![]() ![]() In 1886 he made his first three-month fieldtrip to Vancouver Island. In Berlin during 1885 Boas was captivated by the museum collections of Northwest Coast art he was assigned to catalogue he also interviewed some Bella Coola Indians then in Europe with an American Wild West troupe. In addition, Boas published popular accounts of his fieldwork in German and English (see Stocking 1974: 44-55). His ethnography The Central Eskimo (1888) was published by the Bureau of American Ethnology, then the principal organization for anthropological research in the United States. Although he travelled some 3,000 miles during his fieldwork year, Boas approached participant observation as he hunted with his hosts, acquired a deepening knowledge of their language and interpersonal etiquette, interviewed informants and observed performances of folk-tale telling (Sanjek 1990: 193-5). Boas discovered that something - culture - intervened, and that Inuit activities and knowledge were more than a product of environmental conditions. His objective was to compare the physical environment, which he mapped and measured objectively, with the knowledge of it held by its inhabitants. Boas as ethnographerĭuring 1883-4 Boas undertook his first field-work, a study of the Inuit of Baffin Island. Still, American and world anthropology remain firmly attached to frameworks that Boas established, and many of the ideas he wrestled with continue to haunt the discipline (Wolf 1994), if often in non-Boasian incarnations. Boas’s theoretical contributions are underappreciated in contemporary anthropology, in part because so much of his legacy is taken for granted. His major ethnographic research among the Inuit and Native Americans of the Northwest Coast was complemented by his work in language and linguistics and biological anthropology, his influence as teacher, and his professional and social activism (Kroeber et al. Franz Boas professionalized the holistic study of anthropology from the 1880s into the twentieth century.Born in Germany in 1858, Franz Boas was the dominant figure in American anthropology from the late 1890s through the 1920s. Leibniz, researchers in these fields categorized peoples primarily according to their languages. Ethnography and ethnology focused not on “other” cultures but on all peoples of all eras. ![]() Before Boas delves deeper into issues concerning anthropology’s academic origins to present a groundbreaking study that reveals how ethnology and ethnography originated during the eighteenth rather than the nineteenth century, developing parallel to anthropology, or the “natural history of man.”īefore Boas argues that anthropology and ethnology were separate sciences during the Age of Reason, studying racial and ethnic diversity, respectively. The history of anthropology has been written from multiple viewpoints, often from perspectives of gender, nationality, theory, or politics. Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press
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