40 Fun Facts About Franz Boas

A 1911 remark by Franz Boas on Inuit vocabulary grew into the popular myth of dozens of words for what?

Snow got four Inuit words in the example Boas gave: on the ground, falling, drifting and in a drift. He was showing how languages divide up the world, and later retellings kept inflating the count.

Which student of Franz Boas became nationally famous with her 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa?

Margaret Mead argued that teenage turmoil comes from culture, not biology, and Boas wrote the foreword. Decades later Derek Freeman attacked her Samoan findings in two books.

Which Harlem Renaissance novelist studied anthropology under Franz Boas before collecting folklore in Florida?

Zora Neale Hurston turned that fieldwork into Mules and Men, a 1935 collection of African-American folklore from Florida and New Orleans. Two years later came her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Franz Boas died suddenly in 1942 in the arms of which anthropologist, then a wartime exile in New York?

Claude Lévi-Strauss had escaped Vichy France and was teaching in New York when Boas, aged 84, collapsed at a faculty club meal. He went on to lead the structuralist school of anthropology.

Where in the Canadian Arctic did Franz Boas live among the Inuit in 1883–84, drawing him towards anthropology?

Baffin Island was meant to be a geography project on how the environment shapes Inuit migration. Relying on his hosts for food and shelter, Boas grew more interested in how people lived.

Which NAACP co-founder invited Franz Boas to give the 1906 commencement address at Atlanta University?

W. E. B. Du Bois taught at Atlanta, where Boas told the graduates about African achievements such as iron smelting and argued that their ancestry gave no grounds for any claim of inferiority.

Franz Boas earned his 1881 doctorate, with a dissertation on the color of water, in which subject?

Physics trained Boas to measure, yet judging slight differences in the color of water proved so hard that he became intrigued by how perception shapes what an observer records.

Which gift-giving feast of the Pacific Northwest did Franz Boas document while Canada outlawed it from 1885 to 1951?

Potlatch hosts gave away or destroyed wealth to show their power, and the feasts carried on underground despite jail terms. Boas wrote in 1888 that the ban had failed.

Which Arctic explorer brought six Greenland Inuit to New York in 1897 after Franz Boas asked for one?

Robert Peary delivered the group to the museum where Boas worked, and four soon died of tuberculosis. A boy named Minik was left stranded in the city, and Boas has been widely criticized for his part.

At which New York university did Franz Boas teach from 1896, training a generation of American anthropologists?

Columbia made Boas a professor of anthropology in 1899, and he stayed for the rest of his career. His graduates went on to found departments from Berkeley to Northwestern.

Franz Boas, the 'Father of American Anthropology', was born in 1858 in the town of Minden in which country?

Germany was not yet a unified state in 1858, and Minden belonged to Prussia. Boas settled in America in 1887, put off by growing antisemitism and the lack of academic posts at home.

Which student of Franz Boas wrote Patterns of Culture and a wartime study of Japan, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword?

Ruth Benedict came to study under Boas in 1921 and found in him a kind of father figure. He made her an assistant professor a decade later, and Patterns of Culture followed in 1934.

Which student of Franz Boas went on to work with Ishi, known as the last of California's Yahi people?

Alfred Kroeber earned the first anthropology doctorate Boas supervised in New York, in 1901, then built the program at Berkeley. His daughter was the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin.

Which linguist trained by Franz Boas shares a hypothesis about language and thought with Benjamin Lee Whorf?

Edward Sapir was a philology student when a Boas seminar on Native American languages changed the direction of his career. His own student Whorf developed the idea that language shapes how people think.

Which principle, central to the work of Franz Boas, holds that each culture must be judged by its own standards?

Cultural relativism holds that cultures cannot be ranked as higher or lower. Boas never used the phrase himself; it became common among anthropologists only after his death.

Which 1911 book by Franz Boas attacked the claim that some races are born more intelligent than others?

The Mind of Primitive Man grew out of lectures at Boston's Lowell Institute and argued that no race is innately superior. The Nazis burned Boas's books in May 1933.

After settling in New York in 1887, Franz Boas took his first American job as assistant editor of which journal?

Science offered Boas the post in January 1887, after a field trip to Canada's Pacific coast. He chose to stay in America and married Marie Krackowizer the same year.

Franz Boas helped build the anthropology exhibits for the 1893 World's Fair held in which American city?

Chicago's fair marked 400 years since Columbus reached the Americas, and Boas led about a hundred assistants preparing its displays. The collections became the basis of the Field Museum.

The Jesup North Pacific Expedition, organized by Franz Boas in 1897, compared peoples on either side of which strait?

Bering was the strait in question: for five years the expedition studied the peoples of Siberia, Alaska and Canada's northwest coast to trace the ties between Asia and America.

Measuring 17,821 immigrants and their children, Franz Boas found that which supposedly fixed racial trait could change?

Head shape was treated as a stable racial marker, yet Boas found that American-born children differed from their immigrant parents. Environment, he argued, shapes the body too.

Which people of northern Vancouver Island were the main subject of Franz Boas's fieldwork on Canada's Pacific coast?

Kwakiutl is the name Boas popularized, though it properly belongs to a single community at Fort Rupert. The wider group calls itself Kwakwaka'wakw.

Which Tlingit-English ethnologist, raised at Fort Rupert, wrote thousands of pages of texts for Franz Boas?

George Hunt grew up among the people Boas studied and spoke their language, and Boas taught him to write it. Hunt also gathered hundreds of objects for display at the 1893 World's Fair.

The American Anthropological Association censured Franz Boas in 1919 after he accused four colleagues of what?

Spying for the US government under cover of fieldwork was, Boas wrote, a betrayal of everything a scholar stands for. Members voted 20 to 10 against him, and the censure stood until 2005.

Which weekly magazine printed the angry 1919 letter from Franz Boas that led fellow anthropologists to censure him?

The Nation ran the letter and the backlash was swift: a rival fumed about ending the 'Hun regime' Boas held over American anthropology, and Boas gave up his seat on the National Research Council.

To which elderly president of the Weimar Republic did Franz Boas address an open letter protesting against Hitlerism?

Paul von Hindenburg was the man who had made Hitler chancellor. Boas also answered Nazi attacks on 'Jewish' scholarship with a public statement signed by more than 8,000 fellow researchers.

At which Massachusetts university did Franz Boas lead a new anthropology department before resigning in protest in 1892?

Clark lost Boas in a dispute over academic freedom with its president, the psychologist G. Stanley Hall. In 1909 the same campus hosted Sigmund Freud's only lectures in the United States.

In which country did Franz Boas help create the International School of American Archaeology and Ethnology?

Mexico City hosted the school, and Boas lectured at the National University there in 1910 and 1911. His student Manuel Gamio is often called the father of modern Mexican anthropology.

The scars that criss-crossed the face of Franz Boas came from which pastime of his university days at Heidelberg?

Saber duels over petty slights were a student ritual, and Boas fought his first in 1877 after a quarrel over a shared rented piano. He came home each vacation with new scars.

Abraham Jacobi, uncle by marriage and adviser of Franz Boas, is called the father of which American medical field?

Pediatrics got its first department at a general hospital under Jacobi, at Mount Sinai in New York. A veteran of the 1848 revolutions, he had once stayed with Karl Marx in England.

In which city's Royal Ethnological Museum did Franz Boas meet Nuxalk visitors, sparking his Pacific Northwest research?

Berlin was where Boas worked under Adolf Bastian, who taught that all peoples share the same mental capacity. Once his postdoctoral thesis was accepted, Boas left for Canada's Pacific coast.

An AP report on the Nazi book burnings of May 1933 named Franz Boas, Jack London and which other American author?

Helen Keller answered with an open letter to the students, telling them the ideas in the books would outlive the flames. Boas was a target for his long campaign against racist theories.

Which American news magazine put Franz Boas on its cover in May 1936, as his teaching career was ending?

Time ran the Boas cover on 11 May 1936, when he was 77 and stepping back to emeritus status. He went on writing and campaigning against Nazi race theory until his death six years later.

Which New York institution did Franz Boas quit in 1905 after clashing with president Morris Jesup?

The American Museum of Natural History had made Boas a curator in 1896, and he wanted its halls arranged by tribe to show the style of each people. After resigning he never worked for a museum again.

Which label did Marvin Harris coin for Franz Boas's view that each society is the product of its own unique past?

Historical particularism is widely considered the first American school of anthropological thought. Its followers held that similar customs can arise through diffusion, trade or plain historical accident.

Franz Boas rejected the theory of which author of Ancient Society that all peoples pass from savagery to civilization?

Lewis Henry Morgan held that every society moves from descent through mothers to descent through fathers. Boas concluded that one Pacific coast people he knew well was shifting the other way.

Which pathologist and pioneer of cell theory taught Franz Boas anatomy before his first Arctic expedition?

Rudolf Virchow, called the father of modern pathology, saw no proof that any race was superior to another. Boas followed his mentor in stressing how changeable human types are.

Which term describes the push by Franz Boas and his students to record Native cultures they feared were vanishing?

Salvage ethnography got its name from Jacob Gruber, who traced the impulse to 19th-century scholars documenting conquered peoples. Since the 1960s the term has been used to critique early fieldwork.

Which Brazilian author of The Masters and the Slaves studied under Franz Boas in New York?

Gilberto Freyre left Recife at eighteen to study at Baylor in Texas before moving on to New York. His 1933 book shaped the idea of Brazil as a 'racial democracy'.

Which student of Franz Boas founded America's first major African studies program, at Northwestern University, in 1948?

Melville Herskovits argued in The Myth of the Negro Past that African Americans kept real cultural ties to Africa, rejecting the view that slavery had erased every trace.

Which London-born anthropologist, trained under Franz Boas, wrote Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race?

Ashley Montagu was born Israel Ehrenberg and renamed himself as a young man. He later became a well-known guest on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show.