Franz Boas

Franz Boas (born July 9, 1858; Minden, Westphalia, Germany; died December 21, 1942; New York City, United States of America) was a German-American cultural anthropologist, born into a secular Jewish family.

Franz Boas is said to have established ethnology as a serious social science in the United States, especially during his time at New York's Columbia University. Among the anthropologists trained by Boas were Alfred Louis Kroeber. Robert H. Lowie, Paul Radin, Alexander A. Goldenweiser, Edward Sapir, Melville Jean Herskovits, Ruth Bendict and Margaret Mead. Boas strongly opposed evolutionism, the leading theory of the day and favored diffusionism.

Franz Boas training at Heidelberg, Bonn, and Kiel universities was in geography, mathematics and physics, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1881. In 1883 he undertook an expedition to the Esquimeaux of Baffin Island. Later fieldwork was with various Northwestcoast societies in British Columbia, most famously the Kwakiutl.

Franz Boas taught at Clark University and, from 1899, at Columbia University, he held museum posts at Chicago's Field Museum and the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Outside the profession Franz Boas is famous for his agitation against racism, he had left Germany in part because of antisemitic discrimination. Boas organized funds to support German scientists after World War I.