September 27, 2022 ● The New Books Network 一 Franz Boas is remembered today as one of the most important figures in the history of anthropology. In the United States, he is widely created with creating the modern field of anthropology or at least being one of the key people involved in its creation. And yet despite this fact, no biography of the life of Franz Boas has ever been written -- until now. In the first volume of what will be a two-volume work, Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt (Professor of Anthropology and Dean Emerita, Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Georgia, USA) tracks Boas's life from his birth in 1858 to his permanent appointment at Columbia University at the close of the nineteenth century.
In this interview, channel host Alex Golub (associate professor of anthropology, University of Hawaii at Mānoa) talks with Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt about the young man behind the legend, including Boas's romance with his wife Marie Krackowizer, the years he spent in the academic wilderness trying to find a permanent position, and his remarkable ability to balance life and family work. Along the way Rosemary and Alex discuss her writing project more broadly: How can we reconcile the image of Boas as a social justice activist with the fact that he trafficked in human remains? Would Boas have been a success if he did not have rich relatives to support him in what we would today call his 'adjunct years'? How do you successfully spend twenty years writing a two-volume biography of a prolific scholar who lived to be 82? For answers to these questions and more, please give a listen to this interview about Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt's "Franz Boas: The Emergence of the Anthropologist" (University of Nebraska Press, 2019).
Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt tells the remarkable story of Franz Boas, one of the leading scholars and public intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first book in a two-part biography, Franz Boas begins with the anthropologist’s birth in Minden, Germany, in 1858 and ends with his resignation from the American Museum of Natural History in 1906, while also examining his role in training professional anthropologists from his berth at Columbia University in New York City.
Zumwalt follows the stepping-stones that led Boas to his vision of anthropology as a four-field discipline, a journey demonstrating especially his tenacity to succeed, the passions that animated his life, and the toll that the professional struggle took on him. Zumwalt guides the reader through Boas’s childhood and university education, describes his joy at finding the great love of his life, Marie Krackowizer, traces his 1883 trip to Baffin Land, and recounts his efforts to find employment in the United States. A central interest in the book is Boas’s widely influential publications on cultural relativism and issues of race, particularly his book "The Mind of Primitive Man" (1911), which reshaped anthropology, the social sciences, and public debates about the problem of racism in American society.
"Franz Boas: The Emergence of the Anthropologist" presents the remarkable life story of an American intellectual giant as told in his own words through his unpublished letters, diaries, and field notes. Zumwalt weaves together the strands of the personal and the professional to reveal Boas’s love for his family and for the discipline of anthropology as he shaped it.
