Franz Uri Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942) was a German-American anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. He was a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the movements known as historical particularism and cultural relativism.
Through his students, many of whom went on to found anthropology departments and research programmes inspired by their mentor, Boas profoundly influenced the development of American anthropology. Among his many significant students were A. L. Kroeber, Alexander Goldenweiser, Ruth Benedict, Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gilberto Freyre.
Boas was one of the most prominent opponents of the then-popular ideologies of scientific racism, the idea that race is a biological concept and that human behavior is best understood through the typology of biological characteristics.
In a series of groundbreaking studies of skeletal anatomy, he showed that cranial shape and size was highly malleable depending on environmental factors such as health and nutrition, in contrast to the claims by racial anthropologists of the day that held head shape to be a stable racial trait. Boas also worked to demonstrate that differences in human behavior are not primarily determined by innate biological dispositions but are largely the result of cultural differences acquired through social learning. In this way, Boas posed culture as the primary concept for describing differences in behavior between human groups, and as the central analytical concept of anthropology.
Among Boas's main contributions to anthropological thought was his rejection of the then-popular evolutionary approaches to the study of culture, which saw all societies progressing through a set of hierarchic technological and cultural stages, with Western European culture at the summit. Boas argued that culture developed historically through the interactions of groups of people and the diffusion of ideas and that consequently there was no process towards continuously "higher" cultural forms.
Boas was a proponent of the idea of cultural relativism, which holds that cultures cannot be objectively ranked as higher or lower, or 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 culturally acquired norms. By uniting the disciplines of archaeology, the study of material culture and history, and physical anthropology, the study of variation in human anatomy, with ethnology, the study of cultural variation of customs, and descriptive linguistics, the study of unwritten indigenous languages, Boas created the four-field subdivision of anthropology which became prominent in American anthropology in the 20th century.
Boas was known for passionately defending what he believed to be right. 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.
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. He often emphasized his abhorrence of racism, and used his work to show that there was no scientific basis for such a bias.
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