Born in Minden, Germany, on July 8, 1858, the anthropologist Franz Boas was the son of the merchant Meier Boas and his wife, Sophie Meyer. Raised in the radical and tradition of German Judaism, Franz's youth was steeped in politically liberal beliefs and a largely secular outlook that he carried with him from university through his emigration to the United States.

At the universities of Heidelberg and Bonn, Boas studied physics and geography before completing a doctorate in physical geography at Kiel in 1881. Intending on testing then-current theories of environmental determinism, he signed on to an anthropological expedition to Baffin Island in 1883-1884, expecting that he would document the close adaptative fit of Central Eskimo cultures to their extreme climate. His experiences in the arctic, however, led him to the contrary conclusion: that social traditions, not environmental, exerted a dominant influence over human societies, and from this point onward, he was led to pursue the cultural over than physical dimensions of humanity.

Although he returned to Berlin after the expedition, Boas emigrated to the United States in 1885 to assume an editorial position with the journal Science, hoping to use it as a stepping-stone to an academic appointment. In 1886, he embarked upon a second major field excursion into what would become his most famous ethnographic project, working among the Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka'wakw) Indians of the Northwest Coast, after which he secured his first academic position in 1889, at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. After three years at Clark and a failed appointment at the Field Museum in Chicago in 1892 (during which he played a part in organizing the anthropological exhibits for the Columbian World's Fair), Boas moved to New York City.

The restless activity of Boas's early years slowed in New York. Hired by the American Museum of Natural History (1895-1905), which became the recipient of the amazingly rich anthropological collections he accumulated on the Northwest Coast, Boas began to teach classes at Columbia University in 1896, where three years later he was appointed Professor of Anthropology. For the next 37 years, Boas ruled the anthropological roost at Columbia, accruing unprecedented power in his discipline, wielding grants, recommendations, and appointments with remarkable dexterity, and collecting about him a remarkable group of younger scholars as students and colleagues.

Distancing himself from some of the main currents of contemporary anthropological thought in the United States, and particularly from the evolutionist assumptions that riddled the discipline, Boas championed an anthropology that viewed human cultures as shaped more by historical "tradition" than biological propensity. Claiming to resist any overarching, synthetic theories of human relations, and particularly evolutionary theories of sociocultural development, Boas laid the theoretical groundwork for what became modern cultural relativism. In the process, he helped to clarify the demarcation between the concepts of culture and race and its expression in the divergence of the four fields in anthropology -- linguistics, ethnography, physical anthropology, and archaeology.

Boas's relatively few forays into physical anthropology included a pioneering anthropometric study in 1910-1911, demonstrating that the alleged mental and physical inferiority of immigrants disappeared statistically by the second generation. Opposed to immigration quotas and disdainful of the claims to science used to justify them, Boas was a consistent, strident opponent of racial determinism in intellect or behavior. A committed, politically active Socialist, he was frequently an outspoken critic of American policy. During the First World War, he spoke out against the treatment of German Americans and "enemy aliens" -- to the point of putting himself at risk -- and the rise of the Nazi party in Germany proved an even greater crusade. Despite his age, Boas took an active role in the anti-fascist struggle in the United States and was involved with numerous committees to assist refugee scholars. He was equally ardent in his efforts to criticize racial and ethnic bigotry in the United States.

As a mentor, Boas had a reputation of being directive, at times overbearing, and at the same time of doing too little to prepare his students for the rigors of fieldwork. The extraordinary number of students coming out of Columbia under his care, however, has arguably done as much to extend the Boasian approach than Boas's own writing. Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Elsie Clews Parsons, Alfred Kroeber, Frank Speck, Edward Sapir, Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Deloria, Melville Herskovits, Leslie Spier, Paul Radin, and Ashley Montagu are all students of Boas. Many continued in the same intellectual stream, some diverged, yet all bore traces of Boas's influence. He left a mark as well on the institutions of the discipline, as one of the founders of the American Anthropological Association and of the International Journal of American Linguistics.

Letters between various family members of Franz Boas, nearly all in German. Although the topics relate primarily to personal, familial matters, information about Boas's career and (more generally) his intellectual formation and beliefs.

Physical description

9 lin. feet

9 lin. feet

Provenance

Series I.: Gift of Helene Boas Yampolsky, 1961-1962; and Dr. Cecil Yampolsky, 1964, with many later additions from Norman F. Boas.

Series II.: Requested by Stephen Catlett through Freedom of Information Act, 1983 (accession number 1985-225ms).

Preferred citation

Cite as: Boas Family Papers, American Philosophical Society.

Processing information

Online guide originally created from paper guide: rsc, 2002.

Series I was rehoused and reprocessed by Paul Sutherland in 2022, to reflect records that were not included in the finding aid. It was assessed that these had been a mixture of new accessions, files missed on the creation of the previous finding aid, and files intended for other Boas collections (especially Mss.B.B61 or Mss.B.B61p) but had been kept in this collection for a long duration and were relevant to this collection, thus deemed appropriate to remain in the collection. Many unrecorded files had been interfiled with documented materials.

Materials in finding aid prior to 2022 were divided into Subseries I-IV. Subseries I is the main chronological files, originally from boxes 1-16; Subseries II is the alphabetical files, originally from box 18 plus some files that had been previously missed; and Subseries III and IV are the shorter chronological and alphabetical files, originally from box 17 (box previously in the finding aid as just "1925-1932") plus some previously missed files.

Subseries V-VII are only additional, previously undescribed material.

The following records were removed in 2022, due to not being apparent within the collection and likely originally erroneous/incomplete, after consulting the collection: "Boas Family correspondence 1909-1921" (likely referred to part of what is now Subseries III), and "Family correspondence June 17, 1883 - October 31, 1883, typed transcripts of letters to parents. (37 pages in German, 4 in English.)" (not found in the collection, likely previously merged into materials that made Subseries VI. Translations and Transcriptions).

Related material

The American Council of Learned Societies Committee on Native American Languages, Franz Boas Collection of Materials for American Linguistics ( Mss 497.3.B63c ) is a large collection of primary materials on Native American languages assembled, in part, under Boas's supervision, and including a large quantity of material written by Boas himself.

Boas appears as a correspondent in numerous APS collections, and in addition to its rich collections for the history of anthropology, the library houses the papers of several of Boas's former students and proteges, including Frank Speck ( Mss. Ms. Coll. 126 ), Elsie Clews Parsons ( Mss. Ms. Coll. 29 ), John Alden Mason ( Mss. B M384 ), Paul Radin ( Mss. 497.3 R114 ), and Ashley Montagu ( Mss. Ms. Coll. 109 ).

The APS also houses a microfilm (372.3, reel 1) of original materials in the Office of Anthropology Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., relating to Boas's trips to Baffin Island (N.W.T.) and British Columbia, during which he studied and collected cultural materials, 1885-1909.

The papers of Boas's son Ernst Boas ( Mss. Ms. Coll. 10 ) are housed at the APS. A physician, Ernst Boas shared his father's liberal political outlook and activist social views.

Bibliography

• Anthropologists -- United States.

• Boas, Ernst P. (Ernst Philip), 1891-1955
• Boas, Franz, 1858-1942

• Anthropology -- Research -- United States
• Anthropology -- United States -- History.
• Anthropology -- United States.
• Communists -- United States
• Ethnology -- North America
• Jewish scientists
• Refugees, Political
• Scientists, Refugee
• Socialists -- United States