Franz Boas

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Franz Boas : biography

July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942

Between 1901 and 1911, Columbia University produced seven PhDs in anthropology. Although by today’s standards this is a very small number, at the time it was sufficient to establish Boas’s Anthropology Department at Columbia as the preeminent anthropology program in the country. Moreover, many of Boas’s students went on to establish anthropology programs at other major universities.Briggs, Charles, and Richard Baumann 1999 "The Foundation of All Future Researches": Franz Boas. George Hunt, Native American Texts, and the Construction of Modernity. American Quarterly 51:479–528.

Boas’s first doctoral student at Columbia was Alfred L. Kroeber (1901),Jacknis, I. (2002), The First Boasian: Alfred Kroeber and Franz Boas, 1896–1905. American Anthropologist, 104: 520–532. who, along with fellow Boas student Robert Lowie (1908), started the anthropology program at the University of California, Berkeley. He also trained William Jones (1904), one of the first Native American Indian anthropologists (the Fox nation) who was killed while conducting research in the Philippines in 1909, and Albert B. Lewis (1907). Boas also trained a number of other students who were influential in the development of academic anthropology: Frank Speck (1908) who trained with Boas but received his PhD. from the University of Pennsylvania and immediately proceeded to found the anthropology department there; Edward Sapir (1909) and Fay-Cooper Cole (1914) who developed the anthropology program at the University of Chicago; Alexander Goldenweiser (1910), who, with Elsie Clews Parsons (who received her doctorate in sociology from Columbia in 1899, but then studied ethnology with Boas), started the anthropology program at the New School for Social Research; Leslie Spier (1920) who started the anthropology program at the University of Washington together with his wife Erna Gunther, also one of Boas’s students, and Melville Herskovits (1923) who started the anthropology program at Northwestern University. He also trained John R. Swanton (who studied with Boas at Columbia for two years before receiving his doctorate from Harvard in 1900), Paul Radin (1911), Ruth Benedict (1923), Gladys Reichard (1925) who had begun teaching at Barnard College in 1921 and was later promoted to the rank of professor, Ruth Bunzel (1929), Alexander Lesser (1929), Margaret Mead (1929), and Gene Weltfish (who defended her dissertation in 1929, although she did not officially graduate until 1950 when Columbia reduced the expenses required to graduate), E. Adamson Hoebel (1934), Jules Henry (1935), Ashley Montagu (1938).

His students at Columbia also included Mexican anthropologist Manuel Gamio, who earned his M.A. after studying with Boas from 1909 to 1911, and became the founding director of Mexico’s Bureau of Anthropology in 1917; Clark Wissler, who received his doctorate in psychology from Columbia University in 1901, but proceeded to study anthropology with Boas before turning to research Native Americans; Esther Schiff, later Goldfrank, worked with Boas in the summers of 1920 to 1922 to conduct research among the Cochiti and Laguna Pueblo Indians in New Mexico; Gilberto Freyre, who shaped the concept of "racial democracy" in Brazil;That Freyre was ever Boas’s student is under contention. Boas was opposed to racism, as were students such as Ashley Montagu, etc. It seems unlikely that the "father" of the modern racist theory of Lusotropicalism had ever worked closely with Boas. "The invention of Freyre included his self-invention. For example, he too presented himself as if he had been a follower of Boas ever since his student days." See Peter Burke, Maria Lucia G. Pallares-Burke: "Gilberto Freyre: social theory in the tropics", Peter Lang, 2008, p. 19 Viola Garfield, who carried forth Boas’s Tsimshian work; Frederica de Laguna, who worked on the Inuit and the Tlingit; and anthropologist, folklorist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston, who graduated from Barnard College, the women’s college associated with Columbia, in 1928.