Copyright © 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Franz Boas (1858-1942) was the single most influential anthropologist in North America in the twentieth century. He immigrated to the United States from Germany in the 1880s, taught briefly at Clark University, then in 1896 took a position at Columbia University, where he remained for the rest of his career. He was trained originally in physics and geography, but by the time he came to this country his interests had already turned to anthropology.
He was a controversial figure almost from the start, in part because of his debates with the cultural evolutionists about the course of human history (see CULTURAL EVOLUTION). According to the evolutionists, the pattern of history is one of progress, whereby societies develop through stages of savagery, barbarism, and eventually civilization. In this view, progress is guided by human reason, and societies differ because some have achieved higher degrees of rationality and therefore have produced more perfect institutions than others. According to Boas, however, the dominant process of change is culture borrowing or diffusion. All societies invent only a small fraction of their cultural inventory, for they acquire most of their cultural material from other peoples nearby. The process of diffusion is a result not of reason but of historical accident, and each culture is a unique amalgamation of traits and has a unique historical past.
Boas's concept of culture changed radically in the context of these ideas about history, for he came to view culture as a body of patterns that people learn through interactions with the members of their society. People adhere to such patterns as hunting practices and marriage rules not because they recognize that these help to improve their lives, as the evolutionists thought, but because the members of society absorb the cultural forms of their social milieu. By this view, these historically variable patterns largely govern human behavior and thus are the most important component of the human character. Furthermore, most of culture is emotionally grounded and beyond the level of conscious awareness. Whereas the evolutionists assumed that people are consciously oriented by patterns of rationality and that reason itself is universal and not local -- although different societies exhibit different degrees of it -- from Boas's perspective people are oriented by a body of cultural patterns of which they are largely unaware. These include such features as linguistic rules, values, and assumptions about reality (see LANGUAGE AND CULTURE). These patterns are emotionally grounded in that people become attached to the ways of life they have learned and adhere to them regardless of rational or practical considerations.
Boas's thinking also had significant implications for the concept of race. People behave the way they do not because of differences in racial intelligence, but because of the cultural patterns they have learned through enculturation. Boas was an outspoken proponent of racial equality, and publication of his book The Mind of Primitive Man in 1911 was a major event in the development of modern racial thought. Furthermore, Boas's culture concept had important relativistic implications (see CULTURAL RELATIVISM). He proposed that values are historically conditioned, in the same way as pottery styles and marriage patterns, and consequently the standards that a person uses in judging other societies reflect the perspective that he or she has learned. Boas and his students developed a strong skepticism toward cross-cultural value judgments.
Boas's work was epistemologically innovative, and he elaborated an important version of cognitive relativism (see RATIONALISM VS. EMPIRICISM). In his view, human beings experience the world through such forms as linguistic patterns and cultural beliefs, and like all other aspects of cul ture these are influenced by the vicissitudes of history. Consequently, people experience the world differently according to the cultures in which they are raised. For example, the linguistic rules that a person learns have the capacity to lead that individual to mis-hear speech sounds that he or she is not accustomed to hearing, while the same person has no difficulty hearing minute differences between other speech sounds that are part of his or her native tongue. Thus this segment of experience is comprehended through a complex of unconscious linguistic forms, and speakers of different languages hear these sounds differently.
Yet in important respects Boas was not a relativist. For instance, while he argued that the speakers of different languages hear the same speech sounds differently, he also assumed that the trained linguist may discover this happening, for, with effort, it is possible to learn to hear sounds as they truly are. In a sense, the linguist is able to experience speech sounds outside of his or her own linguistic framework, and to avoid the cognitive distortions produced by culture. Boas held similar views about science. While reality is experienced through cultural beliefs, it is possible to move outside of those beliefs into a sphere of objective neutrality, or a space that is culture-free, in doing scientific research. Thus Boas's anthropological theory contained a version of cognitive relativism at one level but rejected it at another. Relativism applies when human beings think and perceive in terms of their learned, cultural frameworks, but it is possible for cognitive processes to operate outside of those frameworks as well.
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Boas, F. (1928). Anthropology and Modern Life. New York: Norton.
Boas, F. (1940). Race, Language and Culture. New York: Macmillan.
Boas, F., Ed. (1938). General Anthropology. Boston: Heath.
Codere, H., Ed. (1966). Kwakiutl Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Goldschmidt, W. (1959). The Anthropology of Franz Boas: Essays on the Centennial of His Birth. Menasha, WI: American Anthropological Association.
Hatch, E. (1973). Theories of Man and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.
Holder, P. (1911, 1966). Introduction. In F. Boas, Handbook of American Indian Languages. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Jacknis, I. (1985). Franz Boas and exhibits: on the limitations of the museum method of anthropology. In G. W. Stocking, Jr., Ed., Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Lowie, R. H. (1917, 1966). Culture and Ethnology. New York: Basic Books.
Rohner, R. P., and E. C. Rohner. (1969). The Ethnography of Franz Boas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stocking, G. W., Jr. (1968). Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology. New York: The Free Press.
Stocking, G. W., Jr. (1974). The Shaping of American Anthropology: A Franz Boas Reader. New York: Basic Books.
Stocking, G. W., Jr. (1992). The Ethnographer"s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Stocking, G. W., Jr. (1996). Volkgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Anthropology and the German Anthropological Tradition. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press .
Copyright © 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology