenschaften: empiricism. In 1949, Boas's student Alfred Kroeber
summed up the three principles of empiricism that define Boasian anthropology as a science:

1. The method of science is, to begin with, questions, not with answers, least of all with value
judgments.
2. Science is a dispassionate inquiry and therefore cannot take over outright any ideologies
"already formulated in everyday life" since these are themselves inevitably traditional and
normally tinged with emotional prejudice.
3. Sweeping all-or-none, black-and-white judgments are characteristic of categorical attitudes
 and have no place in science, whose very nature is inferential and judicious.[83]

Orthogenetic versus Darwinian evolution

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. As
historian George Stocking noted, however, Boas's main project was
to distinguish between biological and cultural heredity, and to focus
on the cultural processes that he believed had the greatest influence
An illustration from Evidence as to
over social life.[84] In fact, Boas supported Darwinian theory,
Man's Place in Nature (1863) by
although he did not assume that it automatically applied to cultural
Thomas Henry Huxley, which
and historical phenomena (and indeed was a lifelong opponent of
became emblematic of the now-
19th-century theories of cultural evolution, such as those of Lewis
discredited idea of evolution as
H. Morgan and Edward Burnett Tylor).[85] The notion of evolution linear progress.
that the Boasians ridiculed and rejected was the then dominant
belief in orthogenesis—a determinate or teleological process of
evolution in which change occurs progressively regardless of natural selection. Boas rejected the prevalent
theories of social evolution developed by Edward Burnett Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Herbert
Spencer not because he rejected the notion of "evolution" per se, but because he rejected orthogenetic
notions of evolution in favor of Darwinian evolution.

The difference between these prevailing theories of cultural evolution and Darwinian theory cannot be
overstated: the orthogeneticists argued that all societies progress through the same stages in the same
sequence. Thus, although the Inuit with whom Boas worked at Baffin Island, and the Germans with whom
he studied as a graduate student, were contemporaries of one another, evolutionists argued that the Inuit
were at an earlier stage in their evolution, and Germans at a later stage.

Boasians argued that virtually every claim made by cultural evolutionists was contradicted by the data, or
reflected a profound misinterpretation of the data. As Boas's student Robert Lowie remarked, "Contrary to
some misleading statements on the subject, there have been no responsible opponents of evolution as
'scientifically proved', though there has been determined hostility to an evolutionary metaphysics that
falsifies the established facts". In an unpublished lecture, Boas characterized his debt to Darwin thus:

Although the idea does not appear quite definitely expressed in Darwin's discussion of the
development of mental powers, it seems quite clear that his main object has been to express his
conviction that the mental faculties developed essentially without a purposive end, but they
originated as variations, and were continued by natural selection. This idea was also brought
out very clearly by Wallace, who emphasized that apparently reasonable activities of man
might very well have developed without an actual application of reasoning.[86]

Thus, Boas suggested that what appear to be patterns or structures in a culture were not a product of
conscious design, but rather the outcome of diverse mechanisms that produce cultural variation (such as
diffusion and independent invention), shaped by the social environment in which people live and act. Boas
concluded his lecture by acknowledging the importance of Darwin's work: "I hope I may have succeeded
in presenting to you, however imperfectly, the currents of thought due to the work of the immortal Darwin
which have helped to make anthropology what it is at the present time."[87]

Clash With Maurice Fishberg, Joseph Jacobs and Ellsworth

Huntington
During Maurice Fishberg's time as a medical examiner he recorded skull and nose measurements of Jewish
immigrants through which he originally asserted a genetic difference between Jews and non-Jews to
describe them as another race along with Joseph Jacobs. However his theories were largely discredited by
Franz Boas through the application of the scientific method. Opposed to the narrow or vertically arranged
studies which Maurice Fishberg conducted which completely ignored the Jewish ethnicity ie culture,
religion, and even family in the case of adoptions Franz Boas looked at all of those factors as well as across
multiple generations and in multiple geographic locations to determine there to be no discernable genetic
difference between Jews and non-Jews. This combined with the growth of what Max J. Kholer called
Hitlerism or later Nazism in Germany resulted in a national summit where Franz Boas who had legally and
scientifically been determined to be the factually correct opinion on the genetics of the Jewish people
presided as guest of honor as Maurice Fishberg along with Ellsworth Huntington discredited their prior
works before The Judaens and the Jewish Academy of Sciences on March 4th, 1934 to emphatically state
that there is no genetic difference between Jew and non-Jew nor and superior race. Later this discussion
was distributed by Congregation B'nai B'rith in Cincinnati, Ohio.[88]

Early career: museum studies

In the late 19th century anthropology in the United States was dominated by the Bureau of American
Ethnology, directed by John Wesley Powell, a geologist who favored Lewis Henry Morgan's theory of
cultural evolution. The BAE was housed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and the
Smithsonian's curator for ethnology, Otis T. Mason, shared Powell's commitment to cultural evolution.[89]
(The Peabody Museum at Harvard University was an important, though lesser, center of anthropological
research).[90]

It was while working on museum collections and exhibitions that Boas formulated his basic approach to
culture, which led him to break with museums and seek to establish anthropology as an academic
discipline.

During this period Boas made five more trips to the Pacific Northwest. His continuing field research led
him to think of culture as a local context for human action. His emphasis on local context and history led
him to oppose the dominant model at the time, cultural evolution.

Boas initially broke with evolutionary theory over the issue of kinship. Lewis Henry Morgan had argued
that all human societies move from an initial form of matrilineal organization to patrilineal organization.[91]
First Nations groups on the northern coast of British Columbia, like the Tsimshian, and Tlingit, were
organized into matrilineal clans. First Nations on the southern coast, like the Nootka and the Salish,
however, were organized into patrilineal groups. Boas focused on the Kwakiutl, who lived between the
two clusters. The Kwakiutl seemed to have a mix of features. Prior to marriage, a man would assume his
wife's father's name and crest. His children took on these names and crests as well, although his sons would
lose them when they got married. Names and crests thus stayed in the mother's line. At first, Boas—like
Morgan before him—suggested that the Kwakiutl had been matrilineal like their neighbors to the north, but
that they were beginning to evolve patrilineal groups. In 1897,
however, he repudiated himself, and argued that the Kwakiutl were
changing from a prior patrilineal organization to a matrilineal one,
as they learned about matrilineal principles from their northern
neighbors.[92]

Boas's rejection of Morgan's theories led him, in an 1887 article, to

challenge Mason's principles of museum display.[93] At stake,
however, were more basic issues of causality and classification. The
evolutionary approach to material culture led museum curators to
organize objects on display according to function or level of
technological development. Curators assumed that changes in the
forms of artifacts reflect some natural process of progressive
evolution. Boas, however, felt that the form an artifact took
reflected the circumstances under which it was produced and used. "Franz Boas posing for figure in US
Arguing that "[t]hough like causes have like effects like effects Natural History Museum exhibit
have not like causes", Boas realized that even artifacts that were entitled "Hamats'a coming out of
similar in form might have developed in very different contexts, for secret room" 1895 or before.
different reasons.[93] Mason's museum displays, organized along Courtesy of National Anthropology
evolutionary lines, mistakenly juxtapose like effects; those Archives. (Kwakiutl culture)
organized along contextual lines would reveal like causes.

Minik Wallace

In his capacity as Assistant Curator at the American Museum of Natural History, Franz Boas requested that
Arctic explorer Robert E. Peary bring one Inuk from Greenland to New York. Peary obliged and brought
six Inuit to New York in 1897 who lived in the basement of the American Museum of Natural History.[94]
Four of them died from tuberculosis within a year of arriving in New York, one returned to Greenland, and
a young boy, Minik Wallace, remained living in the museum.[94] Boas staged a funeral for the father of the
boy and had the remains dissected and placed in the museum. Boas has been widely critiqued for his role in
bringing the Inuit to New York and his disinterest in them once they had served their purpose at the
museum.[95][96][97]

Later career: academic anthropology

Boas was appointed a lecturer in physical anthropology at
Columbia University in 1896, and promoted to professor of
anthropology in 1899. However, the various anthropologists
teaching at Columbia had been assigned to different departments.
When Boas left the Museum of Natural History, he negotiated with
Columbia University to consolidate the various professors into one
department, of which Boas would take charge. Boas's program at Columbia University library in 1903
Columbia was the first Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) program in
anthropology in America.[98][99]

During this time Boas played a key role in organizing the American Anthropological Association (AAA) as
an umbrella organization for the emerging field. Boas originally wanted the AAA to be limited to
professional anthropologists, but William John McGee (another geologist who had joined the BAE under
Powell's leadership) argued that the organization should have an open membership. McGee's position
prevailed and he was elected the organization's first president in 1902; Boas was elected a vice-president,
along with Putnam, Powell, and Holmes.

At both Columbia and the AAA, Boas encouraged the "four-field" concept of anthropology; he personally
contributed to physical anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, as well as cultural anthropology. His work in
these fields was pioneering: in physical anthropology he led scholars away from static taxonomical
classifications of race, to an emphasis on human biology and evolution; in linguistics he broke through the
limitations of classic philology and established some of the central problems in modern linguistics and
cognitive anthropology; in cultural anthropology he (along with the Polish-English anthropologist
Bronisław Malinowski) established the contextualist approach to culture, cultural relativism, and the
participant observation method of fieldwork.

The four-field approach understood not merely as bringing together different kinds of anthropologists into
one department, but as reconceiving anthropology through the integration of different objects of
anthropological research into one overarching object, was one of Boas's fundamental contributions to the
discipline, and came to characterize American anthropology against that of England, France, or Germany.
This approach defines as its object the human species as a totality. This focus did not lead Boas to seek to
reduce all forms of humanity and human activity to some lowest common denominator; rather, he
understood the essence of the human species to be the tremendous variation in human form and activity (an
approach that parallels Charles Darwin's approach to species in general).

In his 1907 essay, "Anthropology", Boas identified two basic questions for anthropologists: "Why are the
tribes and nations of the world different, and how have the present differences developed?".[100]
Amplifying these questions, he explained the object of anthropological study thus:

We do not discuss the anatomical, physiological, and mental characteristics of a man

considered as an individual; but we are interested in the diversity of these traits in groups of
men found in different geographical areas and in different social classes. It is our task to
inquire into the causes that have brought about the observed differentiation and to investigate
the sequence of events that have led to the establishment of the multifarious forms of human
life. In other words, we are interested in the anatomical and mental characteristics of men
living under the same biological, geographical, and social environment, and as determined by
their past.[100]

These questions signal a marked break from then-current ideas about human diversity, which assumed that
some people have a history, evident in a historical (or written) record, while other people, lacking writing,
also lack history. For some, this distinction between two different kinds of societies explained the difference
between history, sociology, economics and other disciplines that focus on people with writing, and
anthropology, which was supposed to focus on people without writing. Boas rejected this distinction
between kinds of societies, and this division of labor in the academy. He understood all societies to have a
history, and all societies to be proper objects of the anthropological society. In order to approach literate and
non-literate societies the same way, he emphasized the importance of studying human history through the
analysis of other things besides written texts. Thus, in his 1904 article, "The History of Anthropology",
Boas wrote that

The historical development of the work of anthropologists seems to single out clearly a domain
of knowledge that heretofore has not been treated by any other science. It is the biological
history of mankind in all its varieties; linguistics applied to people without written languages;
the ethnology of people without historical records; and prehistoric archeology.[101]
Historians and social theorists in the 18th and 19th centuries had speculated as to the causes of this
differentiation, but Boas dismissed these theories, especially the dominant theories of social evolution and
cultural evolution as speculative. He endeavored to establish a discipline that would base its claims on a
rigorous empirical study.

One of Boas's most important books, The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), integrated his theories concerning
the history and development of cultures and established a program that would dominate American
anthropology for the next fifteen years. In this study, he established that in any given population, biology,
language, material, and symbolic culture, are autonomous; that each is an equally important dimension of
human nature, but that no one of these dimensions is reducible to another. In other words, he established
that culture does not depend on any independent variables. He emphasized that the biological, linguistic,
and cultural traits of any group of people are the product of historical developments involving both cultural
and non-cultural forces. He established that cultural plurality is a fundamental feature of humankind and
that the specific cultural environment structures much individual behavior.

Boas also presented himself as a role model for the citizen-scientist, who understand that even were the
truth pursued as its own end, all knowledge has moral consequences. The Mind of Primitive Man ends with
an appeal to humanism:

I hope the discussions outlined in these pages have shown that the data of anthropology teach
us a greater tolerance of forms of civilization different from our own, that we should learn to
look on foreign races with greater sympathy and with a conviction that, as all races have
contributed in the past to cultural progress in one way or another, so they will be capable of
advancing the interests of mankind if we are only willing to give them a fair opportunity.[102]

Physical anthropology

Boas's work in physical anthropology brought together his interest in Darwinian evolution with his interest
in migration as a cause of change. His most important research in this field was his study of changes in the
body from among children of immigrants in New York. Other researchers had already noted differences in
height, cranial measurements, and other physical features between Americans and people from different
parts of Europe. Many used these differences to argue that there is an innate biological difference between
races. Boas's primary interest—in symbolic and material culture and in language—was the study of
processes of change; he therefore set out to determine whether bodily forms are also subject to processes of
change. Boas studied 17,821 people, divided into seven ethno-national groups. Boas found that average
measures of the cranial size of immigrants were significantly different from members of these groups who
were born in the United States. Moreover, he discovered that average measures of the cranial size of
children born within ten years of their mothers' arrival were significantly different from those of children
born more than ten years after their mothers' arrival. Boas did not deny that physical features such as height
or cranial size were inherited; he did, however, argue that the environment has an influence on these
features, which is expressed through change over time. This work was central to his influential argument
that differences between races were not immutable.[103][104][105] Boas observed:

The head form, which has always been one of the most stable and permanent characteristics of
human races, undergoes far-reaching changes due to the transfer of European races to
American soil. The East European Hebrew, who has a round head, becomes more long-
headed; the South Italian, who in Italy has an exceedingly long head, becomes more short-
headed; so that both approach a uniform type in this country, so far as the head is
concerned.[106]
These findings were radical at the time and continue to be debated. In 2002, the anthropologists
Corey S. Sparks and Richard L. Jantz claimed that differences between children born to the same parents in
Europe and America were very small and insignificant and that there was no detectable effect of exposure
to the American environment on the cranial index in children. They argued that their results contradicted
Boas's original findings and demonstrated that they may no longer be used to support arguments of
plasticity in cranial morphology.[107] However, Jonathan Marks—a well-known physical anthropologist
and former president of the General Anthropology section of the American Anthropological Association—
has remarked that this revisionist study of Boas's work "has the ring of desperation to it (if not obfuscation),
and has been quickly rebutted by more mainstream biological anthropology".[108] In 2003 anthropologists
Clarence C. Gravlee, H. Russell Bernard, and William R. Leonard reanalyzed Boas's data and concluded
that most of Boas's original findings were correct. Moreover, they applied new statistical, computer-assisted
methods to Boas's data and discovered more evidence for cranial plasticity.[109] In a later publication,
Gravlee, Bernard and Leonard reviewed Sparks and Jantz's analysis. They argue that Sparks and Jantz
misrepresented Boas's claims and that Sparks's and Jantz's data actually support Boas. For example, they
point out that Sparks and Jantz look at changes in cranial size in relation to how long an individual has been
in the United States in order to test the influence of the environment. Boas, however, looked at changes in
cranial size in relation to how long the mother had been in the United States. They argue that Boas's
method is more useful because the prenatal environment is a crucial developmental factor.[110]

A further publication by Jantz based on Gravlee et al. claims that Boas had cherry picked two groups of
immigrants (Sicilians and Hebrews) which had varied most towards the same mean, and discarded other
groups which had varied in the opposite direction. He commented, "Using the recent reanalysis by Gravlee
et al. (2003), we can observe in Figure 2 that the maximum difference in the cranial index due to
immigration (in Hebrews) is much smaller than the maximum ethnic difference, between Sicilians and
Bohemians. It shows that long-headed parents produce long headed offspring and vice versa. To make the
argument that children of immigrants converge onto an "American type" required Boas to use the two
groups that changed the most."[111]

Although some sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists have suggested that Boas was opposed to
Darwinian evolution, Boas, in fact, was a committed proponent of Darwinian evolutionary thought. In
1888, he declared that "the development of ethnology is largely due to the general recognition of the
principle of biological evolution". Since Boas's times, physical anthropologists have established that the
human capacity for culture is a product of human evolution. In fact, Boas's research on changes in body
form played an important role in the rise of Darwinian theory.[112] Boas was trained at a time when
biologists had no understanding of genetics; Mendelian genetics became widely known only after 1900.
Prior to that time biologists relied on the measurement of physical traits as empirical data for any theory of
evolution. Boas's biometric studies led him to question the use of this method and kind of data. In a speech
to anthropologists in Berlin in 1912, Boas argued that at best such statistics could only raise biological
questions, and not answer them.[113] It was in this context that anthropologists began turning to genetics as
a basis for any understanding of biological variation.

Linguistics

Boas also contributed greatly to the foundation of linguistics as a science in the United States. He published
many descriptive studies of Native American languages, wrote on theoretical difficulties in classifying
languages, and laid out a research program for studying the relations between language and culture which
his students such as Edward Sapir, Paul Rivet, and Alfred Kroeber followed.[114][115][116][117][118][119]

His 1889 article "On Alternating Sounds", however, made a singular contribution to the methodology of
both linguistics and cultural anthropology.[120] It is a response to a paper presented in 1888 by Daniel
Garrison Brinton, at the time a professor of American linguistics and archaeology at the University of
Pennsylvania. Brinton observed that in the spoken languages of many Native Americans, certain sounds
regularly alternated. Brinton argued that this pervasive inconsistency was a sign of linguistic and
evolutionary inferiority.

Boas had heard similar phonetic shifts during his research in Baffin Island and in the Pacific Northwest.
Nevertheless, he argued that "alternating sounds" is not at all a feature of Native American languages—
indeed, he argued, they do not really exist. Rather than take alternating sounds as objective proof of
different stages in cultural evolution, Boas considered them in terms of his longstanding interest in the
subjective perception of objective physical phenomena. He also considered his earlier critique of
evolutionary museum displays. There, he pointed out that two things (artifacts of material culture) that
appear to be similar may, in fact, be quite different. In this article, he raises the possibility that two things
(sounds) that appear to be different may, in fact, be the same.

In short, he shifted attention to the perception of different sounds. Boas begins by raising an empirical
question: when people describe one sound in different ways, is it because they cannot perceive the
difference, or might there be another reason? He immediately establishes that he is not concerned with
cases involving perceptual deficit—the aural equivalent of color-blindness. He points out that the question
of people who describe one sound in different ways is comparable to that of people who describe different
sounds in one way. This is crucial for research in descriptive linguistics: when studying a new language,
how are we to note the pronunciation of different words? (in this point, Boas anticipates and lays the
groundwork for the distinction between phonemics and phonetics.) People may pronounce a word in a
variety of ways and still recognize that they are using the same word. The issue, then, is not "that such
sensations are not recognized in their individuality" (in other words, people recognize differences in
pronunciations); rather, it is that sounds "are classified according to their similarity" (in other words, that
people classify a variety of perceived sounds into one category). A comparable visual example would
involve words for colors. The English word green can be used to refer to a variety of shades, hues, and
tints. But there are some languages that have no word for green.[121] In such cases, people might classify
what we would call green as either yellow or blue. This is not an example of color-blindness—people can
perceive differences in color, but they categorize similar colors in a different way than English speakers.

Boas applied these principles to his studies of Inuit languages. Researchers have reported a variety of
spellings for a given word. In the past, researchers have interpreted this data in a number of ways—it could
indicate local variations in the pronunciation of a word, or it could indicate different dialects. Boas argues
an alternative explanation: that the difference is not in how Inuit pronounce the word, but rather in how
English-speaking scholars perceive the pronunciation of the word. It is not that English speakers are
physically incapable of perceiving the sound in question; rather, the phonetic system of English cannot
accommodate the perceived sound.

Although Boas was making a very specific contribution to the methods of descriptive linguistics, his
ultimate point is far reaching: observer bias need not be personal, it can be cultural. In other words, the
perceptual categories of Western researchers may systematically cause a Westerner to misperceive or to fail
to perceive entirely a meaningful element in another culture. As in his critique of Otis Mason's museum
displays, Boas demonstrated that what appeared to be evidence of cultural evolution was really the
consequence of unscientific methods and a reflection of Westerners' beliefs about their own cultural
superiority. This point provides the methodological foundation for Boas's cultural relativism: elements of a
culture are meaningful in that culture's terms, even if they may be meaningless (or take on a radically
different meaning) in another culture.

Cultural anthropology

The essence of Boas's approach to ethnography is found in his early essay on "The Study of Geography".
There he argued for an approach that
 ... considers every phenomenon as worthy of being
studied for its own sake. Its mere existence entitles it to
a full share of our attention, and the knowledge of its
existence and evolution in space and time fully satisfies
the student.

When Boas's student Ruth Benedict gave her presidential address to

the American Anthropological Association in 1947, she reminded
anthropologists of the importance of this idiographic stance by
quoting literary critic A. C. Bradley: "We watch 'what is', seeing
that so it happened and must have happened".
Drawing of a Kwakiutl mask from
This orientation led Boas to promote a cultural anthropology Boas's The Social Organization and
characterized by a strong commitment to the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl
Indians (1897). Wooden skulls hang
Empiricism (with a resulting skepticism of attempts to from below the mask, which
formulate "scientific laws" of culture) represents one of the cannibal bird
helpers of Bakbakwalinooksiwey.
A notion of culture as fluid and dynamic
Ethnographic fieldwork, in which the anthropologist
resides for an extended period among the people being researched, conducts research in
the native language, and collaborates with native researchers, as a method of collecting
data, and
Cultural relativism as a methodological tool while conducting fieldwork, and as a heuristic
tool while analyzing data.

Boas argued that in order to understand "what is"—in cultural anthropology, the specific cultural traits
(behaviors, beliefs, and symbols)—one had to examine them in their local context. He also understood that
as people migrate from one place to another, and as the cultural context changes over time, the elements of
a culture, and their meanings, will change, which led him to emphasize the importance of local histories for
an analysis of cultures.

Although other anthropologists at the time, such as Bronisław Malinowski and Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-
Brown focused on the study of societies, which they understood to be clearly bounded, Boas's attention to
history, which reveals the extent to which traits diffuse from one place to another, led him to view cultural
boundaries as multiple and overlapping, and as highly permeable. Thus, Boas's student Robert Lowie once
described culture as a thing of "shreds and patches". Boas and his students understood that as people try to
make sense of their world they seek to integrate its disparate elements, with the result that different cultures
could be characterized as having different configurations or patterns. But Boasians also understood that
such integration was always in tensions with diffusion, and any appearance of a stable configuration is
contingent (see Bashkow 2004: 445).

During Boas's lifetime, as today, many Westerners saw a fundamental difference between modern societies,
which are characterized by dynamism and individualism, and traditional societies, which are stable and
homogeneous. Boas's empirical field research, however, led him to argue against this comparison. For
example, his 1903 essay, "Decorative Designs of Alaskan Needlecases: A History of Conventional
Designs, Based on Materials in a U.S. Museum", provides another example of how Boas made broad
theoretical claims based on a detailed analysis of empirical data. After establishing formal similarities among
the needlecases, Boas shows how certain formal features provide a vocabulary out of which individual
artisans could create variations in design. Thus, his emphasis on culture as a context for meaningful action
made him sensitive to individual variation within a society (William Henry Holmes suggested a similar
point in an 1886 paper, "Origin and development of form and ornament in ceramic art", although unlike
Boas he did not develop the ethnographic and theoretical implications).

In a programmatic essay in 1920, "The Methods of Ethnology",

Boas argued that instead of "the systematic enumeration of
standardized beliefs and customs of a tribe", anthropology needs to
document "the way in which the individual reacts to his whole
social environment, and to the difference of opinion and of mode of
action that occur in primitive society and which are the causes of
far-reaching changes". Boas argued that attention to individual
A painting by Wilhelm Kuhnert agency reveals that "the activities of the individual are determined
illustrates the 1894 potlatch to a great extent by his social environment, but in turn, his own
ceremony at Tsaxis, titled "The activities influence the society in which he lives and may bring
Walas'axa". Painting printed as Plate about modifications in a form". Consequently, Boas thought of
36 in the classic Kwakiutl study The culture as fundamentally dynamic: "As soon as these methods are
Social Organization and the Secret applied, primitive society loses the appearance of absolute stability
Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, ... All cultural forms rather appear in a constant state of flux ..." (see
written by Boas (1897). Lewis 2001b)

Having argued against the relevance of the distinction between

literate and non-literate societies as a way of defining anthropology's object of study, Boas argued that non-
literate and literate societies should be analyzed in the same way. Nineteenth-century historians had been
applying the techniques of philology to reconstruct the histories of, and relationships between, literate
societies. In order to apply these methods to non-literate societies, Boas argued that the task of fieldworkers
is to produce and collect texts in non-literate societies. This took the form not only of compiling lexicons
and grammars of the local language, but of recording myths, folktales, beliefs about social relationships and
institutions, and even recipes for local cuisine. In order to do this, Boas relied heavily on the collaboration
of literate native ethnographers (among the Kwakiutl, most often George Hunt), and he urged his students
to consider such people valuable partners, inferior in their standing in Western society, but superior in their
understanding of their own culture. (see Bunzl 2004: 438–439)

Using these methods, Boas published another article in 1920, in which he revisited his earlier research on
Kwakiutl kinship. In the late 1890s, Boas had tried to reconstruct transformation in the organization of
Kwakiutl clans, by comparing them to the organization of clans in other societies neighboring the Kwakiutl
to the north and south. Now, however, he argued against translating the Kwakiutl principle of kin groups
into an English word. Instead of trying to fit the Kwakiutl into some larger model, he tried to understand
their beliefs and practices in their own terms. For example, whereas he had earlier translated the Kwakiutl
word numaym as "clan", he now argued that the word is best understood as referring to a bundle of
privileges, for which there is no English word. Men secured claims to these privileges through their parents
or wives, and there were a variety of ways these privileges could be acquired, used, and transmitted from
one generation to the next. As in his work on alternating sounds, Boas had come to realize that different
ethnological interpretations of Kwakiutl kinship were the result of the limitations of Western categories. As
in his work on Alaskan needlecases, he now saw variation among Kwakiutl practices as the result of the
play between social norms and individual creativity.

Before his death in 1942, he appointed Helen Codere to edit and publish his manuscripts about the culture
of the Kwakiutl people.

Franz Boas and folklore

Franz Boas was an immensely influential figure throughout the development of folklore as a discipline. At
first glance, it might seem that his only concern was for the discipline of anthropology—after all, he fought
for most of his life to keep folklore as a part of anthropology. Yet Boas was motivated by his desire to see
both anthropology and folklore become more professional and well-respected. Boas was afraid that if
folklore was allowed to become its own discipline the standards for folklore scholarship would be lowered.
This, combined with the scholarships of "amateurs", would lead folklore to be completely discredited, Boas
believed.

In order to further professionalize folklore, Boas introduced the strict scientific methods which he learned in
college to the discipline. Boas championed the use of exhaustive research, fieldwork, and strict scientific
guidelines in folklore scholarship. Boas believed that a true theory could only be formed from thorough
research and that even once you had a theory it should be treated as a "work in progress" unless it could be
proved beyond doubt. This rigid scientific methodology was eventually accepted as one of the major tenets
of folklore scholarship, and Boas's methods remain in use even today. Boas also nurtured many budding
folklorists during his time as a professor, and some of his students are counted among the most notable
minds in folklore scholarship.

Boas was passionate about the collection of folklore and believed that the similarity of folktales amongst
different folk groups was due to dissemination. Boas strove to prove this theory, and his efforts produced a
method for breaking a folktale into parts and then analyzing these parts. His creation of "catch-words"
allowed for categorization of these parts, and the ability to analyze them in relation to other similar tales.
Boas also fought to prove that not all cultures progressed along the same path, and that non-European
cultures, in particular, were not primitive, but different.

Boas remained active in the development and scholarship of folklore throughout his life. He became the
editor of the Journal of American Folklore in 1908, regularly wrote and published articles on folklore
(often in the Journal of American Folklore).[122] He helped to elect Louise Pound as president of the
American Folklore Society in 1925.

Scientist as activist

There are two things to which I am devoted: absolute academic and spiritual freedom, and the
subordination of the state to the interests of the individual; expressed in other forms, the
furthering of conditions in which the individual can develop to the best of his ability—as far as
it is possible with a full understanding of the fetters imposed upon us by tradition; and the fight
against all forms of power policy of states or private organizations. This means a devotion to
principles of true democracy. I object to the teaching of slogans intended to befog the mind, of
whatever kind they may be.

— letter from Boas to John Dewey, 11/6/39

Boas was known for passionately defending what he believed to be right.[122] During his lifetime (and
often through his work), Boas combated racism, berated anthropologists and folklorists who used their
work as a cover for espionage, worked to protect German and Austrian scientists who fled the Nazi regime,
and openly protested Hitlerism.[123]

Many social scientists in other disciplines often agonize over the legitimacy of their work as "science" and
consequently emphasize the importance of detachment, objectivity, abstraction, and quantifiability in their
work. Perhaps because Boas, like other early anthropologists, was originally trained in the natural sciences,
he and his students never expressed such anxiety. Moreover, he did not believe that detachment, objectivity,
and quantifiability was required to make anthropology scientific. Since the object of study of
anthropologists is different from the object of study of physicists, he assumed that anthropologists would
have to employ different methods and different criteria for evaluating their research. Thus, Boas used
statistical studies to demonstrate the extent to which variation in data is context-dependent, and argued that
the context-dependent nature of human variation rendered many abstractions and generalizations that had
been passing as scientific understandings of humankind (especially theories of social evolution popular at
the time) in fact unscientific. His understanding of ethnographic fieldwork began with the fact that the
objects of ethnographic study (e.g., the Inuit of Baffin Island) were not just objects, but subjects, and his
research called attention to their creativity and agency. More importantly, he viewed the Inuit as his
teachers, thus reversing the typical hierarchical relationship between scientist and object of study.

This emphasis on the relationship between anthropologists and those they study—the point that, while
astronomers and stars; chemists and elements; botanists and plants are fundamentally different,
anthropologists and those they study are equally human—implied that anthropologists themselves could be
objects of anthropological study. Although Boas did not pursue this reversal systematically, his article on
alternating sounds illustrates his awareness that scientists should not be confident about their objectivity,
because they too see the world through the prism of their culture.

This emphasis also led Boas to conclude that anthropologists have an obligation to speak out on social
issues. Boas was especially concerned with racial inequality, which his research had indicated is not
biological in origin, but rather social. Boas is credited as the first scientist to publish the idea that all people
—including white and African Americans—are equal.[124] He often emphasized his abhorrence of racism,
and used his work to show that there was no scientific basis for such a bias. An early example of this
concern is evident in his 1906 commencement address to Atlanta University, at the invitation of W. E. B.
Du Bois. Boas began by remarking that "If you did accept the view that the present weakness of the
American Negro, his uncontrollable emotions, his lack of energy, are racially inherent, your work would
still be noble one". He then went on, however, to argue against this view. To the claim that European and
Asian civilizations are, at the time, more advanced than African societies, Boas objected that against the
total history of humankind, the past two thousand years is but a brief span. Moreover, although the
technological advances of our early ancestors (such as taming fire and inventing stone tools) might seem
insignificant when compared to the invention of the steam engine or control over electricity, we should
consider that they might actually be even greater accomplishments. Boas then went on to catalogue
advances in Africa, such as smelting iron, cultivating millet, and domesticating chickens and cattle, that
occurred in Africa well before they spread to Europe and Asia (evidence now suggests that chickens were
first domesticated in Asia; the original domestication of cattle is under debate). He then described the
activities of African kings, diplomats, merchants, and artists as evidence of cultural achievement. From this,
he concluded, any social inferiority of Negroes in the United States cannot be explained by their African
origins:

If therefore, it is claimed that your race is doomed to economic inferiority, you may confidently
look to the home of your ancestors and say, that you have set out to recover for the colored
people the strength that was their own before they set foot on the shores of this continent. You
may say that you go to work with bright hopes and that you will not be discouraged by the
slowness of your progress; for you have to recover not only what has been lost in transplanting
the Negro race from its native soil to this continent, but you must reach higher levels than your
ancestors ever had attained.

Boas proceeds to discuss the arguments for the inferiority of the "Negro race", and calls attention to the fact
that they were brought to the Americas through force. For Boas, this is just one example of the many times
conquest or colonialism has brought different peoples into an unequal relation, and he mentions "the
conquest of England by the Normans, the Teutonic invasion of Italy, [and] the Manchu conquest of China"
as resulting in similar conditions. But the best example, for Boas, of this phenomenon is that of the Jews in
Europe:

Even now there lingers in the consciousness of the old, sharper divisions which the ages had
not been able to efface, and which is strong enough to find—not only here and there—
expression as antipathy to the Jewish type. In France, that let down the barriers more than a
hundred years ago, the feeling of antipathy is still strong enough to sustain an anti-Jewish
political party.

Boas's closing advice is that African Americans should not look to whites for approval or encouragement
because people in power usually take a very long time to learn to sympathize with people out of power.
"Remember that in every single case in history the process of adaptation has been one of exceeding
slowness. Do not look for the impossible, but do not let your path deviate from the quiet and steadfast
insistence on full opportunities for your powers."

Despite Boas's caveat about the intractability of white prejudice, he also considered it the scientist's
responsibility to argue against white myths of racial purity and racial superiority and to use the evidence of
his research to fight racism. At the time, Boas had no idea that speaking at Atlanta University would put
him at odds with a different prominent Black figure, Booker T. Washington. Du Bois and Washington had
different views on the means of uplifting Black Americans. By supporting Du Bois, Boas lost Washington's
support and any chance of funding from his college, Carnegie Mellon University.[125]

Boas was also critical of one nation imposing its power over others. In 1916, Boas wrote a letter to The
New York Times which was published under the headline, "Why German-Americans Blame America".[126]
Although Boas did begin the letter by protesting bitter attacks against German Americans at the time of the
war in Europe, most of his letter was a critique of American nationalism. "In my youth, I had been taught in
school and at home not only to love the good of my own country, but also to seek to understand and to
respect the individualities of other nations. For this reason, one-sided nationalism, that is so often found
nowadays, is to be unendurable." He writes of his love for American ideals of freedom, and of his growing
discomfort with American beliefs about its own superiority over others.

I have always been of the opinion that we have no right to impose our ideals upon other
nations, no matter how strange it may seem to us that they enjoy the kind of life they lead, how
slow they may be in utilizing the resources of their countries, or how much opposed their ideas
may be to ours ... Our intolerant attitude is most pronounced in regard to what we like to call
"our free institutions." Modern democracy was no doubt the most wholesome and needed
reaction against the abuses of absolutism and of a selfish, often corrupt, bureaucracy. That the
wishes and thoughts of the people should find expression, and that the form of government
should conform to these wishes is an axiom that has pervaded the whole Western world, and
that is even taking root in the Far East. It is a quite different question, however, in how far the
particular machinery of democratic government is identical with democratic institutions ... To
claim as we often do, that our solution is the only democratic and the ideal one is a one-sided
expression of Americanism. I see no reason why we should not allow the Germans, Austrians,
and Russians, or whoever else it may be, to solve their problems in their own ways, instead of
demanding that they bestow upon themselves the benefactions of our regime.
Although Boas felt that scientists have a responsibility to speak out on social and political problems, he was
appalled that they might involve themselves in disingenuous and deceitful ways. Thus, in 1919, when he
discovered that four anthropologists, in the course of their research in other countries, were serving as spies
for the American government, he wrote an angry letter to The Nation. It is perhaps in this letter that he most
clearly expresses his understanding of his commitment to science:

A soldier whose business is murder as a fine art, a diplomat whose calling is based on
deception and secretiveness, a politician whose very life consists in compromises with his
conscience, a businessman whose aim is personal profit within the limits allowed by a lenient
law—such may be excused if they set patriotic deception above common everyday decency
and perform services as spies. They merely accept the code of morality to which modern
society still conforms. Not so the scientist. The very essence of his life is the service of truth.
We all know scientists who in private life do not come up to the standard of truthfulness, but
who, nevertheless, would not consciously falsify the results of their researches. It is bad
enough if we have to put up with these because they reveal a lack of strength of character that
is liable to distort the results of their work. A person, however, who uses science as a cover for
political spying, who demeans himself to pose before a foreign government as an investigator
and asks for assistance in his alleged researches in order to carry on, under this cloak, his
political machinations, prostitutes science in an unpardonable way and forfeits the right to be
classed as a scientist.

Although Boas did not name the spies in question, he was referring to a group led by Sylvanus G.
Morley,[127] who was affiliated with Harvard University's Peabody Museum. While conducting research in
Mexico, Morley and his colleagues looked for evidence of German submarine bases, and collected
intelligence on Mexican political figures and German immigrants in Mexico.

Boas's stance against spying took place in the context of his struggle to establish a new model for academic
anthropology at Columbia University. Previously, American anthropology was based at the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington and the Peabody Museum at Harvard, and these anthropologists competed with
Boas's students for control over the American Anthropological Association (and its flagship publication
American Anthropologist). When the National Academy of Sciences established the National Research
Council in 1916 as a means by which scientists could assist the United States government to prepare for
entry into the war in Europe, competition between the two groups intensified. Boas's rival, W. H. Holmes
(who had gotten the job of Director at the Field Museum for which Boas had been passed over 26 years
earlier), was appointed to head the NRC; Morley was a protégé of Holmes's.

When Boas's letter was published, Holmes wrote to a friend complaining about "the Prussian control of
anthropology in this country" and the need to end Boas's "Hun regime".[128] Reaction of Holmes and his
allies was influenced by anti-German and probably also by anti-Jewish sentiment.[128] The Anthropological
Society of Washington passed a resolution condemning Boas's letter for unjustly criticizing President
Wilson; attacking the principles of American democracy; and endangering anthropologists abroad, who
would now be suspected of being spies (a charge that was especially insulting, given that his concerns
about this very issue were what had prompted Boas to write his letter in the first place). This resolution was
passed on to the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the National Research Council.
Members of the American Anthropological Association (among whom Boas was a founding member in
1902), meeting at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard (with which Morley,
Lothrop, and Spinden were affiliated), voted by 20 to 10 to censure Boas. As a result, Boas resigned as the
AAA's representative to the NRC, although he remained an active member of the AAA. The AAA's
censure of Boas was not rescinded until 2005.
Boas continued to speak out against racism and for intellectual freedom. When the Nazi Party in Germany
denounced "Jewish Science" (which included not only Boasian Anthropology but Freudian psychoanalysis
and Einsteinian physics), Boas responded with a public statement signed by over 8,000 other scientists,
declaring that there is only one science, to which race and religion are irrelevant. After World War I, Boas
created the Emergency Society for German and Austrian Science. This organization was originally
dedicated to fostering friendly relations between American and German and Austrian scientists and for
providing research funding to German scientists who had been adversely affected by the war,[129] and to
help scientists who had been interned. With the rise of Nazi Germany, Boas assisted German scientists in
fleeing the Nazi regime. Boas helped these scientists not only to escape but to secure positions once they
arrived.[130] Additionally, Boas addressed an open letter to Paul von Hindenburg in protest against
Hitlerism. He also wrote an article in The American Mercury arguing that there were no differences
between Aryans and non-Aryans and the German government should not base its policies on such a false
premise.[131]

Boas, and his students such as Melville J. Herskovits, opposed the racist pseudoscience developed at the
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics under its director Eugen Fischer:
"Melville J. Herskovits (one of Franz Boas's students) pointed out that the health problems and social
prejudices encountered by these children (Rhineland Bastards) and their parents explained what Germans
viewed as racial inferiority was not due to racial heredity. This "... provoked polemic invective against the
latter [Boas] from Fischer. "The views of Mr. Boas are in part quite ingenious, but in the field of heredity
Mr. Boas is by no means competent" even though "a great number of research projects at the KWI-A
which had picked up on Boas's studies about immigrants in New York had confirmed his findings—
including the study by Walter Dornfeldt about Eastern European Jews in Berlin. Fischer resorted to polemic
simply because he had no arguments to counter the Boasians' critique."[132][133][134][135]

Students and influence

Franz Boas died suddenly at the Columbia University Faculty Club on December 21, 1942, in the arms of
Claude Lévi-Strauss.[124][136][137] By that time he had become one of the most influential and respected
scientists of his generation.

Between 1901 and 1911, Columbia University produced seven PhDs in anthropology. Although by today's
standards this is a very small number, at the time it was sufficient to establish Boas's Anthropology
Department at Columbia as the preeminent anthropology program in the country. Moreover, many of
Boas's students went on to establish anthropology programs at other major universities.[138]

Boas's first doctoral student at Columbia was Alfred L. Kroeber (1901),[139] who, along with fellow Boas
student Robert Lowie (1908), started the anthropology program at the University of California, Berkeley.
He also trained William Jones (1904), one of the first Native American Indian anthropologists (the Fox
nation) who was killed while conducting research in the Philippines in 1909, and Albert B. Lewis (1907).
Boas also trained a number of other students who were influential in the development of academic
anthropology: Frank Speck (1908) who trained with Boas but received his PhD from the University of
Pennsylvania and immediately proceeded to found the anthropology department there; Edward Sapir
(1909) and Fay-Cooper Cole (1914) who developed the anthropology program at the University of
Chicago; Alexander Goldenweiser (1910), who, with Elsie Clews Parsons (who received her doctorate in
sociology from Columbia in 1899, but then studied ethnology with Boas), started the anthropology
program at the New School for Social Research; Leslie Spier (1920) who started the anthropology program
at the University of Washington together with his wife Erna Gunther, also one of Boas's students, and
Melville Herskovits (1923) who started the anthropology program at Northwestern University. He also
trained John R. Swanton (who studied with Boas at Columbia for two years before receiving his doctorate
from Harvard in 1900), Paul Radin (1911), Ruth Benedict (1923), Gladys Reichard (1925) who had begun
teaching at Barnard College in 1921 and was later promoted to the rank of professor, Ruth Bunzel (1929),
Alexander Lesser (1929), Margaret Mead (1929), and Gene Weltfish (who defended her dissertation in
1929, although she did not officially graduate until 1950 when Columbia reduced the expenses required to
graduate), E. Adamson Hoebel (1934), Jules Henry (1935), George Herzog (1938),and Ashley Montagu
(1938).

His students at Columbia also included Mexican anthropologist Manuel Gamio, who earned his Master of
Arts degree after studying with Boas from 1909 to 1911, and became the founding director of Mexico's
Bureau of Anthropology in 1917; Clark Wissler, who received his doctorate in psychology from Columbia
University in 1901, but proceeded to study anthropology with Boas before turning to research Native
Americans; Esther Schiff, later Goldfrank, worked with Boas in the summers of 1920 to 1922 to conduct
research among the Cochiti and Laguna Pueblo Indians in New Mexico; Gilberto Freyre, who shaped the
concept of "racial democracy" in Brazil;[140] Viola Garfield, who carried forth Boas's Tsimshian work;
Frederica de Laguna, who worked on the Inuit and the Tlingit; anthropologist, folklorist and novelist Zora
Neale Hurston, who graduated from Barnard College, the women's college associated with Columbia, in
1928, and who studied African American and Afro-Caribbean folklore, and Ella Cara Deloria, who worked
closely with Boas on the linguistics of Native American languages.

Boas and his students were also an influence on Claude Lévi-Strauss, who interacted with Boas and the
Boasians during his stay in New York in the 1940s.[141]

Several of Boas's students went on to serve as editors of the American Anthropological Association's
flagship journal, American Anthropologist: John R. Swanton (1911, 1921–1923), Robert Lowie (1924–
1933), Leslie Spier (1934–1938), and Melville Herskovits (1950–1952). Edward Sapir's student John
Alden Mason was editor from 1945 to 1949, and Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie's student, Walter
Goldschmidt, was editor from 1956 to 1959. His last student Marian Smith was President of the American
Anthropological Association and the honorary secretary of the Royal Anthropological Institute in
London.[142]

Most of Boas's students shared his concern for careful, historical reconstruction, and his antipathy towards
speculative, evolutionary models. Moreover, Boas encouraged his students, by example, to criticize
themselves as much as others. For example, Boas originally defended the cephalic index (systematic
variations in head form) as a method for describing hereditary traits, but came to reject his earlier research
after further study; he similarly came to criticize his own early work in Kwakiutl (Pacific Northwest)
language and mythology.

Encouraged by this drive to self-criticism, as well as the Boasian commitment to learn from one's
informants and to let the findings of one's research shape one's agenda, Boas's students quickly diverged
from his own research agenda. Several of his students soon attempted to develop theories of the grand sort
that Boas typically rejected. Kroeber called his colleagues' attention to Sigmund Freud and the potential of
a union between cultural anthropology and psychoanalysis. Ruth Benedict developed theories of "culture
and personality" and "national cultures", and Kroeber's student, Julian Steward developed theories of
"cultural ecology" and "multilineal evolution".

Legacy
Nevertheless, Boas has had an enduring influence on anthropology. Virtually all anthropologists today
accept Boas's commitment to empiricism and his methodological cultural relativism. Moreover, virtually all
cultural anthropologists today share Boas's commitment to field research involving extended residence,
learning the local language, and developing social relationships with informants.[143][144][145][146] Finally,
anthropologists continue to honor his critique of racial ideologies. In his 1963 book, Race: The History of
an Idea in America, Thomas Gossett wrote that "It is possible that Boas did more to combat race prejudice
than any other person in history."

Leadership roles and honors

1887—Accepted a position as Assistant Editor of Science in New York.
1889—Appointed as the head of a newly created department of anthropology. His adjunct
was L. Farrand.
1896—Became assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History, under F. W.
Putnam. This was combined with a lecturing position at Columbia University.
1900—Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in April.
1901—Appointed Honorary Philologist of Bureau of American Ethnology.
1903—Elected to the American Philosophical Society.[147]
1908—Became editor of The Journal of American Folklore.
1908—Elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society.[148]
1910—Helped create the International School of American Archeology and Ethnology in
Mexico.
1910—Elected president of the New York Academy of Sciences.
1913—Became founding editor of Columbia University Contributions to Anthropology
(Columbia University Press)[149]
1917—Founded the International Journal of American Linguistics.
1917—Edited the Publications of the American Ethnological Society.
1931—Elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
1936—Became "emeritus in residence" at Columbia University in 1936. Became "emeritus"
in 1938.

Writings
Boas n.d. "The relation of Darwin to anthropology", notes for a lecture; Boas papers
(B/B61.5) American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. Published online by Herbert Lewis
2001b.
Boas, Franz (1889). The Houses of the Kwakiutl Indians, British Columbia (https://repository.
si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/13090/USNMP-11_709_1889.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=
y) (PDF). Proceedings of the United States National Museum. Vol. 11. Washington D.C.,
United States National Museum. pp. 197–213. doi:10.5479/si.00963801.11-709.197 (https://
doi.org/10.5479%2Fsi.00963801.11-709.197). Smithsonian Research Online (http://hdl.han
dle.net/10088/13090).
Boas, Franz (1895). The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl
Indians (https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/29967/Boas_1895_309-738.pdf?se
quence=1&isAllowed=y) (PDF). Report of the United States National Museum. Washington
D.C., United States National Museum. pp. 197–213. Smithsonian Research Online (https://h
dl.handle.net/10088/29967).
Boas, Franz (1897). "The Decorative Art of the Indians of the North Pacific Coast" (http://digit
allibrary.amnh.org/bitstream/handle/2246/539//v2/dspace/ingest/pdfSource/bul/B009a10.pd
f?sequence=1&isAllowed=y) (PDF). Science. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural
History. New York, American Museum of Natural History. IX, Article X. (82): 101–3.
doi:10.1126/science.4.82.101 (https://doi.org/10.1126%2Fscience.4.82.101).
PMID 17747165 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17747165). AMNH Digital Repository (htt
p://hdl.handle.net/2246/539).
Boas, Franz (1898). The Mythology of the Bella Coola Indians (http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/
bitstream/handle/2246/31//v2/dspace/ingest/pdfSource/mem/M02Pt02.pdf?sequence=1&isA
llowed=y) (PDF). Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History. Publications of the
Jesup North Pacific Expedition. Vol. II, Pt. II. New York, American Museum of Natural History.
AMNH Digital Repository (http://hdl.handle.net/2246/31).
Teit, James; Boas, Franz (1900). The Thompson Indians of British Columbia (http://digitallibr
ary.amnh.org/bitstream/handle/2246/13//v2/dspace/ingest/pdfSource/mem/M02Pt04.pdf?seq
uence=1&isAllowed=y) (PDF). Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History. The
Jesup North Pacific Expedition. Vol. II, Pt. IV. New York, American Museum of Natural
History. AMNH Digital Repository (http://hdl.handle.net/2246/13).
Boas, Franz (1901). A Bronze Figurine from British Columbia (http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/bi
tstream/handle/2246/1543//v2/dspace/ingest/pdfSource/bul/B014a05.pdf?sequence=1&isAll
owed=y) (PDF). Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. Vol. XIV, Article X. New
York, American Museum of Natural History. AMNH Digital Repository (http://hdl.handle.net/2
246/1543).
Boas, Franz; Hunt, George (1902). Kwakiutl Texts (http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/bitstream/ha
ndle/2246/23//v2/dspace/ingest/pdfSource/mem/M05Pt01.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y)
(PDF). Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History. Publications of the Jesup North
Pacific Expedition. Vol. V, Pt. I. New York, American Museum of Natural History. AMNH
Digital Repository (http://hdl.handle.net/2246/23).
Boas, Franz; Hunt, George (1902). Kwakiutl Texts (http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/bitstream/ha
ndle/2246/23//v2/dspace/ingest/pdfSource/mem/M05Pt02.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y)
(PDF). Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History. Publications of the Jesup North
Pacific Expedition. Vol. V, Pt. II. New York, American Museum of Natural History. AMNH
Digital Repository (http://hdl.handle.net/2246/23).
Boas, Franz; Hunt, George (1905). Kwakiutl Texts (http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/bitstream/ha
ndle/2246/23//v2/dspace/ingest/pdfSource/mem/M05Pt03.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y)
(PDF). Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History. Publications of the Jesup North
Pacific Expedition. Vol. V, Pt. III. New York, American Museum of Natural History. AMNH
Digital Repository (http://hdl.handle.net/2246/23).
Boas, Franz; Hunt, George (1906). Kwakiutl Texts - Second Series (http://digitallibrary.amnh.
org/bitstream/handle/2246/22//v2/dspace/ingest/pdfSource/mem/M14Pt01.pdf?sequence=1
&isAllowed=y) (PDF). Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History. Publications of
the Jesup North Pacific Expedition. Vol. X, Pt. I. New York, American Museum of Natural
History. AMNH Digital Repository (http://hdl.handle.net/2246/22).
Boas, Franz (1906). The Measurement of Differences Between Variable Quantities. New
York: The Science Press. (Online version (https://archive.org/details/measurementofvar00bo
asuoft) at the Internet Archive)
Boas, Franz (1909). The Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island (http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/bitstrea
m/handle/2246/15//v2/dspace/ingest/pdfSource/mem/M08Pt02.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed
=y) (PDF). Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History. Publications of the Jesup
North Pacific Expedition. Vol. II, Pt. II. New York, American Museum of Natural History.
AMNH Digital Repository (http://hdl.handle.net/2246/15).
Boas, Franz. (1911). Handbook of American Indian languages (https://repository.si.edu/bitstr
eam/handle/10088/15507/bulletin4011911smit.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y) (Vol. 1).
Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 40. Washington: Government Print Office
(Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology).
Boas, Franz (1911). The Mind of Primitive Man. ISBN 978-0-313-24004-1 (Online version (ht
tps://archive.org/details/mindofprimitivem031738mbp) of the 1938 revised edition at the
Internet Archive)
 Boas, Franz (1912). "Changes in the Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants". American
Anthropologist, Vol. 14, No. 3, July–Sept 1912. Boas (https://archive.today/2013.01.05-1004
50/http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122376519/abstract)
Boas, Franz (1912). "The History of the American Race" (https://zenodo.org/record/144769
1). Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. XXI (1): 177–183.
Bibcode:1912NYASA..21..177B (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1912NYASA..21..177B).
doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.1911.tb56933.x (https://doi.org/10.1111%2Fj.1749-6632.1911.tb56
933.x). S2CID 144256357 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:144256357).
Boas, Franz (1914). "Mythology and folk-tales of the North American Indians". Journal of
American Folklore, Vol. 27, No. 106, Oct.-Dec. pp. 374–410.
Boas, Franz (1917). Folk-tales of Salishan and Sahaptin tribes (http://www.secstate.wa.gov/
history/publications_detail.aspx?p=42) (DJVU). Washington State Library's Classics in
Washington History collection. Published for the American Folk-Lore Society by G.E.
Stechert.
Boas, Franz (1917). "Kutenai Tales" (https://www.sos.wa.gov/legacy/images/publications/sl_
boaskutenai/sl_boaskutenai.pdf) (PDF). Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin. Washington
State Library's Classics in Washington History collection. Smithsonian Institution. 59.
Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20190811204015/https://www.sos.wa.gov/legacy/ima
ges/publications/sl_boaskutenai/sl_boaskutenai.pdf) (PDF) from the original on 2019-08-11.
Classics in Washington History: Native Americans (https://www.sos.wa.gov/library/publicatio
ns.aspx).
Boas, Franz (1922). "Report on an Anthropometric Investigation of the Population of the
United States". Journal of the American Statistical Association, June 1922.
Boas, Franz (1927). "The Eruption of Deciduous Teeth Among Hebrew Infants". The Journal
of Dental Research, Vol. vii, No. 3, September 1927.
Boas, Franz (1927). Primitive Art. ISBN 978-0-486-20025-5
Boas, Franz (1928). Anthropology and Modern Life (2004 ed.) ISBN 978-0-7658-0535-5
(Online version (https://archive.org/details/anthropologymode00boas) of the 1962 edition at
the Internet Archive)
Boas, Franz (1935). "The Tempo of Growth of Fraternities". Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, Vol. 21, No. 7, pp. 413–418, July 1935.
Boas, Franz (1940). Race, Language, and Culture ISBN 978-0-226-06241-9
Boas, Franz, ed. (1944). General Anthropology (https://books.google.com/books?id=rbIsAAA
AIAAJ). United States Armed Forces. "Volume 226 of War Department Education Manual"
(D.C. Heath, 1938)
Boas, Franz (1945). Race and Democratic Society, New York, Augustin.
Stocking, George W. Jr., ed. 1974 A Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of American
Anthropology, 1883–1911 ISBN 978-0-226-06243-3
Boas, Franz, edited by Helen Codere (1966), Kwakiutl Ethnography, Chicago, Chicago
University Press.
Boas, Franz (2006). Indian Myths & Legends from the North Pacific Coast of America: A
Translation of Franz Boas' 1895 Edition of Indianische Sagen von der Nord-Pacifischen
Küste-Amerikas. Vancouver, BC: Talonbooks. ISBN 978-0-88922-553-4

Notes
a. Pronounced /ˈboʊæz/; German: [ˈboːas].

References
 1. Lewis, Herbert S. (2013). "Boas, Franz". In McGee, R. Jon; Warms, Richard L. (eds.). Theory
in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE
Publications. p. 82. doi:10.4135/9781452276311.n29 (https://doi.org/10.4135%2F97814522
76311.n29). ISBN 978-1-5063-1461-7.
2. Voget, Fred W. (2008). "Boas, Franz". In Gillispie, Charles Coulston (ed.). Dictionary of
Scientific Biography. Vol. 2. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. p. 208. ISBN 978-0-684-
31559-1.
3. Browman, David L.; Williams, Stephen (2013). Anthropology at Harvard. Peabody Museum
Monographs. Vol. 11. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Peabody Museum Press. p. 346.
ISBN 978-0-87365-913-0. ISSN 1931-8812 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/1931-8812).
4. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. (2018). "Foreword: The Politics of a 'Negro Folklore' ". In Gates,
Henry Louis Jr.; Tatar, Maria (eds.). The Annotated African American Folktales. New York:
Liveright Publishing. p. xxviii. ISBN 978-0-87140-753-5.
5. Titon, Jeff Todd (2016). "Ethnomusicology and the Exiles" (https://www.academia.edu/28924
592). In Wetter, Brent (ed.). On the Third Hand: A Festschrift for David Josephson.
Providence, Rhode Island: Wetters Verlag. p. 32. ISBN 978-0-692-66692-0.
6. Niiya, Brian (2015). "E. Adamson Hoebel" (http://encyclopedia.densho.org/E._Adamson_Ho
ebel/). Densho Encyclopedia. Retrieved May 20, 2019.
7. Lewis, Herbert S. (2013). "Boas, Franz". In McGee, R. Jon; Warms, Richard L. (eds.). Theory
in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE
Publications. p. 84. doi:10.4135/9781452276311.n29 (https://doi.org/10.4135%2F97814522
76311.n29). ISBN 978-1-5063-1461-7.
8. VanStone, James W. (1998). "Mesquakie (Fox) Material Culture: The William Jones and
Frederick Starr Collections" (https://archive.org/details/mesquakiefoxmate30vans). Fieldiana
Anthropology. 2. Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History (30): 4. ISSN 0071-4739 (https://
www.worldcat.org/issn/0071-4739). Retrieved May 20, 2019.
9. Lewis, Herbert S. (2013). "Boas, Franz". In McGee, R. Jon; Warms, Richard L. (eds.). Theory
in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE
Publications. p. 85. doi:10.4135/9781452276311.n29 (https://doi.org/10.4135%2F97814522
76311.n29). ISBN 978-1-5063-1461-7.
10. Mayer, Danila (2011). Park Youth in Vienna: A Contribution to Urban Anthropology. Vienna:
LIT Verlag. p. 39. ISBN 978-3-643-50253-7.
11. Gingrich, Andre (2010). "Alliances and Avoidance: British Interactions with German-
Speaking Anthropologists, 1933–1953". In James, Deborah; Plaice, Evelyn; Toren, Christina
(eds.). Culture Wars: Context, Models and Anthropologists' Accounts. New York: Berghahn
Books. p. 25. ISBN 978-1-84545-811-9.
12. Haas, Mary R. (1976). Chafe, Wallace L (ed.). "Boas, Sapir, and Bloomfield" (https://www.de
gruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110867695-007/pdf). American Indian Languages
and American Linguistics: 59–69. doi:10.1515/9783110867695-007 (https://doi.org/10.151
5%2F9783110867695-007). ISBN 9783110867695.
13. Saltzman, Cynthia (2009). "Ruth Leah Bunzel" (https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/bunzel-r
uth-leah-bernheim). Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. Brookline,
Massachusetts: Jewish Women's Archive. Retrieved May 20, 2019.
14. McClellan, Catharine (2006). "Frederica de Laguna and the Pleasures of Anthropology".
Arctic Anthropology. 43 (2): 29. doi:10.1353/arc.2011.0092 (https://doi.org/10.1353%2Farc.2
011.0092). ISSN 0066-6939 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/0066-6939). JSTOR 40316665
(https://www.jstor.org/stable/40316665). S2CID 162017501 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/
CorpusID:162017501).
15. Lewis, Herbert S. (2013). "Boas, Franz". In McGee, R. Jon; Warms, Richard L. (eds.). Theory
in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE
Publications. pp. 84–85. doi:10.4135/9781452276311.n29 (https://doi.org/10.4135%2F9781
452276311.n29). ISBN 978-1-5063-1461-7.
16. Freed, Stanley A.; Freed, Ruth S. (1983). "Clark Wissler and the Development of
Anthropology in the United States" (https://doi.org/10.1525%2Faa.1983.85.4.02a00040).
American Anthropologist. 2. 85 (4): 800–825. doi:10.1525/aa.1983.85.4.02a00040 (https://do
i.org/10.1525%2Faa.1983.85.4.02a00040). ISSN 1548-1433 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/
1548-1433). JSTOR 679577 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/679577).
17. "A. Irving Hallowell" (https://www.britannica.com/biography/A-Irving-Hallowell).
Encyclopædia Britannica. 2018. Retrieved May 20, 2019.
18. Cole, Sally (1995). "Women's Stories and Boasian Texts: The Ojibwa Ethnography of Ruth
Landes and Maggie Wilson". Anthropologica. 37 (1): 6, 8. doi:10.2307/25605788 (https://doi.
org/10.2307%2F25605788). ISSN 0003-5459 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/0003-5459).
JSTOR 25605788 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/25605788).
19. Swidler, Nina (1989) [1988]. "Rhoda Bubendey Metraux". In Gacs, Ute; Khan, Aisha;
McIntyre, Jerrie; Weinberg, Ruth (eds.). Women Anthropologists: Selected Biographies.
Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press. pp. 265–266. ISBN 978-0-252-06084-7.
20. Cordery, Stacy A. (1998). "Review of Elsie Clews Parsons: Inventing Modern Life, by Desley
Deacon" (https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=2500). H-Women. East Lansing,
Michigan: H-Net. Retrieved May 20, 2019.
21. Gesteland McShane, Becky Jo (2003). "Underhill, Ruth Murray (1883–1984)". In Bakken,
Gordon Morris; Farrington, Brenda (eds.). Encyclopedia of Women in the American West.
Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publishing. pp. 272–273.
doi:10.4135/9781412950626.n146 (https://doi.org/10.4135%2F9781412950626.n146).
ISBN 978-1-4129-5062-6.
22. Boas, Franz. A Franz Boas reader: the shaping of American anthropology, 1883–1911.
University of Chicago Press, 1989. p. 308
23. Holloway, M. (1997) "The Paradoxical Legacy of Franz Boas—father of American
anthropology." Natural History. November 1997.[1] (https://archive.today/2012.07.10-221218/
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_10_106/ai_53479059)
24. Stocking, George W. Jr. 1960. "Franz Boas and the Founding of the American
Anthropological Association". American Anthropologist 62: 1–17.
25. Harris, Marvin. 1968. The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture.
New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company.
26. Moore, Jerry D. (2009). "Franz Boas: Culture in Context". Visions of Culture: an Introduction
to Anthropological Theories and Theorists. Walnut Creek, California: Altamira. pp. 33–46.
27. King, Charles (2019). Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists
Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century (https://books.google.com/boo
ks?id=m756DwAAQBAJ). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-385-54220-3.
28. Gossett, Thomas (1997) [1963]. Race: The History of an Idea in America. New York, Oxford:
Oxford University Press. p. 418. "It is possible that Boas did more to combat race prejudice
than any other person in history."
29. Norman F. Boas, 2004, p. 291 (photo of the graveyard marker of Franz and Marie Boas, Dale
Cemetery, Ossining, N.Y.)
30. Glick, L. B. (1982). "Types Distinct from Our Own: Franz Boas on Jewish Identity and
Assimilation" (https://doi.org/10.1525%2Faa.1982.84.3.02a00020). American
Anthropologist. 84 (3): 545–565. doi:10.1525/aa.1982.84.3.02a00020 (https://doi.org/10.152
5%2Faa.1982.84.3.02a00020).
31. Boas, Franz (1962) [1928]. Anthropology & Modern Life, with an Introduction by Ruth Bunzel
(https://archive.org/details/anthropologymode00boas). W. W. Norton & Company. p. 6 (http
s://archive.org/details/anthropologymode00boas/page/6). ISBN 978-0-486-25245-2.
OCLC 490354 (https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/490354). Retrieved 2019-07-19.
32. Douglas Cole 1999 Franz Boas: The Early Years, 1858–1906 p. 280. Washington: Douglas
and MacIntyre.
33. Boas, Franz. 1938. An Anthropologist's Credo. The Nation 147:201–204. part 1 (http://instruc
t.uwo.ca/anthro/222/bocredo.htm), part 2 (http://groups.chass.utoronto.ca/kalmar/426/boas%
20nation%20credo.pdf) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20140727115359/http://group
s.chass.utoronto.ca/kalmar/426/boas%20nation%20credo.pdf) 2014-07-27 at the Wayback
Machine (PDF).
34. Koelsch, William A. 2004. "Franz Boas, Geographer, and the Problem of Disciplinary
Identity." Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 40(1):1–22
35. Lowie, Robert H (1947). "Franz Boas, 1858–1942" (https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.201
5.89650/page/n357/mode/2up). National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoirs. 24
(303–322): 303.
36. Harris, 1968, p. 253.
37. Koelsch, 2004, p. 1.
38. Koelsch, 2004, p. 1
39. Cole, 1999, pp. 52 and 55.
40. Cole, 1999, p. 298.
41. Kroeber, A. L. (1943). "Franz Boas: The Man. American Anthropological Association".
Memoirs. 61 (5–26): 5.
42. Bohannan and Glazer, 1988, p. 81
43. Murray, Stephen O. 1993. Theory Groups and the Study of Language in North America: A
Social History. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. p. 47
44. Williams, Vernon J. Jr. 1998. Franz Boas Paradox and the African American Intelligentsia. In
V.P. Franklin (ed.) African Americans and Jews in the Twentieth Century: Studies in
Convergence and Conflict. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 54–86. p. 57.
45. Cole, 1999, p. 53.
46. Lowie, 1947, p. 303.
47. Harris, 1968, p. 265.
48. Bohannan, Paul, and Mark Glazer (eds.). 1988. High Points in Anthropology (2nd Ed.). New
York: McGraw-Hill. p. 81
49. Cole, 1999, pp. 49, 51, 55, 56.
50. Koelsch, 2004, p. 4
51. Harris, 1968, p. 265
52. Bohannan and Glaser, 1988, p. 81.
53. Adams, William Y. 2016. The Boasians: Founding Fathers and Mothers of American
Anthropology. Falls Village: Hamilton Books.
54. Adams, 2016, p. 39
55. Williams, 1998, p. 57
56. Koelsch, 2004, p. 5
57. Speth, William W. 1999. How It Came to Be: Carl O. Sauer, Franz Boas and the Meanings of
AnthropogographyEllensburg: Ephemera Press. p. 128.
58. Adams, 2016, pp. 3, 39
59. Koelsch, 2004, pp. 1, 4
60. quoted in Cole, 1999, p. 57.
61. Murray, 1993, p. 47.
62. Marmon Silko, Leslie (1981). Storyteller, p. 254. Arcade. ISBN 978-1-55970-005-4. His
student Parsons stayed behind and documented Laguna language and stories.
63. Liss, Julia E. 1995 Patterns of Strangeness: Franz Boas, Modernism, and the Origins of
Anthropology. In Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of
Modernism. E. Barkan and R. Bush, eds. pp. 114–130. Stanford. CA: Stanford University
Press.
64. Liss, Julia E. 1996. "German Culture and German Science in the Bildung of Franz Boas". In
History of Anthropology, vol. 8. Volksgeist as Method and Ethic. G. W. Stocking Jr., ed. pp.
155–184. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
65. Harris, 1968, p. 264.
66. Smith, W. D. (1991), Politics and the sciences of culture in Germany, 1840–1920 (https://boo
ks.google.com/books?id=LOzmvGubipQC), New York: Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-
19-536227-5
67. Boas, Franz (1888), "The Central Eskimo" (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42084/42084-h/42
084-h.htm), Smithsonian Institution via Gutenberg, Sixth Annual Report of the Bureau of
Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1884–1885, Government Printing
Office, Washington, pp. 399–670, retrieved 13 January 2015
68. Cole, Herbert, ed. (1983), Franz Boas's Baffin Island Letter-Diary, 1883–1884
69. "Franz Uri Boas" (https://www.geni.com/people/Franz-Boas/6000000010572036876).
geni_family_tree. 9 July 1858. Retrieved 2019-02-25.
70. Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt, Franz Boas: The Emergence of the Anthropologist, (https://books.
google.com/books?id=7lKwDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT243) University of Nebraska Press 2019
pp.182-183
71. Cole, Douglas 1983 "The Value of a Person Lies in His Herzensbildung": Franz Boas's
Baffin Island Letter-Diary, 1883–1884. In Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic
Fieldwork. George W. Stocking Jr., ed. pp. 13–52. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
72. Cole, Douglas. 1999/ Franz Boas: The Early Years. 1858–1906. Seattle: University of
Washington Press.
73. Truman, Benjamin (1893). History of the World's Fair: Being a Complete and Authentic
Description of the Columbian Exposition From Its Inception. Philadelphia, PA: J. W. Keller &
Co.
74. "Bird's-Eye View of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893" (http://www.wdl.org/e
n/item/11369/). World Digital Library. 1893. Retrieved 2013-07-17.
75. Lorini, Alessandra (2003), "Alice Fletcher and the Search for Women's Public Recognition in
Professionalizing American Anthropology" (https://web.archive.org/web/20160127183350/htt
p://www.cromohs.unifi.it/8_2003/lorini.html), Cromohs, Florence, Italy, vol. 8, pp. 1–25,
archived from the original (http://www.cromohs.unifi.it/8_2003/lorini.html) on 2016-01-27
76. Boas, Franz (1945), "Race and Democratic Society", J. J. Augustin (1 ed.), New YorkA
collection of 33 public addresses by the late Boas
77. Boas, Franz (1969), Race and Democratic Society A collection of 33 public addresses by the
late Boas
78. Stocking, George W. Jr. (1982), "A Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of American
Anthropology, 1883–1911", University of Chicago Press, Chicago, p. 354
79. Michael Forster (2007-09-27). "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Johann Gottfried von
Herder" (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/herder/). Retrieved 2016-05-20.
80. A Franz Boas Reader: The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883–1911 (https://books.go
ogle.com/books?id=0gN2LBm3MXsC), University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 11.
81. Darnell, Regna; Smith, Joshua; Hamilton, Michelle; Hancock, Robert L. A. (2015). The Franz
Boas Papers, Volume 1: Franz Boas as Public Intellectual – Theory, Ethnography, Activism
(https://books.google.com/books?id=o60oDwAAQBAJ&q=A+single+action+or+event+is+int
eresting%2C+not+because+it+is+explainable%2C+but+because+it+is+trueA+single+action
+or+event+is+interesting%2C+not+because+it+is+explainable%2C+but+because+it+is+true
&pg=PA20). U of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0-8032-6984-2.
82. Boas and Stocking 1989.
83. Kroeber, A. L. (1949). "An Authoritarian Panacea" (https://www.jstor.org/stable/664123).
American Anthropologist. 51 (2): 318–320. doi:10.1525/aa.1949.51.2.02a00210 (https://doi.o
rg/10.1525%2Faa.1949.51.2.02a00210). ISSN 0002-7294 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/00
02-7294). JSTOR 664123 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/664123). PMID 18153430 (https://pub
med.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18153430).
84. Stocking, George W. Jr. 1968. Race, culture, and evolution: Essays in the history of
anthropology. New York: Free Press. 264
85. Alexander Lesser, 1981 "Franz Boas" p. 25 in Sydel Silverman, ed. From Totems to
Teachers New York: Columbia University Press
86. Lewis, Herbert S. (2018-05-03). " "The Relation of Darwin to Anthropology": A Previously
Unpublished Lecture by Franz Boas (1909)" (https://histanthro.org/clio/the-relation-of-darwin
-to-anthropology/). History of Anthropology Review. Retrieved 2022-07-04.
87. Boas, 1909 lecture; see Lewis 2001b.
88. https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/bib264772
89. Woodbury, Richard B.; Woodbury, Nathalie F. S. (1999). "The Rise and Fall of the Bureau of
American Ethnology" (https://www.jstor.org/stable/40170100). Journal of the Southwest. 41
(3): 283–296. ISSN 0894-8410 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/0894-8410).
JSTOR 40170100 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/40170100).
90. "Video: Science, Education, and Character: Reflections on the First Fifty Years of the
Peabody Museum, 1866–1916" (https://peabody.harvard.edu/video-science-education-and-
character-reflections-first-fifty-years-peabody-museum-1866%E2%80%931916).
peabody.harvard.edu. Retrieved 2022-07-24.
91. Stern, Bernhard J. (1946). "Lewis Henry Morgan Today; An Appraisal of His Scientific
Contributions" (https://www.jstor.org/stable/40399752). Science & Society. 10 (2): 172–176.
ISSN 0036-8237 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/0036-8237). JSTOR 40399752 (https://www.
jstor.org/stable/40399752).
92. Boas, Franz, United States National Museum (1897). The social organization and the secret
societies of the Kwakiutl Indians (https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/254418370). Washington:
Government Pr. Office. OCLC 254418370 (https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/254418370).
93. Dall, Wm. H.; Boas, Franz (1887). "Museums of Ethnology and Their Classification" (https://
www.jstor.org/stable/1762958). Science. 9 (228): 587–589. Bibcode:1887Sci.....9..587D (http
s://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1887Sci.....9..587D). doi:10.1126/science.ns-9.228.587 (http
s://doi.org/10.1126%2Fscience.ns-9.228.587). ISSN 0036-8075 (https://www.worldcat.org/is
sn/0036-8075). JSTOR 1762958 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1762958). PMID 17779724 (htt
ps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17779724). S2CID 46250503 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/
CorpusID:46250503).
94. Pöhl, Friedrich (1 January 2008). "Assessing Franz Boas' ethics in his Arctic and later
anthropological fieldwork" (https://doi.org/10.7202%2F038214ar). Études/Inuit/Studies. 32
(2): 35–52. doi:10.7202/038214ar (https://doi.org/10.7202%2F038214ar).
95. Smith, Dinitia (15 March 2000). "An Eskimo Boy And Injustice In Old New York; A
Campaigning Writer Indicts An Explorer and a Museum" (https://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/
15/books/eskimo-boy-injustice-old-new-york-campaigning-writer-indicts-explorer-museum.ht
ml). The New York Times.
 96. "American Experience . Minik, The Lost Eskimo - PBS" (https://web.archive.org/web/201701
10211824/http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/minik/program/pt.html). PBS. Archived from the
original (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/minik/program/pt.html) on 2017-01-10. Retrieved
2017-08-28.
97. Harper, Kenn. (1986/2000) Give Me My Father's Body: The Life of Minik, the New York
Eskimo. South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press.
98. (The first American PhD in anthropology was actually granted from Clark University, though
still under the leadership of Boas.) Moore, Jerry D. (2009). "Franz Boas: Culture in Context".
Visions of Culture: an Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists. Walnut Creek,
California: Altamira. pp. 33.
99. Lynda, Leavitt; Sherrie, Wisdom; Kelly, Leavitt (2017). Cultural Awareness and Competency
Development in Higher Education (https://books.google.com/books?id=kB8UDgAAQBAJ&q
=Boas%27s+program+at+Columbia+became+the+first++PhD+program+in+%5B%5Banthro
pology%5D&pg=PA5). IGI Global. p. 5. ISBN 978-1-5225-2146-4. Retrieved 3 February
2020.
100. Boas, Franz (1908). Anthropology [a lecture delivered at Columbia University in the series
on science, philosophy and art, December 18, 1907] (http://archive.org/details/anthropologya
lec00boas). The Library of Congress. New York, The Columbia University Press.
101. Boas, Franz (1904). "The History of Anthropology" (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1631123).
Science. 20 (512): 513–524. Bibcode:1904Sci....20..513B (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/ab
s/1904Sci....20..513B). doi:10.1126/science.20.512.513 (https://doi.org/10.1126%2Fscience.
20.512.513). ISSN 0036-8075 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/0036-8075). JSTOR 1631123
(https://www.jstor.org/stable/1631123). PMID 17797024 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17
797024).
102. Boas, Franz (1911). The mind of primitive man : a course of lectures delivered before the
Lowell Institute, Boston, Mass., and the National University of Mexico, 1910-1911 (http://arch
ive.org/details/cu31924026391346). Cornell University Library. New York : Macmillan.
p. 278.
103. Allen, John S. (1989). "Franz Boas's Physical Anthropology: The Critique of Racial
Formalism Revisited" (https://archive.org/details/sim_current-anthropology_1989-02_30_1/p
age/79/mode/2up). Current Anthropology. 30 (1): 79–84. doi:10.1086/203716 (https://doi.org/
10.1086%2F203716). S2CID 144974459 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:144974
459).
104. Jackson, John P. (2005). Science for Segregation: Race, Law, and the Case against Brown
v. Board of Education. NYU Press. ISBN 978-0-8147-4271-6.
"Book Review: Science for Segregation: Race, Law, and the Case Against Brown v.
Board of Education" (http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/lhr/25.2/br_19.html).
History Cooperative. 18 October 2020.
105. Spiro, Jonathan P. (2009). Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the
Legacy of Madison Grant. Univ. of Vermont Press. ISBN 978-1-58465-715-6.
106. Abbott, Karen, Sin in the Second City, Random House, 2008, p. 206
107. Sparks, Corey S.; Jantz, Richard L. (2002). "A reassessment of human cranial plasticity:
Boas revisited" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC137471). PNAS. 99 (23):
14636–14639. Bibcode:2002PNAS...9914636S (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2002PN
AS...9914636S). doi:10.1073/pnas.222389599 (https://doi.org/10.1073%2Fpnas.22238959
9). PMC 137471 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC137471). PMID 12374854
(https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12374854).
108. Marks, Jonathan What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes,
University of California Press, 2003 ISBN 978-0-520-24064-3 p. xviii [2] (https://books.googl
e.com/books?id=HUBe0wjowLMC&dq=Jonathan+Marks+ring+of+desperation++Boas&pg=
PR18)
109. "Archived copy" (https://web.archive.org/web/20050325220928/http://lance.qualquant.net/gr
avleeetal03a.pdf) (PDF). lance.qualquant.net. Archived from the original (http://lance.qualqu
ant.net/gravleeetal03a.pdf) (PDF) on 25 March 2005. Retrieved 17 January 2022.
110. "Archived copy" (https://web.archive.org/web/20040421082034/http://www.anthro.fsu.edu/pe
ople/faculty/CG_pubs/gravlee03b.pdf) (PDF). www.anthro.fsu.edu. Archived from the original
(http://www.anthro.fsu.edu/people/faculty/CG_pubs/gravlee03b.pdf) (PDF) on 21 April 2004.
Retrieved 17 January 2022.
111. Richard L. Jantz. "The Meaning and Consequences of Morphological Variation" (http://www.
understandingrace.org/resources/pdf/myth_reality/jantz.pdf) (PDF). Understandingrace.org.
Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20101130163534/http://understandingrace.org/resour
ces/pdf/myth_reality/jantz.pdf) (PDF) from the original on 2010-11-30. Retrieved 2017-03-04.
112. Massin, Benot (1996). "From Virchow to Fisher: Physical Anthropology and "Modern Race
Theories" in Wilhelmine Germany". In Stocking, G.W. (ed.). Volksgeist as method and ethic:
Essays on Boasian ethnography and the German anthropological tradition. Univ of
Wisconsin Press. p. 122. ISBN 978-0-299-14554-5.
113. Boas, Franz (1913). "Veränderungen der Körperform der Nachkommen von Einwanderern in
Amerika" (https://www.jstor.org/stable/23031137). Zeitschrift für Ethnologie. 45 (1): 1–22.
ISSN 0044-2666 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/0044-2666). JSTOR 23031137 (https://www.
jstor.org/stable/23031137).
114. Jakobson, Roman; Boas, Franz (1944). "Franz Boas' Approach to Language". International
Journal of American Linguistics. 10 (4): 188–195. doi:10.1086/463841 (https://doi.org/10.108
6%2F463841). S2CID 144088089 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:144088089).
115. Boas' view of grammatical meaning. R Jakobson – American Anthropologist, 1959
116. Mackert, Michael (1993). "The Roots of Franz Boas' View of Linguistic Categories As a
Window to the Human Mind". Historiographia Linguistica. 20 (2–3): 331–351.
doi:10.1075/hl.20.2-3.05mac (https://doi.org/10.1075%2Fhl.20.2-3.05mac).
117. Darnell, Regna (1990). "Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and the Americanist Text Tradition".
Historiographia Linguistica. 17 (1–2): 129–144. doi:10.1075/hl.17.1-2.11dar (https://doi.org/1
0.1075%2Fhl.17.1-2.11dar).
118. Stocking, G. W. 1974. "The Boas plan for the study of American Indian languages," in
Studies in the history of linguistics: Traditions and paradigms. Edited by D. Hymes, pp. 454–
83. Bloomington: Indiana University Press
119. Postal, Paul M. (1964). "Boas and the Development of Phonology: Comments Based on
Iroquoian". International Journal of American Linguistics. 30 (3): 269–280.
doi:10.1086/464784 (https://doi.org/10.1086%2F464784). S2CID 145771488 (https://api.se
manticscholar.org/CorpusID:145771488).
120. Boas, Franz (1889). "On Alternating Sounds" (https://www.jstor.org/stable/658803).
American Anthropologist. 2 (1): 47–54. ISSN 0002-7294 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/0002
-7294). JSTOR 658803 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/658803).
121. Berlin, Brent and Paul Kay 1969 Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution
122. Lewis, Herbert (June 2001). "The Passion of Franz Boas" (https://archive.org/details/sim_am
erican-anthropologist_2001-06_103_2/page/447/mode/2up). American Anthropologist. 103
(2): 447–467. doi:10.1525/aa.2001.103.2.447 (https://doi.org/10.1525%2Faa.2001.103.2.44
7).
123. Liss, J. E. (1998). "Diasporic Identities: The Science and Politics of Race in the Work of
Franz Boas and W. E. B. Du Bois, 1894–1919". Cultural Anthropology. 13 (2): 127–166.
doi:10.1525/can.1998.13.2.127 (https://doi.org/10.1525%2Fcan.1998.13.2.127).
124. Silverman, Sydel, ed. (2004). Totems and Teachers: Key Figures in the History of
Anthropology. Rowman Altamira. p. 16. ISBN 9780759104600.
125. Baker, L. D. (1998). From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race,
1896–1954 (1st ed.). University of California Press.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1pnh2d
126. Boas, Franz (1916-01-08). "WHY GERMAN-AMERICANS BLAME AMERICA.; They Think
Their New Country, Having Sacrificed Its Own Ideals, Is Setting Up as the Arbiter of the
World" (https://www.nytimes.com/1916/01/08/archives/why-germanamericans-blame-americ
a-they-think-their-new-country.html). The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 (https://www.wo
rldcat.org/issn/0362-4331). Retrieved 2022-07-03.
127. Browman, David L. (2011). "Spying by American Archaeologists in World War I" (https://doi.o
rg/10.5334%2Fbha.2123). Bulletin of the History of Archaeology. 21 (2): 10–17.
doi:10.5334/bha.2123 (https://doi.org/10.5334%2Fbha.2123).
128. Adam Kuper, 1988 The Invention of Primitive Society p. 149. London: Routledge
129. Robert F. Barsky. 2011. Zellig Harris: From American Linguistics to Socialist Zionism. MIT
Press, Apr 15, 2011, p. 196
130. Lewis 2001:458–459
131. Boas, Franz, "Aryans and Non-Aryans," The American Mercury, June 1934, at p. 219.
132. Hans-Walter Schmuhl, The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and
Eugenics, 1927–1945, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen, 2003, pp. 212–213
133. Baker, Lee D. (2004). "Franz Boas out of the ivory tower". Anthropological Theory. 4 (1): 29–
51. doi:10.1177/1463499604040846 (https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1463499604040846).
S2CID 143573265 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:143573265).
134. "Boasian Anthropology and the Critique of American Culture". Richard Handler. American
Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Jun., 1990), pp. 252–273
135. Beardsley, Edward H (1973). "The American Scientist as Social Activist: Franz Boas, Burt G.
Wilder, and the Cause of Racial Justice, 1900–1915". Isis. 64: 50–66. doi:10.1086/351043
(https://doi.org/10.1086%2F351043). S2CID 144156844 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/Cor
pusID:144156844).
136. Krupat, Arnold; Boas, Franz (1988). "Anthropology in the Ironic Mode: The Work of Franz
Boas". Social Text (19/20): 105–118. doi:10.2307/466181 (https://doi.org/10.2307%2F46618
1). ISSN 0164-2472 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/0164-2472). JSTOR 466181 (https://ww
w.jstor.org/stable/466181).
137. McVicker, Donald (1989). "Parallels and Rivalries: Encounters Between Boas and Starr".
Curator: The Museum Journal. 32 (3): 212–228. doi:10.1111/j.2151-6952.1989.tb00721.x (ht
tps://doi.org/10.1111%2Fj.2151-6952.1989.tb00721.x). ISSN 2151-6952 (https://www.worldc
at.org/issn/2151-6952).
138. Briggs, Charles; Baumann, Richard (1999). "The Foundation of All Future Researches":
Franz Boas. George Hunt, Native American Texts, and the Construction of Modernity".
American Quarterly. 51: 479–528. doi:10.1353/aq.1999.0036 (https://doi.org/10.1353%2Faq.
1999.0036). S2CID 144803374 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:144803374).
139. Jacknis, I (2002). "The First Boasian: Alfred Kroeber and Franz Boas, 1896–1905".
American Anthropologist. 104 (2): 520–532. doi:10.1525/aa.2002.104.2.520 (https://doi.org/1
0.1525%2Faa.2002.104.2.520).
140. That Freyre was ever Boas's student is under contention. Boas was opposed to racism, as
were students such as Ashley Montagu, etc. It seems unlikely that the "father" of the modern
racist theory of Lusotropicalism had ever worked closely with Boas. "The invention of Freyre
included his self-invention. For example, he too presented himself as if he had been a
follower of Boas ever since his student days." See Peter Burke, Maria Lucia G. Pallares-
Burke: "Gilberto Freyre: social theory in the tropics", Peter Lang, 2008, p. 19
141. Moore, Jerry D. (2004). Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and
Theorists. Rowman Altamira. p. 234
142. Laguna, Frederica de (April 1962). "Marian Wesley Smith 1907–1961" (https://doi.org/10.10
17%2FS0002731600024045). American Antiquity. 27 (4): 567–570.
doi:10.1017/S0002731600024045 (https://doi.org/10.1017%2FS0002731600024045).
ISSN 0002-7316 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/0002-7316). S2CID 245677793 (https://api.s
emanticscholar.org/CorpusID:245677793).
143. Darnell, Regna (1973). "American Anthropology and the Development of Folklore
Scholarship: 1890–1920". Journal of the Folklore Institute. 10 (1–2): 23–39.
doi:10.2307/3813878 (https://doi.org/10.2307%2F3813878). JSTOR 3813878 (https://www.j
stor.org/stable/3813878).
144. Epps, Patience L.; Webster, Anthony K.; Woodbury, Anthony C. (2017). "A Holistic
Humanities of Speaking: Franz Boas and the Continuing Centrality of Texts". International
Journal of American Linguistics. 83 (1): 41–78. doi:10.1086/689547 (https://doi.org/10.108
6%2F689547). S2CID 152181161 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:152181161).
145. Andersen, Chris; O'Brien, Jean M., eds. (2016). Sources and Methods in Indigenous
Studies. New York: Routledge.
146. Regna Darnell. 1998. And Along Came Boas: Continuity and Revolution in Americanist
Anthropology. John Benjamins Publishing
147. "APS Member History" (https://search.amphilsoc.org/memhist/search?creator=Franz+Boas&
title=&subject=&subdiv=&mem=&year=&year-max=&dead=&keyword=&smode=advanced).
search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2021-01-27.
148. American Antiquarian Society Members Directory (http://www.americanantiquarian.org/mem
berlistb)
149. About Columbia University Press (https://cup.columbia.edu/about-us), columbia.edu.
Retrieved 24 April 2021.

Further reading
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, "The Defender of Differences" (review of Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt,
Franz Boas: The Emergence of the Anthropologist, University of Nebraska Press, 2019, 417
pp.; Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists
Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century, Doubleday, 2019, 431 pp.;
Mark Anderson, From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism, and American
Anthropology, Stanford University Press, 262 pp), The New York Review of Books, vol.
LXVII, no. 9 (28 May 2020), pp. 17–19. Appiah writes: "[Boas] was skeptical... about
doctrines of racial superiority. He had, more slowly, become a skeptic of social evolutionism:
the notion that peoples progress through stages (in one crude formulation, from savagery to
barbarism to civilization)... 'My whole outlook', [Boas] later wrote in a credo, 'is determined by
the question: how can we recognize the shackles that tradition has laid upon us?'" (p. 18.)
Baker, Lee D. (1994). "The Location of Franz Boas Within the African American Struggle".
Critique of Anthropology. 14 (2): 199–217. doi:10.1177/0308275x9401400205 (https://doi.or
g/10.1177%2F0308275x9401400205). S2CID 143976125 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/C
orpusID:143976125).
Baker, Lee D. (2004). "Franz Boas Out of the Ivory Tower". Anthropological Theory. 4 (1):
29–51. doi:10.1177/1463499604040846 (https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1463499604040846).
S2CID 143573265 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:143573265).
Bashkow, Ira (2004). "A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries" (https://archive.tod
ay/2013.01.05-072145/http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120129372/abstract).
American Anthropologist. 106 (3): 443–458. doi:10.1525/aa.2004.106.3.443 (https://doi.org/1
0.1525%2Faa.2004.106.3.443). Archived from the original (http://www3.interscience.wiley.co
m/journal/120129372/abstract) on 2013-01-05.
Benedict, Ruth (1943). "Franz Boas". Science. 97 (2507): 60–62.
Bibcode:1943Sci....97...60B (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1943Sci....97...60B).
doi:10.1126/science.97.2507.60 (https://doi.org/10.1126%2Fscience.97.2507.60).
JSTOR 1670558 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1670558). PMID 17799306 (https://pubmed.nc
bi.nlm.nih.gov/17799306).
Boas, Norman F. 2004. Franz Boas 1858–1942: An Illustrated Biography ISBN 978-0-
9672626-2-8
Bunzl, Matti (2004). "Boas, Foucault, and the 'Native Anthropologist' " (https://archive.today/2
013.01.05-233951/http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120129371/abstract).
American Anthropologist. 106 (3): 435–442. doi:10.1525/aa.2004.106.3.435 (https://doi.org/1
0.1525%2Faa.2004.106.3.435). Archived from the original (http://www3.interscience.wiley.co
m/journal/120129371/abstract) on 2013-01-05.
Cole, Douglas 1999. Franz Boas: The Early Years, 1858–1906. ISBN 978-1-55054-746-7
Darnell, Regna 1998. And Along Came Boas: Continuity and Revolution in Americanist
Anthropology. ISBN 978-1-55619-623-2
Evans, Brad 2006. "Where Was Boas During the Renaissance in Harlem? Diffusion, Race,
and the Culture Paradigm in the History of Anthropology." ISBN 978-0-299-21920-8.
King, Charles (2019). Gods of the upper air : how a circle of renegade anthropologists
reinvented race, sex, and gender in the twentieth century (First ed.). New York. ISBN 978-0-
385-54219-7. OCLC 1109765676 (https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1109765676).
Kroeber, Alfred (1949). "An Authoritarian Panacea" (https://doi.org/10.1525%2Faa.1949.51.
2.02a00210). American Anthropologist. 51 (2): 318–320.
doi:10.1525/aa.1949.51.2.02a00210 (https://doi.org/10.1525%2Faa.1949.51.2.02a00210).
PMID 18153430 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18153430).
Krupnik, Igor; Müller-Wille, Ludger (2010). "Franz Boas and Inuktitut Terminology for Ice and
Snow: From the Emergence of the Field to the "Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax" ". In Igor
Krupnik; Claudio Aporta; Shari Gearheard; Gita J. Laidler; Lene Kielsen Holm (eds.). SIKU:
Knowing Our Ice. Dordrecht; London: Springer Netherlands. pp. 377–400. doi:10.1007/978-
90-481-8587-0_16 (https://doi.org/10.1007%2F978-90-481-8587-0_16). ISBN 978-90-481-
8586-3.
Kuper, Adam. 1988. The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion
ISBN 978-0-415-00903-4
Lesser, Alexander 1981. "Franz Boas" in Sydel Silverman, ed. Totems and Teachers:
Perspectives on the History of Anthropology ISBN 978-0-231-05087-6
Lewis, Herbert (June 2001). "The Passion of Franz Boas" (https://archive.org/details/sim_am
erican-anthropologist_2001-06_103_2/page/446/mode/2up). American Anthropologist. 103
(2): 447–467. doi:10.1525/aa.2001.103.2.447 (https://doi.org/10.1525%2Faa.2001.103.2.44
7).
Lewis, Herbert 2001b. "Boas, Darwin, Science and Anthropology" in Current Anthropology
42(3): 381–406 (On line version contains transcription of Boas's 1909 lecture on Darwin.)
Lewis, Herbert (2008). "Franz Boas: Boon or Bane" (Review Essay)". Reviews in
Anthropology. 37 (2–3): 169–200. doi:10.1080/00938150802038968 (https://doi.org/10.108
0%2F00938150802038968). S2CID 145679059 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:1
45679059).
 Liss, Julia Elizabeth (1990). The Cosmopolitan Imagination: Franz Boas and the
Development of American Anthropology (https://www.proquest.com/openview/504b0bf04a60
6ddfc6a08eead0e81474). University of California, Berkeley – via ProQuest Dissertations
Publishing.
Lowie, Robert H. "Franz Boas (1858–1942)." The Journal of American Folklore: Franz Boas
Memorial Number. Vol. 57, No. 223. January–March 1944. Pages 59–64. The American
Folklore Society. JSTOR. Print. Franz Boas (1858–1942) (https://www.jstor.org/stable/53575
5).
Lowie, Robert H. "Bibliography of Franz Boas in Folklore." The Journal of American
Folklore: Franz Boas Memorial Number. Vol. 57, No. 223. January–March 1944. Pages 65–
69. The American Folklore Society. JSTOR. Print. Bibliography of Franz Boas in Folklore (htt
ps://www.jstor.org/stable/535756).
Maud, Ralph. 2000. Transmission Difficulties: Franz Boas and Tsimshian Mythology.
Vancouver, BC: Talonbooks. ISBN 978-0-88922-430-8
Price, David (2000). "Anthropologists as Spies" (http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=200
01120&c=2&s=price). The Nation. 271 (16): 24–27.
Price, David (2001). " 'The Shameful Business': Leslie Spier On The Censure Of Franz
Boas" (https://web.archive.org/web/20171111110045/http://homepages.stmartin.edu/fac_staf
f/dprice/HAN-Spier.htm). History of Anthropology Newsletter. XXVII (2): 9–12. Archived from
the original (http://homepages.stmartin.edu/fac_staff/dprice/HAN-Spier.htm) on 2017-11-11.
Retrieved 2006-05-21.
Stocking, George W. Jr. (1960). "Franz Boas and the Founding of the American
Anthropological Association" (https://doi.org/10.1525%2Faa.1960.62.1.02a00010).
American Anthropologist. 62 (1): 1–17. doi:10.1525/aa.1960.62.1.02a00010 (https://doi.org/1
0.1525%2Faa.1960.62.1.02a00010).
Stocking, George W. Jr. 1968. Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of
Anthropology ISBN 978-0-226-77494-7
Stocking, George W. Jr., ed. 1996. Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian
Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition ISBN 978-0-299-14554-5
Williams, Vernon J. Jr. 1996. Rethinking Race: Franz Boas and His Contemporaries (https://
web.archive.org/web/20070827231610/http://www.kentuckypress.com/viewbook.cfm?Categ
ory_ID=1&Group=2&ID=922). Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
Xie, Yu (1988). "Franz Boas and Statistics" (https://scholar.princeton.edu/yuxie/publications/f
ranz-boas-and-statistics). Annals of Scholarship. 5: 269–296.
Zumwalt, Rosemary Lévy. American Folklore Scholarship: A Dialogue of Dissent. Ed. Alan
Dundes. Bloomington and Indianapolis; Indiana University Press, 1988. Print.
Zumwalt, Rosemary Lévy. 2019. Franz Boas: The Emergence of the Anthropologist. Lincoln,
NE: University of Nebraska Press online review (http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?i
d=55922)

External links
Works by Franz Boas (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/40195) at Project
Gutenberg
Works by Franz Boas (https://fadedpage.com/csearch.php?author=Boas%2C%20Franz) at
Faded Page (Canada)
Works by or about Franz Boas (https://archive.org/search.php?query=%28%28subject%3
A%22Boas%2C%20Franz%20Uri%22%20OR%20subject%3A%22Boas%2C%20Franz%2
0U%2E%22%20OR%20subject%3A%22Boas%2C%20F%2E%20U%2E%22%20OR%20s
ubject%3A%22Franz%20Uri%20Boas%22%20OR%20subject%3A%22Franz%20U%2E%2
0Boas%22%20OR%20subject%3A%22F%2E%20U%2E%20Boas%22%20OR%20subjec
 t%3A%22Boas%2C%20Franz%22%20OR%20subject%3A%22Franz%20Boas%22%20O
R%20creator%3A%22Franz%20Uri%20Boas%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Franz%20
U%2E%20Boas%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22F%2E%20U%2E%20Boas%22%20OR%
20creator%3A%22F%2E%20Uri%20Boas%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Boas%2C%20F
ranz%20Uri%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Boas%2C%20Franz%20U%2E%22%20OR%
20creator%3A%22Boas%2C%20F%2E%20U%2E%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Boas%
2C%20F%2E%20Uri%22%20OR%20creator%3A%22Franz%20Boas%22%20OR%20creat
or%3A%22Boas%2C%20Franz%22%20OR%20title%3A%22Franz%20Uri%20Boas%22%
20OR%20title%3A%22Franz%20U%2E%20Boas%22%20OR%20title%3A%22F%2E%20
U%2E%20Boas%22%20OR%20title%3A%22Franz%20Boas%22%20OR%20description%
3A%22Franz%20Uri%20Boas%22%20OR%20description%3A%22Franz%20U%2E%20Bo
as%22%20OR%20description%3A%22F%2E%20U%2E%20Boas%22%20OR%20descript
ion%3A%22Boas%2C%20Franz%20Uri%22%20OR%20description%3A%22Boas%2C%2
0Franz%20U%2E%22%20OR%20description%3A%22Franz%20Boas%22%20OR%20des
cription%3A%22Boas%2C%20Franz%22%29%20OR%20%28%221858-1942%22%20AN
D%20Boas%29%29%20AND%20%28-mediatype:software%29) at Internet Archive
Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History (http://anthro.amnh.org/anthr
o.html) – Objects and Photographs from Jesup North Pacific Expedition 1897–1902 (section
Collections Online, option Collections Highlights).
Franz Boas at Minden, Westphalia (http://www.franz-boas.com)
Franz Boas Papers (http://amphilsoc.org/mole/view?docId=ead/Mss.B.B61-ead.xml) at the
American Philosophical Society
Recordings made by Franz Boas during his field research can be found at the Archives of
Traditional Music at Indiana University (http://www.indiana.edu/~libarchm/) Archived (https://
web.archive.org/web/20171114195257/http://www.indiana.edu/~libarchm/) 2017-11-14 at
the Wayback Machine
National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir (http://www.nasonline.org/publications/
biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/boas-franz.pdf)
Genius at Work: How Franz Boas Created the Field of Cultural Anthropology (https://magazi
ne.columbia.edu/article/genius-work-how-franz-boas-created-field-cultural-anthropology) By
Charles King, Columbia Magazine, Winter 2019-20

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Franz_Boas&oldid=1182258904"