Franz Boas: The Emergence of the Anthropologist is the first of two volumes of a biography of Franz Boas, the central figure in the intellectual and institutional foundation of the discipline of anthropology in the United States. Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt notes that A. L. Kroeber, writing at the time of Boas’s death, lamented that there was little in the public record on Boas’s early years, and that Boas himself was not given to reminiscence (xx). In this volume, Zumwalt, making use of previously unpublished letters, diaries, and field notes deposited with the American Philosophical Society, seeks to broaden and deepen the perspective on Boas the man. The book is billed as a “life story” and that is what it primarily is. Zumwalt asserts that her “work twines together the personal and the professional” (xix), and while we are given great detail about Boas’s personal life and his efforts to establish himself in a secure professional position, the book is not, at root, an intellectual biography.
Beginning with Boas’s birth in Minden, Westphalia, in 1858, the book follows his life course through his early home life, gymnasium, university (including his dueling), the army, his doctoral work in physics on the color of sea water, and his work on the polar Eskimo of Baffin Island in 1883-1884 that served as his Habilitation, which accredited him to teach at a German university. Almost immediately following his Habilitation, however, Boas left for the United States. Even before his switch from geography to ethnology (primarily a result of his Eskimo research), Boas felt that the academy in the United States was less structured and more open to development. German universities were too embedded in hierarchy and tradition for him to realize his own scientific plans. Also, Boas longed to see his fiancée, Marie Krackowizer, whom he had first met in Germany in 1881 and who was then residing with relatives in New York. Boas would remain in the United States for the rest of his eighty-four years with only occasional visits to Germany.
In the United States, Boas immediately began a frantic search for employment (recent Ph.D.s might take inspiration, and perhaps instruction, from Boas’s efforts) so he could pursue his professional career and marry Marie. He made as many contacts as he could in ethnographic circles. He was employed to conduct field surveys of the tribes along the coast of British Columbia by the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He landed a permanent position as an assistant editor for the journal Science and part-time work with the Bureau of American Ethnology to develop his ethnographic materials. In the meantime, Boas was actively engaged in networking and institution-building: he was the editor of the North American section of Geographisches Jahrbuch; assistant editor of the newly founded Journal of American Folklore, and he was actively trying to revive the American Ethnological Society. Eventually Boas was offered a position at the newly created Clark University under the presidency of G. Stanley Hall. Unfortunately, after three years, Boas, along with many of his colleagues, resigned because of budget challenges, maladministration, and the loss of enthusiasm by benefactor Jonas Clark for his university project. A good number of Boas’s departing colleagues were scooped up by the Rockefeller-funded University of Chicago. Boas was not.
Boas did find employment as the assistant to Frederic Ward Putnam, who was in charge of the Department of Ethnology of the World’s Columbian Exposition that opened in Chicago in 1893. Putnam was the curator of the Peabody Museum of American Archeology and Ethnology and a professor of archeology and ethnology at Harvard University. Putnam and Boas assembled ethnological artifacts from all over the world for display, many of which were slated to become the core collection of the new museum (the Field Columbian Museum) that would be established in Chicago following the fair. Boas was also tasked with creating Mayan ruins and establishing a living Kwakiutl village. There were other exhibitions of living peoples that were presented along the mile-long Midway Plaisance—e.g., Dahomey village, Chinese village, Javanese settlement, —but these were not part of the remit of the Department of Ethnology. The problems of the exhibition for Putnam and Boas far exceeded those of mounting a large exhibition in the short time they had. There was fierce political infighting over exhibit space and resources, for which Putnam was unprepared and at which he was inadept, and both Putnam and Boas were thoroughly dejected and exhausted at the Exposition’s end. Boas even suffered something of a nervous breakdown. Nevertheless, despite the problems, during the Exposition Boas managed to gather anthropometric data; do some work on Kwakiutl song; and most importantly, train his informant, interpreter, collaborator, and friend George Hunt, to transcribe the Kwak’wala language—an effort that eventually resulted in thousands of pages of published Kwakiutl texts.
Putnam hoped to direct the new Columbian Museum, and Boas hoped to direct its Anthropological Department. Both were to be outmaneuvered and disappointed. Boas left Chicago unemployed. Eventually Putnam was made curator of the Department of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Putnam was able to throw small bits of work Boas’s way, and he continually extended the hope that he would be able to bring Boas on board at the museum. Putnam constantly advocated for Boas and was as good as his word. With Boas’s uncle, Abraham Jacobi, he managed to get Boas appointed as Lecturer in Physical Anthropology at Columbia College and Assistant in the Department of Anthropology and Natural History at the American Museum. Boas was finally on a path that could promise some security and leave him free to do the kind of work he wanted.
From his joint positions at Columbia and the American Museum of Natural History, Boas was able to convince museum president Morris K. Jesup to fund a North Pacific Expedition to explore the physical and cultural relationships between Asia and America. When the trustees of the museum proved unwilling to fund the project, Jesup undertook to fund it himself. The Jesup North Pacific Expedition would unfold over many years, involve many researchers, and drain the enthusiasm of both Jesup and Boas. For some reason, Boas was never able to write up the final report of the expedition that Jesup so wished to see before he died. Boas did give a paper in 1908 on “The Results of the Jesup Expedition,” nine months after Jesup’s death, but a final volume distilling the research was never to appear. Nevertheless, the expedition was one of the most ambitious and extensive anthropological projects ever undertaken, and it resulted in eleven published volumes in the Jesup Expedition series, amounting to more than six thousand pages not counting ancillary articles and publications.
Boas did get his professorship at Columbia, but not without substantial help from Putnam and Jacobi, and the book ends in the last years of the nineteenth century with Boas deeply involved in trying to establish the American Anthropological Association and in putting the journal American Anthropologist on a sound intellectual and financial footing.
Although Zumwalt’s Franz Boas is not an intellectual biography, it does address a number of elements that speak to Boas’s intellectual views as well as to personal traits that contribute to an understanding of his drive to establish the field of anthropology. From a very young age, Boas was exceedingly ambitious. He felt that he would not be happy unless he accomplished something exceptional (30). (Boas was also fascinated by fairytales [16], a predilection I have informally noted among a number of folklorists.) While Boas’s letters to Marie, which are liberally sprinkled throughout the volume, evidence his love, they also demonstrate his professional commitment. He took himself off to the Arctic for a whole year soon after meeting Marie and later went on repeated months-long trips to the Pacific Northwest, even though he clearly disliked being away from his family. Likewise, he resisted the entreaties of his parents, whom he dearly loved, to return and establish himself at a German university.
Boas’s approach to his research in Baffin Land revealed something of his future orientation as an anthropologist. He tried to learn the language even before he arrived. He did not stay in an encampment around a station to work with the local population as did many other explorers, but rather spent two-thirds of his time living with the people in their tupiks and igloos. He traveled great distances by foot, boat, and dogsled under harsh weather conditions and participated in Inuit hunting activities. He encouraged the people to draw their own maps of the land, and on his maps, he recorded the Inuit place names rather than giving them European ones. One hundred years later, when local elders were presented with Boas’s maps and place- name lists, they knew about forty percent of them and were reminded of another thirty percent. The other names had been lost to them. The elders were amazed that these place names had been preserved on German maps from a century before while there were still no maps with Inuit place names published in Canada (126-27). Boas also questioned the sense of superiority that Europeans presumed in relation to so-called “savage” peoples. He found the Inuit warm, sharing, helpful, uncomplaining, and hospitable. If superstitious beliefs obstructed their progress, Boas noted, the beliefs of Europeans obstructed their own progress as well (115).
There are a number of situations that call into question Boas’s behavior in the pursuit of scientific data. One was his penchant for removing skeletal materials from gravesites—grave robbing. He knew this was highly offensive to the people that he was studying, for on Baffin Island he once refrained from collecting some skulls because he was traveling with “my Eskimos” (118). When he acquired skeletal material in British Columbia, he reflected: “It is most unpleasant work to steal bones, but … someone has to do it” (181). In one case, Boas had to maneuver adroitly to avoid an investigation by the Canadian police. Boas then contracted with professional grave robbers who provided skulls and skeletons to American scientists. These robbers also came under increasing police scrutiny, but they managed to ship Boas what they had collected.
Boas was aware of the great danger of sending native peoples for exhibition in Europe and America. He had witnessed the devastation wrought by European diseases—measles, diphtheria—among the Inuit he had studied on Baffin Island. In 1886, while working for Adolph Bastian at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, Boas began work on the language of nine Bella Coola Indians who had been brought back by Johan and Bernard Jacobsen for a promoter of Völkerschauen (exotic peoples shows). Jacobsen had previously brought Inuit from Labrador, all of whom died in the first months of their visit. Boas wrote about his work with the Bella Coola for the Berliner Tageblatt and questioned the ethics of exhibiting foreign peoples when there was so much danger to their health when removed from their native environments (155). Yet he accepted the charge of establishing the Kwakiutl village at the World’s Columbia Exposition. In 1897, Boas asked Robert Peary to bring a middle-aged Greenland Eskimo to stay for a winter in New York. Peary brought three men, one woman, a boy, and a girl. Peary exhibited these people to raise money for his return voyage to the Arctic. Morris Jesup found himself in the unexpected position of having to put these people up at the Museum of Natural History. All the Eskimo got sick, and four of the six died there (307-09).
As a folklorist, I was somewhat disappointed that Zumwalt did not make more of the importance of folklore in Boas’s work. Folklore and mythology were special kinds of data for Boas, and he collected myths and tales from the very start of his polar research and throughout his extensive work with the tribes of the Pacific Northwest. For Boas, coherent texts were essential to rigorous language study; crucial evidence of historical relations between peoples; the rationalizations of traditional forms of behavior; moreover, they formed a set of unifying symbols and provided unique insights into the dominant ideas and emotional dispositions of a people. Folklore, for Boas, was central, not peripheral. Of course, these observations have been noted by others—and by Boas himself—but I would have hoped to find it more developed here rather than merely alluded to in passing.
Franz Boas: The Emergence of the Anthropologist reads well. I learned much about the man and his efforts to build a career that I did not know or, at best, knew only vaguely. There are some things I probably did not need to know, but that is the nature of biography. Zumwalt has woven together a variety of materials from a range of sources into a comprehensive and coherent story. I certainly will read the second volume when it is published even if I am not called upon to review it.
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[Review length: 2155 words • Review posted on March 31, 2020]