Anthropology and Modern Life

Franz Boas was born in Germany in 1858 and educated at the University of Kiel. His first anthropological fieldwork was among the Inuit in Northern Canada in 1883, a turning point in Boas’s life as he became fascinated with the role of culture. He began lecturing at the University of Columbia in 1896, establishing the first department of Anthropology in the United States and becoming Columbia’s first professor of Anthropology, a position he held for thirty-seven years. He influenced an astonishing variety of scholars and researchers, from the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict to the philosopher W. E. B. DuBois and writer Zora Neale Hurston. Boas is the early-twentieth-century scholar most responsible for discrediting the then-dominant scientific theories of racial superiority. Through his elaboration of cultural relativism as an alternative theoretical framework, he came to have an enormous influence on the development of American anthropology. The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), demonstrated that there was no such thing as a ‘pure’ race or a superior one. His books were banned in Hitler's Germany. 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.

"…for a college student to read the Bhagavad Gita in a Great Books class, for racism to be rejected as both morally bankrupt and self-evidently stupid, and for anyone, regardless of their gender expression, to claim workplaces and boardrooms as fully theirs—if all of these things are not innovations or aspirations but the regular, taken-for-granted way of organizing society, then we have the ideas championed by the Boas circle to thank for it." - Charles King, author of Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century"…the father of American cultural anthropology and the scholar who taught generations how to think about human diversity without hierarchy." - Kwame Anthony Appiah, The New York Review of Books

• Foreword to the Routledge Classics Edition Regna Darnell Introduction Herbert S. Lewis 1. What Is Anthropology? 2. The Problem of Race 3. The Interrelation of Races 4. Nationalism 5. Eugenics 6. Criminology 7. Stability of Culture 8. Education 9. Modern Civilisation and Primitive Culture Afterword Herbert S Lewis References Index