Franz Boas

Franz Boas (born July 9, 1858 at Minden, Westphalia, in Germany; died December 21, 1942, New York City, United States of America) was a German-American cultural anthropologist. He was born into a secular Jewish family.

Franz Boas is said to have established ethnology as a serious social science in the United States, especially during his time at New York's Columbia University. Among the anthropologists trained by Boas were Alfred Louis Kroeber. Robert H. Lowie, Paul Radin, Alexander A. Goldenweiser, Edward Sapir, Melville Jean Herskovits, Ruth Bendict and Margaret Mead. Boas strongly opposed evolutionism, the leading theory of the day and favored diffusionism.

Franz Boas training at Heidelberg, Bonn, and Kiel universities was in geography, mathematics and physics, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1881. In 1883 he undertook an expedition to the Inuit (Eskimo) of Baffin Island. He later did fieldwork with various Northwestcoast societies in British Columbia, most famously the Kwakiutl (until 1896).

Boas taught at Clark University and, since 1896, at Columbia University, first as lecturer, from 1899 as professor. He founded Columbia's Anthropology Department. Boas was emeritated in 1937.

Boas worked for the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. He was curator at Chicago's Field Museum and from 1896 to 1905 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Outside the profession Franz Boas was known because of his stance against racism. Boas also organized financial support for German science after the lost World War I.