A SEMINAR SERIES OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE

Monday 17 April 2023 at 5.00-7.00pm (BST)

This is an online event. Register here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_0wSASflwTFiqKltZBL0cGA 

Franz Boas: The Emergence of the Anthropologist 

The Royal Anthropological Institute is pleased to present ‘Reviewer meets Reviewed’, a discussion between author Prof Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt (Agnes Scott College) and reviewer Prof Lee D Baker (Duke University).

Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt tells the remarkable story of Franz Boas, one of the leading scholars and public intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first book in a two-part biography, Franz Boas begins with the anthropologist’s birth in Minden, Germany, in 1858 and ends with his resignation from the American Museum of Natural History in 1906, while also examining his role in training professional anthropologists from his berth at Columbia University in New York City.

Zumwalt follows the stepping-stones that led Boas to his vision of anthropology as a four-field discipline, a journey demonstrating especially his tenacity to succeed, the passions that animated his life, and the toll that the professional struggle took on him. Zumwalt guides the reader through Boas’s childhood and university education, describes his joy at finding the great love of his life, Marie Krackowizer, traces his 1883 trip to Baffin Land, and recounts his efforts to find employment in the United States. A central interest in the book is Boas’s widely influential publications on cultural relativism and issues of race, particularly his book The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), which reshaped anthropology, the social sciences, and public debates about the problem of racism in American society.

Franz Boas presents the remarkable life story of an American intellectual giant as told in his own words through his unpublished letters, diaries, and field notes. Zumwalt weaves together the strands of the personal and the professional to reveal Boas’s love for his family and for the discipline of anthropology as he shaped it.

The book is published by University of Nebraska Press
More info here: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496215543/   

-----------------------------------------------

The review

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 28 (4) December 2022 pp.1396-1397

Lee D Baker 

There are several biographies of Franz Boas. However, many attempts to narrate and analyse his six decades of prodigious scholarship, his role in developing and leading professional institutions, his mentorship and placement of a generation of anthropologists, and his pugnacious toppling of ideas of racial superiority and inferiority while describing the relativity of cultures have fallen short.

Zumwalt is on her way to tackle this herculean set of goals in two volumes. This first volume details Boas's childhood in Germany, college and graduate education, initial research on Baffin and Vancouver Island, and peripatetic and precarious employment. It ends in 1906 when, at 48, Boas secures his first stable position at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

The historical record Zumwalt investigates is his professional and personal correspondence. She twines the professional letters with personal notes between his parents and wife, Marie. Zumwalt translated many of the family letters herself. Her careful analysis of this vast cache of epistolary missives enables her to develop gripping prose that captures Boas's emotions and ambitions, his anxieties and indignations. Zumwalt paints a poignant picture of an emerging anthropologist who was a gamey mix of hubris and insecurity.

We also learn that Boas was a lover and a fighter in equal measure. In the first half of the twentieth century, he would quickly become the confident and imperious ‘father’ of American anthropology. However, in the last decade of the nineteenth, Zumwalt describes a young father and budding anthropologist mired in a myriad of setbacks, personal tragedies, professional missteps, and just bad luck. Boas's future was anything but preordained.

Zumwalt organizes each of the eleven chapters around a significant milestone in Boas's early career, which begins with his upbringing in Minden, Germany, in the 1860s. He was plagued by brutal headaches that forced him to take respite in the countryside, where he learned to love natural history. Zumwalt describes Boas's college years in delightful detail. He took chemistry with Robert Wilhelm Bunsen (famous for his patented burner) while immersed in his other studies, especially mathematics. Boas also rented a piano for his small flat, and his incessant practising led to the first of many sabre duels. At 19, he was desperate to make friends but was ‘repulsed’ by the noisy, loud-mouthed, and ‘very unbearable Jewish society’ (p. 34). He was from a ‘refined, acculturated, and intellectual family’, and he was shocked by those who embraced and revelled in their Yiddishkeit (p. 35). He completed his studies in the northern seaport of Kiel, where he continued to engage in sabre duels, but this time against those who viewed him ‘simply and stereotypically as a Jew’ (p. 58).

After Boas completed his doctorate and took a well-earned vacation with family and friends in the Harz mountains, he met Marie Krackowizer, the daughter of his parents’ friends. They quickly fell for each other, forming a life-long relationship, and he remarked that ‘I am in heaven since I know that you love me’ (p. 86). Although desperately longing to be with his beloved, his passion for science separated them for over a year as he conducted his first scientific expedition among people whom he referred to as the ‘Eskimos’ of Baffin Island (p. 67). It was both arduous and dangerous, but he was sustained by writing love letters to Marie in a letter diary to be read on his return. Financially, his expedition was supported in part by his influential Uncle Abraham Jacobi, who would continue to provide funding for him to pursue his science, including donating to Columbia University to fund his first year as a lecturer there.
The narrative thread Zumwalt produces is driven by letters that chronicled the joys and sorrows, pain and exuberance that Boas and his family members felt when he worked tirelessly at the World's Columbian Exposition, when their daughter died, when he published his first monograph, when he was away so long conducting research in the Pacific Northwest, when he got caught up in a scandal when measuring schoolchildren while a docent at Clark University, or when he was appointed the Director of the massive Jesup North Pacific Expedition. This book is an intimate and extensive epistolary biography that does not interpret, judge, or make a political point, which of course many biographical works on Boas do.

Boas had two loves in his life, Marie and science. In the beginning, both appeared to be star-crossed, but Zumwalt demonstrates how, through his sheer will and determination, and a little help from Uncle Jacobi, he was able to flourish loving them both.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Your support makes all the difference to the RAI

The RAI needs your support. We are an independent charity dedicated to anthropology. Please can you help us with our essential work by making a donation today. With your support we can continue to deliver our inspiring online events programme and run our flagship events (London Anthropology Day, the RAI Film Festival and our international conferences). We can continue our essential support of anthropological research, to care for our archive, manuscript and photo collections and develop our education programmes to create globally informed citizens. Thank you for your interest in this event, we appreciate you supporting the RAI.

To make a donation
Donate with PayPal
Or send a Text Message to add a donation to your monthly mobile phone bill or pay as you credit :
• Text RAISE 3 to 70085 for a one-off donation of £3
• Text RAISE 5 to 70085 for a one-off donation of £5
• Text RAISE 10 to 70085 for a one-off donation of £10
• Text RAISE to 70460 to set up a regular gift of £3 each month, helping fund our vital work long term.

For more information and terms & conditions please go to: https://www.therai.org.uk/support-us/donate 

Have you considered becoming an RAI Fellow? https://www.therai.org.uk/joining
Many people from all over the world are affiliated to the RAI. We welcome anyone with an interest in the subject, whether working in an academic institution or not. Our affiliates include academic specialists, students, those working in fields where anthropology has practical applications, and those whose interest is captured by the subject matter of anthropology.

Want to hear more about the RAI's upcoming events? You can sign up to our mailing list here:
https://us7.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=94e3bf4c82be9b8d19299eb8a&id=f6438860ac