Franz Boas

Born in Minden, Germany, Franz Boas studied at the universities of Heidelberg and Bonn before receiving his doctorate, in 1881, in psychophysics at Kiel. Despite the nature of his academic training, he taught geography in Berlin, eventually focusing on cultural geography through his study of the Kwakiutl of British Columbia and the indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest. Boas moved to New York in 1887 and became a professor of anthropology at Columbia University in 1889. Though not entirely free of the influence of racist and Darwinist anthropological assumptions then dominant in Europe and the United States, Boas laid the groundwork for serious cultural anthropology by rejecting the view that human cultural difference reflected essential “racial-biological” differences and insisting instead that every culture had to be regarded as a unique and complex ethical and aesthetic achievement. Among his students were the preeminent American anthropologists of the mid-century era Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict.