Franz Boas: The Emergence of the Anthropologist | Franz Boas: Shaping Anthropology and Fostering Social Justice

Review By Brian Gobbett

May 27, 2025

Douglas Cole, in his introductory comments to Franz Boas: The Early Years, 1858-1906 (1999), noted that while Franz Boas’ intellectual development had generated much debate — then, as now, both critical and sympathetic in nature — the intimate and personal life of Boas and his relationships remained obscure.  Drawing upon the rich and largely untapped Boas collections at the American Philosophical Society (APS), Cole sought to reveal “the personal context and [to offer] a correction of much of the apocrypha that surrounds the man” (5). In his pursuit of this ambitious task, Cole was successful, although only partially so, for his sudden passing in 1997 prevented the second volume from being completed, a volume which was to cover Boas’ transformation from a university professor to the most influential anthropologist in the United States.

Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt — who has previously authored a short but innovative study on Boas’ visit to Atlanta University in 1906 — has taken up Cole’s agenda and brought it to conclusion, all while extending his approach with a meticulous methodology that is deeply immersed in Boas’ personal and professional correspondence and unpublished papers. Boas epistolary output was vast — the APS alone contains over 60,000 items — and drawing upon these and other primary sources, Zumwalt has constructed a narrative that traverses her subject’s life according to thematic episodes. The Emergence of the Anthropologist focuses upon the period between his birth in Miden, Germany, in 1858 and his temporary and ultimately permanent appointment at Columbia University beginning in 1896. The second volume, Shaping Anthropology and Fostering Social Justice, is a particularly rich interpretation that explores his formative role in establishing anthropology as a discipline, in advancing his professional agenda on the field through an impressive number of PhD students, and in his critique of racial science in the first decades of the twentieth century, both in the USA and abroad. There is a great amount of detail in these lengthy volumes and perhaps it is of some value to focus briefly on Zumwalt’s methodological approach and, second, on her view of Boas as a force for social justice.

Zumwalt began her archival research at the APS in the mid-1990s and her immense research allows her to explore repeatedly the intersection of Boas’ personal and professional lives. As he prepared to leave for his Arctic research in 1883 — a journey which was to become one of the formative experiences of his professional life — Boas wrote to Marie Krackowizer, whom he later married, “Can you be angry with me that my profession makes me go?” (I: 90), a sentiment that was to be repeated many times throughout his career. Likewise, in times of personal uncertainty (I:30), depression (I: 240-41) or deep loss, Boas often oriented himself according his career: writing to his son Ernst, Boas reflected that “unfortunately I have not the light spirit of others”  and, when he did not work, “I can think of nothing but Trudel and Heini [two of his children who had died in adulthood]” (II: 275). Following the death of Marie in 1929 from a hit and run accident, Gladys Reichard, an instructor at Barnard College and former Boas student, noted that Boas’ secretary, Ruth Bryan, had come to his house “yesterday and worked all day,” while Elsie Clews Parsons quickly wrote and invited Boas to a field trip in Mexico “as a way of distancing himself from his tragic loss” (II: 276). Such moments of intimacy are, of course, common in biography, but are also indicative of Zumwalt’s desire to frame her appeal to evidence from the archival and personal toward the professional and public.

Central to Zumwalt’s interpretation of Boas is the formation and maturation of his societal conscience and desire for social justice. Over the course of his career, his various concerns (amongst others) included articulating a critique of biological determinism and cultural evolution, arguing for some measure of cultural relativism (although he never made use of this term), advocating for pacifism in the midst of the Great War, promoting the education of women and Indigenous scholars, and placing refugee Jewish scientists in the United States accompanied by a very public shaming of the “Nordic nonsense” in the 1930s. Yet, the so-called “Boasian paradox” is also evident, and Boas participated in, for example, removing Indigenous remains from graves (I: 181), made frequent reference to the “Vanishing Indian” and salvage anthropology, and, in 1905 at least, could still write about “the average size of the Negro brain” and its correlation to mental ability (II:100). Significantly, Zumwalt notes that by 1906 Boas’ correspondence begins to reveal a desire to compile substantial research on race from both a scientific and, as Boas wrote, from a “humanitarian point of view” (II:100). Some of this research found itself into a report for the United States Immigration Commission (1911), a study that has been regarded by some as “an intellectual landmark on the path toward racial egalitarianism” (II:115) and which acted in opposition to the desires of the Commission. That same year Boas published The Mind of Primitive Man, a collection of essays written over the course of almost two decades, and which, despite its title, critiqued the “naïve assumption” (as Boas described it) of European supremacy and racial determinism. The role of Boas as a liberator of race prejudice has not gone unchallenged and scholars such as Mark Anderson and Audra Simpson have sought to portray Boas as a less sympathetic figure in this regard. Zumwalt does not engage these criticisms at length — save to note that Anderson has not paid sufficient heed to The Mind of Primitive Man (II: 119) — for her biographical concern lies elsewhere and, in her deliberate reconstruction, she places greater weight on W.E.B. Du Bois remembering “the profound and riveting impression” that Boas had made on him during his 1906 visit (II:119-20). Likewise, Dan Cranmer, who had worked with Boas on the Kwakwaka’wakw language, wrote to Boas’ daughter following her father’s death in 1942 that “oh my dear Helene if only sympathy were like waves of light, how the rays would pour from my heart to illumine the gloomy veil of grief” and that the “people sang some mourning songs [for] … he was well known amongst the … people (II:428).

In a special issue of BC Studies (125 &126 Spring/Summer 2000), the contributors honoured Doug Cole for his multi-faceted contribution to the study of British Columbia.  While Zumwalt was not a contributor to that issue, she notes the foundational nature of his work (I: xvi) and has produced a generational biography that constitutes a vital source for subsequent scholarship, both on Franz Boas and for understanding the complexities of Boasian influences on historic and contemporary societies.