Franz Boas - Post-graduate Studies

Post-graduate Studies

Boas took up geography as a way to explore his growing interest in the relationship between subjective experience and the objective world. At the time, German geographers were divided over the causes of cultural variation. Many argued that the physical environment was the principal determining factor, but others (notably Friedrich Ratzel) argued that the diffusion of ideas through human migration is more important. In 1883 Boas went to Baffin Island to conduct geographic research on the impact of the physical environment on native Inuit migrations. The first of many ethnographic field trips, Boas culled his notes to write his first monograph titled The Central Eskimo, which was published in the 6th Annual Report from the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1888. Boas lived and worked closely with the Inuit peoples on Baffin Island, and he developed an abiding interest in the way people lived.

In the perpetual darkness of the Arctic winter, Boas reported, he and his traveling companion became lost and were forced to keep sledding for twenty-six hours through ice, soft snow, and temperatures that dropped below -46 °C. The following day, Boas penciled in his diary:

I often ask myself what advantages our 'good society' possesses over that of the 'savages' and find, the more I see of their customs, that we have no right to look down upon them. . . We have no right to blame them for their forms and superstitions which may seem ridiculous to us. We 'highly educated people' are much worse, relatively speaking. . . Franz Boas to Marie Krackowizer, December 23, 1883. Franz Boas’ Baffin Island Letter-Diary, 1883-1884, edited by Herbert Cole (1983:33).

Boas went on to explain in the same entry that "all service, therefore, which a man can perform for humanity must serve to promote truth." Boas was forced to depend on various Inuit groups for everything from directions and food to shelter and companionship. It was a difficult year filled with tremendous hardships that included frequent bouts with disease, mistrust, pestilence, and danger. Boas successfully searched for areas not yet surveyed and found unique ethnographic objects, but the long winter and the lonely treks across perilous terrain forced him to search his soul to find a direction for his life as a scientist and a citizen.

Boas' interest in indigenous communities grew as he worked at the Royal Ethnological Museum in Berlin where he was introduced to members of the Nuxálk Nation of British Columbia, which sparked a lifelong relationship with the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest.

He returned to Berlin to complete his studies. In 1886 Boas defended (with Helmholtz' support) his habilitation thesis, Baffin Land, and was named privatdozent in geography.

While on Baffin Island he began to develop his interest in studying non-Western cultures (resulting in his book, The Central Eskimo, published in 1888). In 1885 Boas went to work with physical anthropologist Rudolf Virchow and ethnologist Adolf Bastian at the Royal Ethnological Museum in Berlin. Boas had studied anatomy with Virchow two years earlier, while preparing for the Baffin Island expedition. At the time, Virchow was involved in a vociferous debate over evolution with his former student, Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel had abandoned his medical practice to study comparative anatomy after reading Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, and vigorously promoted Darwin's ideas in Germany. However, like most other natural scientists prior to the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics in 1900 and the development of the modern synthesis, Virchow felt that Darwin's theories were weak because they lacked a theory of cellular mutability. Accordingly, Virchow favored Lamarckian models of evolution. This debate resonated with debates among geographers. Lamarckians believed that environmental forces could precipitate rapid and enduring changes in organisms that had no inherited source; thus, Lamarckians and environmental determinists often found themselves on the same side of debates.

But Boas worked more closely with Bastian, who was noted for his antipathy to environmental determinism. Instead, he argued for the "psychic unity of mankind", a belief that all humans had the same intellectual capacity, and that all cultures were based on the same basic mental principles. Variations in custom and belief, he argued, were the products of historical accidents. This view resonated with Boas' experiences on Baffin Island, and drew him towards anthropology.

While at the Royal Ethnological Museum Boas became interested in the Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, and after defending his habilitation thesis, he left for a three month trip to British Columbia via New York. In January 1887, he was offered a job as assistant editor of the journal Science. Alienated by growing antisemitism and nationalism as well as the very limited academic opportunities for a geographer in Germany, Boas decided to stay in the United States. Possibly he received additional motivation for this decision from his romance with Marie Krackowizer, whom he married in the same year.

Aside from his editorial work at Science, Boas secured an appointment as docent in anthropology at Clark University, in 1888. Boas was concerned about university president G. Stanley Hall's interference in his research, yet in 1889 he was appointed as the head of a newly created department of anthropology at Clark University. In the early 1890s he went on a series of expeditions which were referred to as the Morris K. Jesup Expedition. The primary goal of these expeditions was to illuminate Asiatic-American relations.

In 1892 Boas, along with another member of the Clark faculty, resigned in protest of the alleged infringement by Hall on academic freedom. He took the post of chief assistant in anthropology to F.W. Putnam at the Chicago World’s Fair. These exhibits later served as the basis for the Field (Columbian) Museum, where Boas served as the curator of anthropology and was succeeded by Wm. H. Homes. In 1896 Boas was named the assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History, again under Putnam.