Franz Boas Biography - Father of American Anthropology
After studying at various German universities such as Heidelberg, Bonn, he received his doctorate from Kiel. He rejected cultural evolutionism and diffusionism, since he did not believe that the same events in separate places and times could come from universal laws that would direct the human spirit. He was a representative of the relativistic school and, in turn, a forerunner of historical particularism.
In his early days he studied physics and geography, a discipline in which he received his doctorate by conducting a study on the color of sea water. In 1886, during research, he traveled to northern Canada to study different water springs. He got lost and was rescued by the Inuit. As a result of this fact, he decided to stay in the United States and became an anthropologist, going on to teach at Columbia University, where he created and directed the department of Anthropology.
In 1921 he carried out work related to the consequences of migration; These consisted of comparing the first and second generation of immigrants in the populations of origin, which had remained sedentary. The objective of these studies was to measure the impact of the new environment on migrants.
He was the founder of the American Anthropological Association and the American Anthropologist magazine which was first published in 1898. In 1931 he was president of the Anglo-American Association for the Development of Science. When the German NSDAP denounced the "Jewish science" (attack not only against him, but also against Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein), Boas responded to them in writing along with 8000 more intellectuals that what mattered was the development of scientific knowledge, the characters ethnic and religious choices were completely irrelevant.
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