Boas, Franz (1858-1942)
Boas, Franz (1858-1942)
Anthropologist, born in Minden, Germany. Having studied geography at Kiel, his expeditions to the Arctic and to British Columbia shifted his interest to the tribes there, and motivated his emigration to the USA in 1886. Professor at Columbia from 1899, he became the dominant figure in establishing modern anthropology in the USA. He and his pupils established new and less simple concepts of culture and of race, as outlined in his collection of papers, Race, Language and Culture (1940).
One of his more notable disciples was Edward Sapir
Return to the biography index.
Back to my index, the school, the bookstore, or the Underground student pipeline.