The anthropometric legacy of Franz Boas

Franz Boas was responsible for obtaining anthropometric data from approximately 27,000 subjects living around the turn-of-the-century. The subjects are of Native American, Siberian and European ancestry. These data have been entered into databases and are available for research. This paper describes the circumstances under which these data were collected and discusses their research potential.     

The First Boasian: Alfred Kroeber and Franz Boas, 1896-1905

This article reviews the interplay of the personal, institutional, and intellectual factors in the relationship between Franz Boas and Alfred Kroeber, his first important student. It focuses on their first decade, 1896-1905, a critical transitional period in the formation of American anthropology. After a consideration of their personal and familial contexts, it reviews Boas's role as a graduate professor to Kroeber, the beginning of an academic anthropology program at the University of California, Boas and Kroeber's collaborative and competitive relationship as museum curators, their diverging ethnographic strategies, Boas's editing of Kroeber's professional writings, and their disagreements over the organization of national professional societies (primarily the American Anthropological Association and the American Folklore Society). This article is a case study of the construction of anthropological traditions. [Keywords: Franz Boas, Alfred Kroeber, history of anthropology]     

A Cannibal in the National Museum: The Early Career of Franz Boas in America

Franz Boas spent several weeks at Fort Rupert, British Columbia, at the end of 1894, when he saw the Kwakiutl hamatsa ritual in situ for the first time. Soon after his return east Boas posed for a series of photographs in the U.S. National Museum for a diorama of the hamatsa dance. These photographs, now published for the first time, are a sharp reminder of Boas' constant (and sometimes forced) collaboration with the limited number of anthropological institutions in America at the end of the century, and of his personal difficulties in establishing himself professionally in America.     

Types Distinct from Our Own: Franz Boas on Jewish Identity and Assimiliation

Boas's published writings on assimilation were deeply influenced by his German Jewish background. In particular, his unwillingness to recognize Jewish cultural identity as a reality was central to his persistent emphasis on human plasticity and his insistence that people not be "classified" in groups. In support of this argument, 19th-century German and German Jewish history is reviewed, focusing on the relation between Kultur ideology and anti-Semitism. It is suggested that this approach to Boas's statements offers fresh perspective on some of the apparent confusion in his ideas about culture and assimilation.