. How do you think Boas's personal life influenced his ideas and his work as an anthropologist?

Answer 1

Franz Boas was a Jewish-German anthropologist who began his life in Minden Germany, raised by liberal-minded parents. His physical health was said to be 'delicate' during childhood, and as a result he spent much of his time engrossed in books and autodidacticism. This inception likely set the foundation for his beliefs on race and culture, which would later be crystalized into the relativistic school of anthropology and the concept of cultural relativism. After earning a PhD in physics and briefly serving in the military, Boas was afforded the opportunity to travel to Baffin Island in order to study geographical influences on Indigenous migration patterns. It was during this time that he was immersed in the daily lives of the Inuit cultures with which he was studying.

The most significant event in Boas' time working on Baffin Island occurred while he and a travel companion were traversing the winter landscape in negative forty-six-degree Fahrenheit temperatures and they became lost. In order to survive the duo had to sled through the arctic landscape for twenty-six straight hours. Later, Boas would write in his journals of this event, musing on how he had no significant advantage over the Indigenous people in surviving the harsh climate and geography of the region. He concluded that the seemingly 'superstitious' beliefs of the Indigenous people were shaped just as much by their need for survival as those of western cultures. His continued reliance on the Indigenous people's kindness and knowledge for his survival would become the lynchpin of his belief that no race was superior to another in intelligence and emotional complexity.

Boas' work in anthropology would continue to challenge the beliefs of the time, primarily the belief that evolution played a role in race and racial variation. He would become outspoken against anti-immigration laws and the underlying racist beliefs that supported them. Boas infused the field of anthropology with the idea that race was in fact a social construct and had no biological basis past evolutionary adaptions to environment. He demonstrated that the association between skull size and race had no scientific foundation, and that physical variations in skull sizes existed throughout racial groups. Additionally, he is known as the founder of the four primary branches of anthropology that we know today. It is because of his unique experiences both in childhood and his professional life that he was able to formulate the ideas still taught in anthropology programs, earning him the title of the 'father of modern anthropology'.