![]() He assisted German and European émigré intellectuals fleeing Nazi Germany to relocate in the United States and was instrumental in organizing the denunciation of Nazi racial science and American eugenics. entry into World War I, reveals his struggle against the forces of nativism, racial hatred, ethnic chauvinism, scientific racism, and uncritical nationalism.īoas was instrumental in the American cultural renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, training students and influencing colleagues such as Melville Herskovits, Zora Neale Hurston, Benjamin Botkin, Alan Lomax, Langston Hughes, and others involved in combating racism and the flourishing Harlem Renaissance. Boas’s emergence as a prominent public intellectual, particularly his opposition to U.S. Zumwalt takes the reader through the most vital period in the development of Americanist anthropology and Boas’s rise to dominance in the subfields of cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics. ![]() Franz Boas: Shaping Anthropology and Fostering Social Justice is the second volume in Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt’s two-part biography of the renowned anthropologist and public intellectual. Boas remains an inescapable, fundamental figure in the history of anthropology and an inexhaustible subject of reassessment and controversy.Franz Boas defined the concept of cultural relativism and reoriented the humanities and social sciences away from race science toward an antiracist and anticolonialist understanding of human biology and culture. Herskovits – went on to be leaders in the field themselves, a number of them founding departments of anthropology at leading universities. Kroeber, Edward Sapir, Paul Radin, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead and Melville J. ![]() Many of his students at Columbia University – such as Alfred L. In dialogue with African-American intellectuals, he was a leading moral figure in anthropology and an activist against racism, ethnocentrism and Nazism. Interested in the pre-colonial past and the historical development of cultures and languages, Boas also dedicated himself to Anthropology and Modern Life (1928). ![]() Focused on salvaging for posterity “the culture as it appears to the Indian himself”, he published extensively, particularly on the “Kwakiutl” (Kwakwa’wakw) and other peoples of the Northwest Coast, including the bilingual edition of vernacular texts collected by Indigenous collaborators. Both a museum curator at the American Museum of Natural History (1896) and a professor of anthropology at Columbia University (1899), he was himself a fieldworker from the 1880s to the 1930s. Boas was a central figure in the professionalization of anthropology and ethnography in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In works such as The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) or his collection of essays on Race, Language and Culture (1940), he gave a scientific basis to cultural relativism. He challenged both cultural evolutionism and racial determinism by putting a plural notion of culture at the center of the discipline. American anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942), born in Germany into a Jewish family, is considered to be one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology in the United States and worldwide.
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