Franz Boas Biography

Franz Boas was of Jewish decedent who was born in Westphalia, Germany. He was born on born on July 9,1858 to a father with a successful business and mother that was civically. He studied at the universities of Heidelberg, Bonn, and graduated from the University of Kiel with a Ph.D. in Physics and a minor in geography in 1881. It is this degree that led him to investigate seawater in Artic Conditions between 1883-1884. It is while he was there that Boas spent time with the tribes of Eskimos in Canada. This experience inspired him to turn to the field of Anthropology. Boas went on to work at the North Pacific Coast of North America museum. While there he spent his time he working on Native American Cultures to general public work. He eventually left this museum and ended up at the American Museum of National History. There he created the Northwest Coast Indian exhibit, which is still up today. In 1905 he went on to teach Anthropology, becoming the first Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Franz Boas’ field focus was on collecting information on race, languages, art, dance, and archaeology. In his field he stressed the unimportance of race in understanding humans. Boas was an avid speaker against racism, which seems to have greatly influenced his work. At one point he presented that the skulls in which he had collected from various races showed that there was no correlation between skull size and racial background. One of the model Boas designed was the “four field” model. This model included four branches; they were physical anthropology, archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and cultural anthropology. When it came to value Boas believed that cultures were so different from one another that there was no way to compare value even if they had similar social, economic, and environmental conditions (Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowsky: A Contrast, Comparison, and Analysis P.42). Franz Boas died in 1942, having established a real anthropology as science. Website for this image