Franz Boas: The First Modern Anthropologist
This year, on July 9th, will be the 160th anniversary of the birth of Franz Boas, one of the greatest pioneers of anthropology. While the majority of his discoveries and researches took place over 100 years ago, his brilliantly progressive and critical work within the field of anthropological study still leads a powerful example for the humanities studies of today. For this post, I will focus mainly on providing some of the most significant information on Boas that I can, in the hopes that you as the reader will be curious enough to learn more.
Franz Boas made immense contributions to modern anthropology in ways that had rarely been addressed until his publications. One of his many contributions to the humanities in his time as a researcher was that he was a major proponent in opposition of scientific racism, an incredibly popular form of European “science” that perpetuated nonsense arguments of Western European white superiority.
Boas also made strides in the way that anthropologists think when addressing and studying different cultures, bringing into anthropology the concept of cultural relativism. Cultural relativism, basically, is the belief that cultures and societies cannot be ranked hierarchically, and that the study of external cultures must be conducted in an unbiased manner. In that same vein, Boas rejected the view that cultures evolved, and that signs of non-modernity in cultural practices also reflected inferiority in the races which practiced them.
Boas is also considered to be responsible for the formation of the four main disciplines of modern anthropology: socio-cultural, linguistic, archaeological, and biological anthropology. These four fields, working in tandem with each other, cover incredible ground in the study of human history and culture. Anthropology as it is known and studied today, especially within the United States, was inextricably dependent on the work and philosophies of Franz Boas.
If you’d like to learn more about the work of Boas, or his philosophies and progressive ideas, here is a link to the wikipedia page on him:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Boas#Early_life_and_education
