Boasian Anthropology and the Critique of American Culture

Abstract

DURING THE FIRST THIRD OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, AMERICAN anthropology was dominated by the work and ideas of Franz Boas (1858-1942) and his students. Trained in Germany as a physicist, Boas developed an interest in the relationship between human perception and the natural world, an interest that led him to geography and finally to ethnology. After geographical and ethnological research in Baffinland (1883) and British Columbia (1886), Boas emigrated to America. An outsider to professional ethnology, Boas mounted a devastating critique of the discipline's racialistic and evolutionary assumptions, culminating in 1911 with major publications in physical anthropology, linguistics, and ethnology. Boas's scholarship was shaped by nineteenth-century German historicism and materialism, romanticism and liberalism; the thrust of his anthropological critique led towards twentieth-century cultural relativism.' Boas established himself in American anthropology at a time when the discipline was moving out of museums and into the academy. From his base at Columbia University, Boas trained most of the important anthropologists of the next two generations, many of whom found