Franz Boas and the Development of Physical Anthropology in North America

Summary Noam Chomsky’s frequent references to the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt during the 1960s produced a considerable revival of interest in this 19th-century scholar in North America. This paper demonstrates that there has been a long-standing influence of Humboldt’s ideas on American linguistics and that no ‘rediscovery’ was required. Although Humboldt’s first contacts with North-American scholars goes back to 1803, the present paper is confined to the posthumous phase of his influence which begins with the work of Heymann Steinthal (1823–1899) from about 1850 onwards. This was also a time when many young Americans went to Germany to complete their education; for instance William Dwight Whitney (1827–1894) spent several years at the universities of Tübingen and Berlin (1850–1854), and in his writings on general linguistics one can trace Humboldtian ideas. In 1885 Daniel G. Brinton (1837–1899) published an English translation of a manuscript by Humboldt on the structure of the verb in Amerindian languages. A year later Franz Boas (1858–1942) arrived from Berlin soon to establish himself as the foremost anthropologist with a strong interest in native language and culture. From then on we encounter Humboldtian ideas in the work of a number of North American anthropological linguists, most notably in the work of Edward Sapir (1884–1939). This is not only true with regard to matters of language classification and typology but also with regard to the philosophy of language, specifically, the relationship between a particular language structure and the kind of thinking it reflects or determines on the part of its speakers. Humboldtian ideas of ‘linguistic relativity’, enunciated in the writings of Whitney, Brinton, Boas, and others, were subsequently developed further by Sapir’s student Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941). The transmission of the so-called Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis – which still today is attracting interest among cultural anthropologists and social psychologists, not only in North America – is the focus of the remainder of the paper. A general Humboldtian approach to language and culture, it is argued, is still present in the work of Dell Hymes and several of his students.

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Franz Boas’ Postulate of the Warfare Origin of Secret Societies and Myths about the “Culture Heroˮ and the “Tricksterˮ in North America

Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology ◽

10.21301/eap.v16i1.1 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 16 (1) ◽

pp. 19-48

Author(s):

Dragana Jeremić Molnar ◽

Aleksandar Molnar

Keyword(s):

North America ◽

20Th Century ◽

American Indians ◽

North American ◽

Secret Society ◽

Secret Societies ◽

Franz Boas ◽

North American Indians ◽

The North

In this paper, the authors argue that Franz Boas had a coherent theory of the secret society, which he did not systematically develop anywhere, but which can be reconstructed from several of his works. The authors are not dealing with the whole theory, but only with the postulate of the warfare origin of secret societies (which later became the foundation of the Männerbund theory). Namely, Boas believed that the secret societies of the North American Indians were originally warlike, but that by the beginning of the 20th century they either retained only the functions of initiation and education, or were transformed into therapeutic and dance societies. Although he claimed that the mythology of the Indians did not provide additional insights into the origins of secret societies, his dealings with the myth of the “culture heroˮ and the “tricksterˮ proved the contrary. The authors try to go a step further and find new contributions for the study of the origins of secret societies in North America in the myth of Wolf as the brother (father) of the “culture hero.ˮ

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Denken der Relation : Franz Boas und der « Typus »-Begriff

Sociétés plurielles ◽

10.46298/societes-plurielles.2018.4247 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol Épistémologies du pluriel (Articles) ◽

Author(s):

Camille Joseph

Keyword(s):

Statistical Methods ◽

Physical Anthropology ◽

Franz Boas ◽

International Audience ◽

Taxonomic Approach

International audience Der « Typus »-Begriff wird hier in dem wissenschaftlichen Werk des deutsch-amerikanischen Anthropologen Franz Boas (1858-1942) untersucht.Anhand einer Analyse seiner wichtigsten Texte über Anthropometrie wird gezeigt, wie bei Boas die Statistik dazu dient, die physische Anthropologie von seinem taxinomischen Hintergrund zu befreien und einen neuen Zugang zu einem Denken der Relation zu eröffnen, das auf Variationen und Korrelationen den Fokus legt.Boas denkt die « Typen » im Plural und legt den Nachdruck auf die Anleihen und Mischungen, auf die Plastizität der Menschen und auf ihre Grenzen. This article focuses on the concept of « type » in Franz Boas’ work. Based on a close examination of his main anthropometrical texts, it sheds light onthe way Boas used statistical methods in order to criticize the taxonomic approach of physical anthropology. Instead, he developed a perspective where relations between types are put forward and emphasized the importance of variability and correlation phenomena. By using the plural “types”, Boas was able to consider human plasticity as a scene for borrowing and intermixture. Cet article se propose d’examiner le concept de « type » dans le travail de Franz Boas (1858-1942). À partir d’une lecture des principaux textes del’anthropologue consacrés à l’anthropométrie, cet article expose la manière dont il s’est servi des méthodes statistiques pour détourner l’anthropologie physique de ses objectifs taxinomiques et mettre en avant une pensée de la relation fondée sur la variation et les phénomènes de corrélation. Boas préfère penser les « types » au pluriel pour mieux observer les jeux d’emprunts et de mélanges qui se manifestent dans les limites de la plasticité humaine.

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Hunter-gatherer complexity on the west coast of North America

Antiquity ◽

10.1017/s0003598x00080716 ◽

1991 ◽

Vol 65 (249) ◽

pp. 921-923

Author(s):

Hergert D. G. Maschner ◽

Brian M. Fagan

Keyword(s):

North America ◽

Pacific Northwest ◽

Social Relations ◽

West Coast ◽

Bering Strait ◽

The West ◽

Franz Boas ◽

European Contact ◽

The Pacific ◽

The Rich

The west coast of North America encompasses some of the richest and most diverse maritime environments on earth. Even in their presentday impoverished state, they support major commercial fisheries, large whale migrations and dense sea mammal populations. From the earliest days of European exploration, visitors such as the redoubtable Captain James Cook commented on the rich culture of Pacific coast peoples (Beaglehole 1967). ‘Their life may be said to comprise a constant meal,’ remarked Spanish friar Pedro Fages of the Chumash peoples of the Santa Barbara Channel in southern California. At European contact, between the 16th and 18th centuries AD, the shores of the Bering Strait, the Pacific Northwest and parts of the California coast supported elaborate, sophisticated and sedentary huntergatherer peoples. These decimated and muchchanged societies still enjoyed elaborate ceremonials and intricate social relations as late as the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when pioneer anthropologists such as Franz Boas and John Harrington worked among them. From these researches have come classic stereotypes of west coast peoples as ‘complex huntergatherer societies’, some of which were organized in powerful chiefdoms. Peoples like the Tlingit, the Kwakiutl and the Chumash have become the epitome of complex huntergatherers in many archaeologists’ eyes.

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The emergence of cultural complexity on the west coast of North America

Antiquity ◽

10.1017/s0003598x00080777 ◽

1991 ◽

Vol 65 (249) ◽

pp. 974-976 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Brian M. Fagan ◽

Herbert D. G. Maschner

Keyword(s):

Native American ◽

North America ◽

Infectious Diseases ◽

West Coast ◽

Indigenous Populations ◽

Cultural Complexity ◽

The West ◽

Franz Boas ◽

European Contact ◽

American Society

It has been apparent for some time that the overbearingly rich ethnographic record from the west coast has had an almost numbing effect on thinking about later prehistory from Alaska to the Mexican border. ‘The tyranny of the ethnographic record’ has been a war-cry in archaeology for some time, so there is nothing new in this observation. ‘I hear very little about olden times’, said Franz Boas of the Kwakiutl as long ago as the 1880s, but the archaeologists that followed in his footsteps seem to have forgotten his remark. There has been a tendency to think of the ethnographic record of the 17th-19th centuries AD as a true record of the state of native American society along the west coast before European contact. As Maschner and Ames point out in their papers, nothing could be further from the truth. Ann Ramenovsky (1984), among others, has pointed out that indigenous populations were decimated by smallpox and other infectious diseases very soon after contact, and sometimes even before actual physical meetings with the newcomers. Some of the elaborate cultures observed by Boas and others were, in themselves, responses to changing conditions. The elaboration of the Northwest potlatch is, of course, a well known example of this phenomenon. Here, Ames and Maschner point out that populations may already have been in decline prior to Columbus.

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Recent Publications on American Indian Physical Anthropology

American Antiquity ◽

10.2307/277141 ◽

1954 ◽

Vol 19 (3) ◽

pp. 290-291

Author(s):

Erik K. Reed

Keyword(s):

South Africa ◽

New York ◽

North America ◽

American Indian ◽

Physical Anthropology ◽

American Antiquity ◽

New Methods ◽

Methods And Techniques ◽

Theoretical Considerations

The six papers reviewed by T. D. Stewart in the July 1952 issue of American Antiquity (Vol. XVIII, No. 1, pp. 71-72; also reviewed in the American ]ournal of Archaeology, Vol. 56, No. 4, October 1952, pp. 234- 236, by E. K. Reed) were given in the symposium on new methods and techniques of interpretation of the physical anthropology of the American Indian constituting the second half of the Viking Fund's Fourth Summer Seminar in Physical Anthropology, August 29 to September 3, 1949 (the first half being devoted to the Australopithecinae of South Africa). Abstracts of all papers were published in the Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, Vol. 4, 1948, New York (Viking Fund), 1949. In addition to the six papers presented in full in Physical Anthropology of the American Indian (ed. W. S. Laughlin, published by the Viking Fund, New York, 1951), these were: Morris Steggerda, “Anthropometry of the living American Indian“; Charles E. Snow, “The Sequence of Physical Types in North America“; and T. D. McCown, “The sequence of physical types in California.” Final discussion, of methods and theoretical considerations, was presided over by Stewart as moderator.

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