Columbia awarded Boas an honorary degree in 1929. While at Columbia, he taught and inspired a generation of anthropologists, notably Alfred Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Zora Neale Hurston. A reconciliation was effected in 1929, when Boas was honored at the University's 175th-anniversary ceremonies. During the 1920s, he felt underappreciated by University president Nicholas Murray Butler and his key administrators, and spent much of his time on campus at Barnard. His opposition to American entry into World War I put his tenure in momentary jeopardy. Boas began to lecture at Columbia in 1896, and in 1899 became its first professor of anthropology, a position he held for 37 years. From there, he went to the Field Museum in Chicago, moving to New York in 1895 to work at the American Museum of Natural History. In 1889, he secured his first American job at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1963, the scholar Thomas Gossett wrote, "It is possible that Boas did more to combat race prejudice than any other person in history."īoas was born in Minden, Westphalia, and educated at the University of Kiel in Germany. Long outspoken against totalitarianism in its many guises, he was a fierce advocate of intellectual freedom, supported many democratic causes, and was the founder of the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom. A student of Native American languages, Boas emphasized the importance of linguistic analysis from internal linguistic structure. Not surprisingly, his books were banned in Hitler's Germany. Perhaps his most influential book, The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), demonstrated that there was no such thing as a "pure" race or a superior one. He reexamined the premises of physical anthropology and became an early critic of race rather than environment as an explanation for difference in the natural and social sciences. Through his elaboration of cultural relativism as an alternative theoretical framework, he came to have an enormous influence on the development of American anthropology. "If we were to select the most intelligent, imaginative, energetic, and emotionally stable third of mankind, all races would be present."īoas is the early-twentieth-century scholar most responsible for discrediting the then-dominant scientific theories of racial superiority.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |