82 THENEWYORKER, AUGUST 26, 2019
Columbia. For many years, he was in-
stitutionally embattled, at least partly
because of his left-wing politics. King
says that at one point the anthropology
department was moved into three rooms
up seven flights of stairs in the journal-
ism building—one room for Boas, one
for a secretary, and the third left empty.
Somehow, Boas managed to train an
entire generation of scholars in what
was, until after the Second World War,
a tiny academic field. The historian Lois
Banner has calculated that forty-five
Ph.D.s in anthropology were awarded
in the United States between 1892 and
1926, and that nineteen of the recipients
studied under Boas. By 1930, she says,
most American anthropology depart-
ments were chaired by Boas students.
Like two other influential profes-
sors, John Dewey and Thorstein Veb-
len, both of whom were his exact con-
temporaries, Boas was a turgid writer.
But he was intellectually fearless; he
had energy and charisma; and though
he made a fierce impression—his face
was scarred from sabre duels he had
fought as a student in Germany—his
students were devoted to him. They
called him Papa Franz. He retired from
teaching in 1936, but remained active
professionally until his death, in 1942.
Boas was trained as a physicist. His
student work was in psychophysics, the
science that measures things like sen-
sory thresholds, and his dissertation
was an effort to determine the degree
to which light must increase in inten-
sity for people to perceive a change in
the color of water. This might seem an
utterly sterile topic for research, but
Boas reached an unorthodox conclu-
sion: it depends. Our perception of color
is a function of circumstances. Differ-
ent observers have different perceptions
depending on their expectations and
experiences, and those differences are
not innate. They are, consciously or un-
consciously, learned. It made no sense,
Boas decided, to talk about a general
law of sensory thresholds.
It’s an academic adage that a schol-
ar’s career consists of footnotes to the
dissertation, and, in a way, this was true
for Boas. He was an empiricist: he col-
lected facts, and he was not inclined to
theoretical speculation. But he thought
that the basic fact about human beings
is that the facts about them change, be-
cause circumstances change. Our lives
may be determined, by some combina-
tion of genes, environment, and culture,
but they are not predetermined.
Boas’s revolutionary work was a study,
undertaken for a congressional com-
mittee and published in 1911, on the
bodily form—head size, height, hair
color, age at pubescence—of the chil-
dren of recent European immigrants.
The impetus was public anxiety that
immigrants from southern and eastern
Europe would, through intermarriage,
dilute the racial stock (sometimes iden-
tified as “Nordic”). Boas’s finding, which
was that the cranial index of children
born in America differed from that of
children of the same background born
in Europe, rocked the field. It upset
long-believed claims that racial differ-
ences, including what we would now
call ethnic differences, are immutable.
The evidence proved, Boas said, “the
plasticity of human types.” It also showed
that variations within groups are greater
than variations between groups.
In 1911, this was not what most white
scientists and politicians wanted to hear.
Boas’s career spanned an exceptionally
active period of Aryan supremacy. Boas
witnessed the legalization of Jim Crow;
the widespread acceptance of social
Darwinism and eugenics; imperial ex-
pansion, including the American occu-
pation of the Philippines; drastic re-
strictions on immigration; the rise of
the second Ku Klux Klan; and the com-
ing to power of Adolf Hitler. (Boas was
Jewish.) Often, science was invoked as
a justification for colonization, segre-
gation, discrimination, exclusion, steril-
ization, or extermination. Boas devoted
his life to showing people that the sci-
ence they were relying on was bad sci-
ence. “He believed the world must be
made safe for differences,” Ruth Bene-
dict wrote when Boas died.I
f innate biological differences don’t
account for the observed variety of
roles and practices among human groups,
then something else must be at work.
Boas thought there were several factors,
and one was culture.
Using the term required some redefi-
nition. In the nineteenth century, “cul-
ture” was generally regarded as an attain-
ment; it was something societies acquired
as they advanced, marking a stage in thegrowth of a civilization. Boas is one of
the people responsible for the sense we
have in mind when we use the phrase
“culture in the anthropological sense”—
that is, the sense of culture as standing
for a way of life. One of his major con-
tributions was to show that pre-mod-
ern societies—“primitive” was the ac-
cepted term—have cultures in exactly
the same way that modern societies have
them, and that the minds of people who
live in those societies are no different
from the minds of everyone else.
Boas did his first field work with the
Inuit living on Baffin Island, in north-
ern Canada. He had intended to study
hunting patterns and the like, but the
more time he spent with the Inuit the
more he realized that their particular
way of doing things reflected a partic-
ular way of seeing the world. The Inuit
way was not the European way, but
it wasn’t inferior. In some respects, he
thought, it might be better. The Inuit
seemed, for example, to be more hos-
pitable than Europeans. Immersion in
Inuit life made him see his own culture
from the outside. He learned, as he put
it, “the relativity of all education. ”
Boas eventually concluded that there
is not one human culture but many, and
he started referring to “cultures,” in the
plural. He was engaged in ethnography,
and he believed that the job of the eth-
nographer was to disappear, in effect,
into the culture of the people being stud-
ied, to understand from the inside what
it means to be male or female, to give
or receive a gift, to bury one’s dead. The
ethnographer needed to get the society’s
jokes. This meant leaving one’s ethno-
centrism at home. “Get nowhere unless
prejudices first forgotten,” Ella Deloria
wrote in her notes on one of Boas’s lec-
tures. “Cultures are many; man is one.”“
A
ll my best students are women,”
Boas told an anthropologist friend
in 1920. Columbia College did not admit
women—it was the last of the Ivies to
go coed, in 1983—but the graduate
school and Teachers College did. And
Boas also taught at Barnard, which is
right across the street.
Ella Deloria came to Boas by way of
Teachers College. She was born on a
South Dakota reservation, and belonged
to an eminent Sioux family. Her father
was an Episcopal priest; her mother was PREVIOUS PAGE: IRVING BROWNING/THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY/GETTY