Franz Boas Essay Research Paper Father Franz

Franz Boas Essay, Research Paper

Father Franz Boas–Father of American Anthropology

Franz Boas is often referred to as the father of

American anthropology because of the great influence he had

in the lives and the careers of the next great generation of

anthropologists in America. He came at a time when

anthropology was not considered a true science or even a

meaningful discipline and brought an air of respectability

to the profession, giving those who followed a passion and

an example of how to approach anthropology. Boas directed

the field studies and trained such prominent anthropologists

as Alfred Louis Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Margaret Mead, as

well as others. Although he did not leave as his legacy any

specific line of thought, he left a pattern that was

followed by numerous scientists in the next generation.

Franz Boas studied physics and geography in Germany and

left to pursue his hypothesis on was born and raised in

Germany and studied physics and geography. After receiving

his doctorate in geography he left Germany and went to

Baffin Island to test his hypothesis on Arctic geography.

While he was there he became fascinated with the Eskimos and

how they lived. From then on he was no longer a geographer

but an Anthropologist.

Boas was Jewish and was criticized all his life about

being Jewish. His work showed his resentment of

Anti-Semitism, reflecting the belief that all men are

created equal. At the time anthropology was based on the

beliefs of men like Tylor and Spencer who believed in

evolutionary theories that stated that some people are more

evolved than others. They believed in categorizing

different cultures depending on how evolved they were.

These men also did not do any field work, they received

their information from missionaries, government officials,

and other people who traveled the world. They categorized

cultures by putting them into a line starting with

barbarians and ending with white people. Anthropologists

then ranked them depending on how civilized they thought

they were. They also felt that people at the high end of

the line(whites) had one time been where these other

cultures are and feel this sort of a .psychic unity.

towards them.

Boas was the first anthropologist to do field work. He

believed it was essential to live with certain cultures to

get the real feel of what they were like. He believed that

empirical observation is the only way to create an

understanding. He did not want data from someone else

because it was of no use to him if he did not record it.

Boas. rejection of data that was not collected in the field

is well-documented and presents a nature that was very

specific in its analysis of the subject. His determination

to go out into the field and collect the data for the

project ushered in a new respectability to the field in that

he was not merely regurgitating data that had been collected

for another study but rather he was analyzing a specific set

of information that was pertinent to the study at hand. He

introduced the concept of empirical observation. This

initial use of fieldwork set Boas ahead of the rest of the

anthropologists. He was not content to take old data and

make it suit his theories. Rather, he embraced the

scientific method and collected data and then reworked his

thesis to fit the information dictated by the data set

found.

Boas lived what he preached, and this can be seen in

his numerous trips to live among the natives of the land. He

put in stints in the Arctic, with the Kwakitul of the

Pacific Northwest.

Boas also felt that learning a language was a

significant part of understanding a culture, something that

was a new concept. Along these lines, Boas recognized the

importance of reaching into the past to create and preserve

the present, again setting himself ahead of the rest of his

contemporaries.

The idea of cultural whole is that every culture was a

complete system. He felt that anthropologists should not

rank cultures. Instead, Boas stated that societies could not

be compared, a concept known as cultural relativism.

Cultures were the evolution of societies over a period of

time, and there was not right or wrong in a culture nor was

their an inferior or a superior culture. Cultures were

separate entities that existed solely in their own plane of

existence. Boas also felt that each culture had its own

unique history, and that the anthropologist had a

responsibility to study that one in turn. The anthropologist

could no effectively analyze a culture without effectively

understanding it from all aspects and from all sides.

To be sure, Boas went against the major trends of

thought among a

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