Franz Boas

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

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

Franz Boas training in Germany at Heidelberg, Bonn, and Kiel included geography and physics (Ph. D. in 1881). He first went to America in 1883, on an expedition to the Esquimeaux of Baffin Island. From 1888 on he undertook fieldwork in British Columbia, where he studied various Northwestcoast societies, most famously the Kwakiutl.

Franz Boas taught at Clark University and, from 1899, at Columbia University, he held museum posts at the Field Museum in Chicago and the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Outside his profession Franz Boas was famous for his agitation against racism. Although he had left Germany in part because of antisemitic discrimination, Boas supported German science after World War I.