Anthropology in the Ironic Mode
The Work of Franz Boas
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2920693 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Arnold Krupat, Franz Boas |
| Year | 1988 |
| Issue | 19/20 |
| Pages | 105 |
| Publication date | 1988-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social Text (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0164-2472 • E-ISSN: 1527-1951 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/466181 |
| OpenAlex | W2330715180 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 2 |
Born in Minden, Westphalia, in 1858, Franz Boas was clearly an extraordinary figure, not only a teacher, but a maitre in the grand sense, whose students became disciples, and, in several cases (Kroeber, Mead, Sapir, Benedict, Radin), virtual masters themselves. Boas published extensively on linguistics, on folklore, art, race, and, of course, ethnography, a fabled five foot shelf, of materials on the Kwakiutl. Yet, Boas did not, like his contemporaries Sigmund Freud and Ferdinand de Saussure, what Foucault refers to as a field of discursivity, a written discourse which gives rise to the endless possibility of further discourse, or a discipline, like psychoanalysis or structural linguistics. The exact nature of Boas' achievement remains to be specified. In 1888, Boas went to Clark University where he taught anthropology until 1892. He held positions with the World's Columbian exposition in Chicago and at the American Museum of Natural History in New York before moving, 1896, to Columbia University as a lecturer in physical anthropology. He received promotion to a professorship in 1899, a position which he held until his retirement in 1936. Boas died-in the arms of Ievi-Strauss-in 1942. Boas' influence from his academic base at Columbia was enormous. By 1926, for example, as George Stocking has noted,1 every academic department of anthropology in the United States was headed by one of Boas' students. That the Winnebago were studied by Paul Radin or the Pawnee much later by Gene Weltfish, that Edward Sapir, and later, Melville Jacobs gathered Native texts is largely due to Boas. Both Boas' admirers-who are many-and his detractors-they have been fewer-have agreed only on the issue central to their disagreement, the question of Boas' contribution to a science of culture. Shortly after his death, for example, Ruth Benedict declared that having found anthropology a collection of wild guesses and a happy hunting ground for the romantic lover of primitive things; [Boas] left it a discipline in which theories could be tested.2 Alfred Kroeber, the first to take a doctorate in anthropology with Boas at Columbia, wrote that Boas had found anthropology a playfield and jousting ground of opinion; he left it a science.3 In
George (robot · History of anthropology · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies
| Citations per year | 0.17 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1991 - 2018 (28) |
| Highly cited | No |