Franz Boas Collections, American Philosophical Society

Table of contents

Abstract

During the half century leading up to the Second World War, Franz Boas helped to define academic anthropology in the United States. Trained as a geographer at the University of Heidelberg, Boas worked initially on the Inuit of Baffin Island and subsequently on the cultures of the Indians of the Northwest Pacific Coast, becoming a leading figure in American anthropology by the first decade of the twentieth century. As Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, Boas made significant theoretical contributions to ethnology, linguistics, and physical anthropology, helping to ingrain the four fields approach in his discipline and introducing the concept of cultural relativism into wide currency. He was, as well, a committed Socialist and an ardent opponent of both racism and fascism.

The Boas collections at the APS contain a nearly complete assemblage of Boas's professional correspondence, including both in-coming letters and retained copies of out-going letters, along with typescripts and manuscripts of lectures, speeches, and articles by Boas, diaries, field notes, and photographs. These comprise an important resource for documenting the transitions in American and German anthropology during the first half of the twentieth century.

Background note
Scope & content
- Arrangement
Administrative information
Additional information
Added entries
Contact information
Collection overview
- Collection I. Franz Boas Papers, 1862-1942
- Collection II. Franz Boas Professional Papers, ca.1860-1942
- Collection III. Boas Family Papers, 1862-1942
- Collection IV. Boas-Rukeyser Collection, 1869-1940
- Collection V. Field notebooks and anthropometric data, ca.1883-1912
- Collection VI. United States Federal Bureau of Investigation Files, 1939-1950
- Collection VII. Photographs, 1869-1940
Collection inventory
- Collection I. Franz Boas Papers, 1862-1942
- Collection II. Franz Boas Professional Papers, ca.1860-1942
- Collection III. Boas Family Papers, 1862-1942
- Collection IV. Boas-Rukeyser Collection, 1869-1940
- Collection V. Field notebooks and anthropometric data, ca.1883-1912
- Collection VI. United States Federal Bureau of Investigation Files, 1939-1950.
- Collection VII. Photographs, 1869-1940.

Background note

Franz Boas dressed as 'Eskimo' ice fisher

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.

Franz Boas and Thomas Hunt Morgan, ca.1920s

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.

Scope and content

The Boas Collections at the APS are the key resource for documenting the transformations in American ethnography, linguistics, and physical anthropology in the period between the 1880s and 1940s. Consisting of almost 60 linear feet of Franz Boas' professional correspondence and 9 feet of family correspondence, supplemented by numerous essays, lectures, and photographs, the collection provides richly detailed coverage of every facet of Boas's career from the time of his emigration to America in the mid-1880s until his death in 1940, shedding light on the development of ethnography, anthropological linguistics, and anthropological approaches to archaeology. His correspondence was highly diverse, including not only his fellow anthropologists, but geneticists, evolutionary biologists, social scientists, and social activists.

The Boas collections are also a rich resource for historians interested in "radical" social causes in the twentieth-century through Boas's participation in socialist political circles and progressive social movements. There is significant material on the Germanistic Society of America and for German National Socialism and the expulsion of European scholars, as well as the efforts to reestablish them in British and American institutions.

Arrangement


Collection I. Franz Boas Papers	1862-1942	49 linear feet
Collection II. Franz Boas Professional Papers	1860-1942	12.5 linear feet
Collection III. Boas Family Papers	1862-1942	9 linear feet
Collection IV. Boas-Rukeyser Collection	1869-1940	2 linear feet
Collection V. Field notes and anthropometic data	ca.1883-1912	1.5 linear feet
Collection VI. U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation Files	1939-1950	49p.
Collection VII. Photographs	ca.1869-1940

Administrative information

Restrictions

None.

Provenance

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

Preferred citation

Cite as: Franz Boas Papers, [Collection Name], American Philosophical Society.

Other finding aids

Series I is thoroughly inventoried in Franziska Boas, Guide to the Microfilm Collection of the Professional Papers of Franz Boas (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1972), 2 vols. This guide forms the basis of the inventory for Boas Collection I below.

Materials relating to Boas's research on American Indians is indexed in great detail in the on-line and print versions of American Philosophical Society Guide to Manuscripts Relating to the American Indian.

Additional information

Separated material

Photographs have been separated for storage with the library's photographic collection.

Related material

The Records of the American Council of Learned Societies Committee on Native American Languages (the "Boas Linguistic Collection") 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, Elsie Clews Parsons, John Alden Mason, Paul Radin, and Ashley Montagu.

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

A sampling of graphic images from the Boas Collections is available on the APS website at http://www.amphilsoc.org/library/guides/boas/

References

Rohner, Ronald P., ed., The Ethnography of Franz Boas: Letters and Diaries of Franz Boas, Written on the Northwest Coast from 1886 to 1931 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1969). Call no.: B B61e.r

Stocking, George, ed., The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883-1911: A Franz Boas Reader (N.Y.: Basic Books, 1974). Call no.: 572.081 B63s

Cole, Douglas, Franz Boas: The Early Years, 1859-1906 (Seattle: Univ. of Washington, 1999).

Boas, Franz, The Mind of Primitive Man (N.Y.: MacMillan, 1911). Call no.: 572 B63m

Boas, Franz, Ethnology of the Kwakiutl (Washington, D.C.:Government Printing Office, 1921). Call no.: 572.97 B63e

Boas, Franz, Primitive Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1927). Call no.: 571.7 B63p

Boas, Franz, ed., General Anthropology (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1938). Call no.: 572 B63g.r

Boas, Franz, Race, Language and Culture (N.Y.: MacMillan, 1940). Call no.: 572.081 B63r