Franz Boas

Franz Boas was a German-American anthropologist who is widely regarded as the founder of modern American anthropology. He was born on July 9, 1858, in Minden, in the Prussian province of Westphalia, into a liberal German-Jewish family, and was educated in Heidelberg, Bonn and Kiel, where he received his doctorate in physics in 1881 with a dissertation on the color of seawater.

His scientific direction shifted after a year-long expedition to Baffin Island in 1883–84, where his fieldwork among the Inuit convinced him that human behavior could not be reduced to environment or biology. He emigrated to the United States in 1887, joining the editorial staff of the journal Science, and from 1899 held the chair of anthropology at Columbia University, which he occupied for nearly four decades.

From Columbia he trained the first generation of American academic anthropologists, including Alfred Kroeber, Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston and Melville Herskovits. He insisted on the four-field structure (cultural, linguistic, archaeological and physical anthropology) that has shaped the American discipline ever since. His major works include The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), Handbook of American Indian Languages (1911), Primitive Art (1927) and Anthropology and Modern Life (1928).

He was an early and forceful critic of scientific racism. His 1912 study of the descendants of European immigrants demonstrated that head shape — long treated as a fixed racial marker — changed within a single generation in a new environment, undermining a central claim of physical-anthropological racism. He died of a stroke at the Columbia University Faculty Club on December 21, 1942, while denouncing Nazi racial theory.

His name Franz is the German short form of Franziskus, the German form of Francis, from the Late Latin Franciscus meaning "Frenchman" or "free man." It is a masculine name long popular in German-speaking countries.