Franz Boas

Franz Boas was one of the principal founders of modern American Anthropology and Ethnology. He was born in Minden, Germany, west of Hannover, and studied physics, geography, and geology at various universities, finishing his Ph.D. in Kiel in 1881. In the holistic tradition established by Franz Boas in the USA at the beginning of the twentieth century, anthropology was conceived as comprising four subfields: archaeology, physical (now `biological') anthropology, linguistics (now `linguistic anthropology'), and ethnology (now `sociocultural anthropology'). Boas contributed to all four of his named branches of anthropology, in studies ranging from racial classification to linguistic description focusing primarily on the languages and the peoples of northwestern U.S. and Canada.