Franz Boas

[Marcus Marulus]

Franz Boas and the Rise of Modern Culture

Fri, 05/25/2007

Originally published in three parts in 2000 at Suite 101 when I was the editor of their Jewish-American History section. That section disappeared in a subsequent re-design of the site. This is a compilation of those pieces, edited to improve the flow as a single essay.

Franz Boas (1858-1942) was, arguably, the founder of modern American anthropology. Although there were students of human culture working in America before Boas' immigration from Germany in the 1890s--notably Lewis Henry Morgan, Franklin Cushing, and Matilda Coxe Stevenson--none had the depth of scholarly sophistication nor the institutional vision that Boas brought to the field and which allowed him to become the primary shaping influence on the development not only of anthropology as a professional vocation but on the way we frame and examine issues of human behaviour even to this day.

Boas was one of a number of highly-assimilated German-Jewish intellectuals who came of age in the increasingly conservative, post-1848, Bismarckian Germany. The son of active liberal Jewish parents, Boas was a promising student of physics and geography during the time that Bismarck was consolidating an alliance of Junker landowners, high-ranking civil bureaucrats, and military officers into a unified German state. Boas saw his future in Germany as increasingly dim, as growing anti-Semitism made it less and less likely for a Jew to receive a teaching position, even in the secondary schools.

With this in mind, Boas began looking to America as a likely place to build his career as early as 1882 (though he did not permanently immigrate until over a decade later). He also saw America as a place where he could develop and refine some of the ideas he had been working with as an academic. While working as a physicist on the colour of water, Boas had discovered that he often had difficulty distinguishing between, say, bluish-white and yellowish-white of certain intensities. Rather than simply accept that the colours were nearly identical, Boas wondered if his inability to distinguish between these colours reflected a learned pattern of perception (or, in this case, non-perception) native to his culture. This observation paralleled concerns he wanted to examine in geography, about the way that people experienced and perceived their physical environments. With these questions in mind, Boas set out for Baffinland in the American Arctic to do research among the Eskimo, research which would initiate a chain of events that would ultimately and profoundly shape the development of anthropology and the concept of culture.
Living among the Eskimo has been described by Boas' closest students, and indeed by Boas himself in his later years, as a sort of "conversion experience". His writings at the time, however, portray this period more as a time of deepening and affirming the convictions he had already developed in Germany, both as a scholar and as a Jewish liberal finding himself increasingly marginalized in Bismarck's Germany. He was especially struck by the integrated society of the Eskimo, the sense of shared destiny that demanded the cooperation and inclusion of all its members--a notable contrast to his own position in a German society marked by divisions of class, occupation, and religion (understood at the time in terms of "race"). On his return to Germany the following year, Boas committed himself to ethnological study (though still within the boundaries of geography), going to work in the Royal Ethnographic Museum in Berlin while awaiting an appointment at the University of Berlin.

Boas' deepened interest in the ethnographic study of humankind led him back into the field in 1886 and 1888, this time to the Pacific Northwest where he would encounter the people who would come to form the basis of his anthropological career, the Kwakiutl. While there, he was again faced with what had become a familiar problem--the differing perception of physical phenomena, this time speech sounds. Boas seems to have had an incredible gift for languages and music, often collecting and transcribing significant vocabularies and musical cycles over the course of a visit of only a few days. However, he noticed in his own transcriptions significant variations in the sounds he thought he was hearing. For instance, he transcribed the Tlingit word for "fear" alternately as "baec" and "pas". Previous researchers had ascribed these alternations to a lack of sophistication and specificity on the part of the "unrefined", "barbaric" Indians. Boas, conditioned by his earlier work on colour, saw them instead as indications of the researchers' unfamiliarity with the sounds of the language studied. In other words, the same sounds were perceived differently by researchers bound by a cultural and linguistic framework different from that of his or her subjects.

The importance of these findings, published in the 1888 essay "On Alternating Sounds", cannot be overestimated. With this essay, Boas planted the seed of what would become "cultural relativism", upsetting both the racial-scientific and cultural evolutionist models of human difference, both of which saw white, Western European Christianity as the universal norm from which all other ways of life were deviations which reflected the inferiority of non-Western and non-Christian peoples. Boas saw these people not as examples of what "we" once were like, nor as examples of retardation or degeneration making them unfit for inclusion in the modern, "civilized" world, but as alternatives to Western lifeways worthy of study and appreciation in their own right. As we will see, the insights developed in Boas' early career would continue to influence his work as he attacked the pseudo-scientific racism, anti-Semitism, and nativism which underlay the political and social reality of the West in the years leading up to World War II. They would also form the basis for a study of human culture which sought to understand human behaviour on it own terms, rather than in relation to the expectations and moral judgment of the West.

***

In the early 1880s, Franz Boas took up what would become permanent residence in the United States, working as a docent at Clark University in Massachusetts before accepting a job at the 1893 Colombian Exposition in Chicago. As part of the Expo's goal of putting American culture and technology on display, a large collection of contemporary native handicrafts, archaeological artifacts, and even native peoples (the so-called "ethnographic zoo") were displayed, including representations of Boas' subject tribes, the Kwakiutl and Eskimo of the Pacific Northwest. As the Expo wound to a close, the question of what to do with all the materials amassed began to be raised. Boas was instrumental in solving this problem, helping to lobby for the creation of a natural history museum in Chicago. After department store magnate Marshall Field contributed a million dollars to the project, Chicago's Field Museum was born, and Boas took up the helm as interim curator, a position he assumed would become permanent. Behind-the-scenes political machinations prevented this, and Boas left the Field Museum in fury when the permanent curatorship was offered to another man.

In 1895, Boas came to settle in New York, where he had been offered a position at the American Museum of Natural History. A year later, he began teaching at Columbia University, where he would become, over several decades, the preeminent figure in the newly professionalizing field of anthropology. In his dual position as curator and professor, Boas imagined the creation of a unified and institutionalized anthropological discipline. Though his program encountered numerous resistances along the way, his view of the discipline eventually dominated anthropologists' conception of themselves and the people they study.

Central to Boas' perception of the discipline was the integration of ethnology, human biology, and linguistics. With the later addition of archaeology, this conception would become known as "four-field anthropology". Boas' reconception of anthropology stemmed from his recognition of culture, race, and language as fundamental, but independent, determinants of human behavior. Bias' view flew in the face of the racial science predominant in his day, which held race, understood primarily according to notions of superiority and inferiority, as the determinant of culture and language. The racial view was grounded in a post-Darwinian evolutionary understanding that arrayed races along a progression from "savage", more animalistic and less developed or evolved, to "civilized" white Northern Europeans (the Nordic/Aryan myth), considered the most evolved and furthest removed from their animal ancestors, a view which legitimized their political, economic, and social domination around the world.

Among his many others, Boas' most significant contribution to the separation of race from notions of supremacy and inferiority was his 1908-10 studies of immigrant racial changes, funded by a congressional committee dedicated to immigration restriction. At the turn-of-the-century, racial typology was not limited to the more familiar "red, white, black, yellow" model we think of today. Instead, scientists had many different ways of dividing human populations into as many as 50 different races. Europe, for instance, was seen as home to the superior Nordic or Aryan race, plus inferior Alpine, Gaelic, Mediterranean, and Semitic races (among others, depending on the classification system). American nativists, frightened by the massive influx of Italians, Jews, and others after the 1880s, turned to anthropology to support their call for limiting the immigration of "inferior" races, arguing that they would be a drain on the nation's resources and would be unable to assimilate.

Boas' study not only found little data to support immigration restriction, but ultimately challenged the notion of race itself. Beginning with a series of measurements taken from Russian Jews at New York's City College and two high schools, Boas discovered that immigrant populations, within the space of a single generation, could undergo massive changes in physical type. The most striking of these changes involved the "cephalic index", a ratio expressing the relation of skull length to its width. Scientists had long relied on the cephalic index as a primary indicator of racial type, believing it to be among the most stable physical features. Entire careers had been spent recording cephalic indices among various populations and archaeological findings. Boas' study showed radical changes in cephalic indices, changes that were verified when he expanded his study to include other immigrant groups in New York.

The widespread variations in physical type, even in so seemingly permanent of feature as the cephalic index, could only be explained by changes in the immigrants' environment -- climate, diet, breeding pools, and so on -- factors that Boas, with his geography background and liberal outlook, was especially able to appreciate. Although Boas was not quite ready to dispense with the notion of race altogether -- it would be the next generations of anthropologists, mostly trained by Boas, who would discard race altogether as an explanation for human behavior -- Boas did assert, based on his findings, that environmental factors far outweighed biological factors in the determination of human differences. As we will see, this view was not easily accepted by Boas' peers, many of whom saw Boas' research as an apology for Jewish difference. Ultimately, though, Boas' downplaying of racial factors contributed greatly to his, and his students', emphasis on culture as the defining human attribute and the key to human diversity.

***

In the first two decades of the 20th century, Franz Boas came to occupy a position of incredible influence within anthropology and in American society as a whole. At a time when American racism and anti-Semitism were mounting, Boas and his students were key critics of racial explanations for human difference, a struggle which was played out not only in society at large but within the field of anthropology and particularly in Boas' career. Boas had made a lot of enemies in the course of consolidating his professional and theoretical position, and especially during and immediately after World War I, Boas would be besieged by those whose theories and methodology he had attacked, culminating in his removal from his position in the governing council of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and his resignation from the National Research Council in 1919. Not only were Boas' professional beliefs challenged, but also his status as a loyal American citizen was called into question on the basis of his German origin, his Jewishness, and his radical political affiliations.

Boas was among a vocal minority of American intellectuals, Jewish and otherwise, who had opposed American involvement in World War I, even after America had entered the war. In Boas' case, this was partially due to his German heritage and his disgust with the wave of anti-German sentiment that was encouraged by the war effort. But Boas' stand was reflected in a more general anti-War stand taken by intellectuals such as Charles Beard, John Dewey, and Randolph Bourne, as well as by radicals such as Emma Goldman. Boas' involvement in this opposition was complex. As a member of the National Research Council (NRC), he was involved in various research programs oriented towards the war effort.

Emblematic of this involvement was his response to a study of intelligence among American military recruits, which the NRC had sponsored. For the first time, psychologists were able to administer their IQ tests to a huge number of subjects (1.7 million) and their results, predictably enough, showed significant differences in intelligence between different race and immigrant groups, with "white" recruits having far higher average IQ scores than either blacks or immigrants. Naturally enough, most Americans took these results as a confirmation of their belief in whites' innate superiority. Boas countered this assertion with a sophisticated reanalysis of the data, showing that the range of IQ scores between groups overlapped to a great degree, so that in fact there were many African- and other immigrant-Americans with scores above the average white score, and that within any given group there were variations by region, so that Southern whites had a lower average IQ than Northern blacks. Obviously the tests were either biased towards Northern urban cultural norms, or intelligence was not the stable inherent property of races but was in fact a culturally determined, and thus highly malleable, human trait, or both. Boas' conclusions were confirmed in 1923, when one of his students, Otto Klineberg, completed a study that showed that the IQ scores of blacks in Northern cities varied directly with their length of residence.

Of course, few in this period of nativism, anti-Semitism, and racism were prepared to accept the findings of Boas and his students. In the same year as Klineberg's study, the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization held hearings that would lead to the racist 1924 immigration reform, effectively shutting the "open door" that had encouraged the immigration of so many Jews and others by limiting the immigration of Southern and Eastern Europeans to pre-1880 levels. During the hearings, Lathrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White Supremacy, dismissed Boas' work as "the desperate attempt of a Jew to pass himself off as 'white'." With Boas' publication in 1919 of "Scientists as Spies", an open letter printed in The Nation, which condemned the involvement of four unnamed anthropologists for using their anthropological research to cover their spying activities, the animosities against Boas' work and his beliefs crystallized, leading a group composed primarily of physical anthropologists and archaeologists--fields which had developed largely outside Boas' influence as he focused more and more on cultural explanations--to call for Boas' ouster from the AAA, ostensibly on grounds of professional ethics, but more clearly due to his perceived lack of patriotism and questionable political affiliations. Boas' supporters against this motion were drawn primarily from among his students, most of whom were devoted to cultural anthropology, and many of which were Jewish. Ultimately, Boas and his supporters were outvoted, and Boas was officially censured, removed from his office within the Association (though not, in the end, denied membership altogether), and eventually forced to resign (temporarily) from the NRC.

This defeat was, however, a temporary setback at best. Despite his opponents' wishes, Boas was still chair of the largest anthropology department in the country, with ex-students holding key positions in anthropology departments throughout the country. With students including Alfred Kroeber, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ashley Montagu, among dozens of others, Boas' influence would continue to be felt through the generations to come, down to the present, both within the discipline and--through the publication of popular anthropological works like Benedict's Patterns of Culture and Montagu's Race: Man's Most Dangerous Myth--in popular American belief. With the end of World War II and the revelation of the atrocities of the Holocaust, racial science finally lost its stranglehold on American politics and science. By 1951, Ashley Montagu would draft the official UN Statement on Race, announcing that "race" has no scientific basis as an explanation for human differences and calling for an end to racial thinking in scientific and political thought. In its place, Boas' conception of culture--relativistic, flexible, and not reducible to biology--became the foundation of social science, the implications of which--if the recent resurgence of biological explanations in evolutionary psychology and sociobiology are any indication--we are still struggling to understand.

[source]

[Marcus Marulus]

The accomplishments of Franz Boas and Margaret Mead

by Ashley Richards

Franz Boas and Margaret Mead

The Quest for an Empirical Discipline

In the nineteenth-Century, ethnology, which involves the organized comparison of human societies, and relied on second hand materials collected by missionaries, explorers, or colonial officials, earned the ethnologists their current label of "arm-chair anthropologists" developed. However, by the 20th century most socio-cultural anthropologists turned to the study of ethnography, in which an anthropologist actually lives among another society and participates in the culture while conducting scientific research. Bronislaw Malinowski, who conducted fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands and taught in England, developed this method, and Franz Boas promoted it. These founders of the science made substantial contributions to the growth of the discipline. (Patterson, 2001)

By the mid-1900s, several key scholars emerged and further defined the scope of the discipline. Scholars such as Ruth Benedict, Eric Wolf, and Margaret Mead were among this group of anthropologists who expanded on the contributions of the fathers. Indeed, the 20th Century was pivotal to the development of modern cultural anthropology.

Franz Boas was an instrumental American scholar in the founding of the discipline of anthropology, and paved the way for later scholars to further define the goals and range and to broaden the study of culture. Margaret Mead was one such later scholar, whose research in the Pacific Islands proved to be enlightening on the nature versus nurture debate, challenging the assumptions of the universal stages of human growth and development, and on childhood and socialization. Both of these influential researchers are of great importance to our examination of the history of anthropology and I will discuss both of them in this paper. We will cover each of their backgrounds, their greatest contributions, and their overall influence on the discipline of anthropology.

German-born Franz Boas (1858-1942), often referred to as the "Father of American Anthropology", played an important role in professionalizing American anthropology and shifting the profession's center from the federal government and private museum to the university. This shift, in turn, provided credentials and certification to the next generation of anthropologists, and was occurring during a period characterized by extreme discrimination against people of color, immigrants, women, and the poor. Being a political radical, a foreigner to America and a Jew, Boas felt a profound impact from being a part of this transformation. (Patterson, 2001) One of his biographers noted that his vision of anthropology was shaped in part by his political commitments:

These commitments were more fundamental than the professionalization of anthropology, although professionalism was sometimes strong enough to clash successfully with Boas's politics. Professionalism acted as a brake on Boas's political activism, at least until his later years. (Willis, 1975 as quoted by Patterson, 2001)

Like many such pioneers, Boas trained in other disciplines during his education, including languages, geography, psychophysics, and philosophy, and was influenced by neo-Kantian thinkers who gave expression to liberal and socialist ideals in the oppressive political climate of Bismarck's Germany during the 1870s and 1880s. He is famed for applying the scientific method to the study of human cultures and societies, a field which was previously based on the formulation of grand theories around subjective knowledge. He held a lifetime commitment to freedom of thought. (Patterson, 2001) Boas thoroughly believed that individuals had the right to challenge "the authority of tradition" in ways that free us from the errors of the past" and that "prevent individualism from outgrowing its legitimate limits and becoming intolerable egotism." (Boas, 1938 as quoted by Patterson, 2001)

In 1883, Boas traveled to Baffin Island, the largest island of Canada, to conduct geographic research on the impact of the physical environment on native Inuit populations. The first of many ethnographic field trips, Boas gathered his notes to write his first monograph titled The Central Eskimo (1888). Boas lived and worked closely with the Inuit peoples on Baffin Island, and he developed an abiding interest in the way people lived.

Boas's ideas of culture being a relatively autonomous totality with interrelated parts built on the legacy of Johann Herder an eighteenth-century supporter of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man as well as a critic of the German nobility. Boas's recognition of a plurality of cultures and his cultural relativism still persist to present day. He believed that anthropologists gained understanding of "a culture through first-hand experience with living peoples and how they understood their conditions of existence." (Boas, 1901)

Boas accepted the idea that evolution was historical development, but he rejected the then-popular claims that all societies simply moved from simple to more complex conditions. He launched a critique of this cultural unilinear evolutionary thought shortly after he arrived in the United States in 1887. (Patterson, 2001) Even in 1920, Boas was still making his voice heard in the scholarly community by writing (Boas, 1920):

During the second half of he last century evolutionary thought held almost complete sway and investigators like Spencer, Morgan, Tylor, Lubbock, to mention only a few, were under the spell of the idea of a general, uniform evolution of culture in which all parts of mankind participated. ...it may be recognized that the hypothesis implies the thought that our modern Western European civilization represents the highest cultural development toward which all other more primitive cultural types tend, and that, therefore, retrospectively, we construct an orthogenetic development towards our own modern civilization. It is clear that if we admit that there may be different ultimate and coexisting types of civilization, the hypothesis of one single general line of development cannot be maintained.

His were unpopular opinions in the scholarly world at the time, and he was met with many obstacles during his career because he voiced those critiques of American anthropology so clearly and adamantly. At the 1894 meeting for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he challenged the racialist theories and the racist attitudes they buttressed in wider society. With several statements, Boas actually came close to challenging the utility of the race-concept itself as an analytical category. (Patterson, 2001)

In addition to the other critiques of American anthropology, Boas advocated comparative studies of the historical circumstances in which various peoples emerged and the growth processes that were actually involved in the development of these cultures. (Patterson, 2001) Thus, he sought for anthropologists to become as unbiased as possible, and certainly not ethnocentric, even subconsciously.

Franz Boas was also a participant in the nature versus nurture argument, in the late nineteenth-Century. In 1891, while teaching in the Psychology Department at Clark University, he launched his first study of human growth and development. Boas proved that children grew at different rates, and that variations in the tempo of growth were characteristic of both mental development and physical growth. He knew that the growth and development of children were affected by their surroundings and social circumstances, and would eventually undertake a study of children all over the U.S. and Canada. (Patterson, 2001) Eventually, Boas was invited by W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) to measure African-American children in Atlanta and to participate in a conference on the Negro physique, which placed him in the midst of the struggle for racial equality. (Patterson, 2001)

The civil rights struggles were not confined to only immigrants and African Americans to Boas. In 1915, he wrote to a U.S. Senator claiming that women should be granted the same rights and privileges as men. Only two years later, he fought for the Kwakiutl Indians, as the federal government threatened to prohibit the potlatch. (Patterson, 2001)

Following the First World War, the struggle over the future of anthropology began, and was generally between three schools of thought. One of which was formed by Franz Boas and his students arguing that it was culture, not race that determines behavior. They stressed the interconnection of ethnology, linguistics, folklore, archaeology, and physical anthropology. The National Research Council (NRC), established in 1916 to mobilize science and research for the war effort, became an important arena for this struggle to take place, and Boas was eventually invited to join the NRC. He assisted in organizing the young council and the American Anthropological Association (AAA). (Patterson, 2001) Definitely by this point in time, Boas was recognized as the leader of American anthropology.


Boas also participated in research on immigrants of the United States and their descendants, examining the acquired physical adaptations due to the different environment. He had this to state about his findings before the Academy at Columbia on April 27, 1920 (Boas, 1920):

On the whole the results show that each hereditary type can be considered as stable only in a stable environment, and that with a change of environment, many of the characteristic features of the body undergo changes. These results have been corroborated later on by investigations on immigrants in Boston and in certain respects also by Dr. Hrdlika's observations on Americans whose ancestors have been residents of this continent for several generations.

The cultural determinists Boas and younger anthropologists including Ralph Linton (1893-1953), Melville J. Herskovits (1895-1963), and Margaret Mead (1901-78) reasserted the hegemony of their views within the profession in the 1920's. By doing so, they challenged the hegemony of the eugenicists' views in wider society and attacked the methodology of racial intelligence testing. (Patterson, 2001)

Boas believed that the "genius of a people" (i.e. its culture) was found in its language, knowledge, skills, arts, and mythology. The studies he conducted of the folklore of the Northwest Coast tribes showed that many of the elements of their mythologies had been borrowed from neighboring peoples, reworked and reinterpreted to make them into ethical beliefs and values of the borrowers. (Patterson, 2001) Therefore, Boas realized that no culture develops completely independently from any other.

Boas continued to speak out against racism and for intellectual freedom until his death in 1942. In fact, when the Nazi Party in Germany denounced "Jewish science" (which included Boasian Anthropology and Freudian psychoanalysis), Boas responded publically with a statement signed by over 8,000 other scientists, declaring that there is only one science, to which race and religion are irrelevant.


In 1949 Boas's student, Alfred Kroeber summarized the principles of empiricism that define Boasian anthropology as a science (Kroeber, 1949):
1. The method of science is to begin with questions, not with answers, least of all with value judgments.
2. Science is dispassionate inquiry and therefore cannot take over outright any ideologies "already formulated in everyday life," since these are themselves inevitably and normally tinged with emotional prejudice.
3. Sweeping all-or-none, black-and-white judgments are characteristic of totalitarian attitudes and have no place in science, whose very nature is inferential and judicial.

The Boasian legacy has had an enduring influence upon anthropology, and Boas's commitment to empiricism and methodological cultural relativism has persisted to this day. Practically all cultural anthropologists today share Boas's devotion o field research involving extended residence, learning the local language, and developing social relationships.

Many of Boas's students were successful anthropologists and shared his concern for careful, historical reconstruction, and his antipathy towards speculative, evolutionary models. He encouraged them to criticize themselves and to learn from one's informants. Among his more prominent students were Alfred L. Kroeber, Albert B. Lewis, Ruth Benedict, and not the least of which, Margaret Mead, who will be the next scholar we discuss. (Patterson, 2001)

Margaret Mead (1901-78) expanded on the contributions of the Franz Boas by developing more complex methodological approaches, sharpening her subject matter, and by researching in a different geographical area or arena of culture. To summarize all of Margaret Mead's professional achievements would not be an easy task. She personified the discipline of anthropology for the public. She focused her work mainly on the nature vs. nurture debate, furthering Boas's work on the challenges and assumptions of the universal stages of human growth and development, childhood and socialization, and the basic personality structure and national character. (Patterson, 2001) She conducted research on several Pacific Islands and on the Indians of the Southwest. For fifty years, Margaret Mead remained an extraordinary presence in American anthropology. She acted as social commentator, adviser to civic organizations and governments and she was the recipient of many honors. She authored approximately 1,500 books, articles, occasional pieces, and films, and was the most widely recognized anthropologist in the United States. (McDermott, 2006)

Mead maintained a close relationship between anthropology and psychology throughout her career and conducted fieldwork in American Samoa beginning in 1925. (Patterson, 2001) There, she addressed the question of whether the biological development of adolescence inevitably let do emotional turbulence. She concluded through her observations and interviews that in Samoa, they did not; culture, not biology defined and determined the transition to adulthood. The book she authored about her fieldwork there, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), was one of her most popular pieces. (McDermott, 2006)

Mead conducted the first-ever course in field methods at Columbia University in the 1920's, worked as assistant curator of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and as executive secretary of the NRC's Committee on Food Habits during World War II. (McDermott, 2006) Additionally, she taught at Columbia University as adjunct professor starting in 1954. Another of Mead's books was Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), which was extremely influential for the women's movement, since she reported that females are dominant in the Chambri Lake region of Papua New Guinea without causing any great problems. (Freeman, 1983) This issue of inequality between men and women was previously mentioned by Franz Boas, and Mead furthered the cause by applying anthropology to the American society.

Additionally, Mead focused much time and research on child-rearing and child development and growth, as Boas did. She based her research question in Growing Up in New Guinea (1930), on "If primitive adults think in an animistic way, as Piaget says our children do, how do primitive children think?" And she later concludes in her research that "primitive" children actually think in a very practical way and begin to think in terms of spirits and other belief sets as they get older. (Mead, 1930)

Mead's research was more specific in subject matter, however she conducted it as a true Boasian; very empirical, scientific, professionally, and lacking of any ethnocentrism or racism. Her studies were also conducted in more remote parts of the world, seemingly previously untouched by the Western World.

Margaret Mead was also very devoted to the improvement of anthropology as a science and to further refining field methodology. This is made quite clear in the article she published in American Anthropologist in 1933, "More Comprehensive Field Methods", in which she highlights some of the more prominent errors made by ethnographers at the time, and proposes ideas for improvement. And once again, cultural relativism is emphasized and ethnocentrism is condemned. (Mead, 1933)

She revisited the process of enculturation, delving into the subject by stating the inevitability of the transmission of culture (Mead, 1940):

Students of culture especially students of primitive society recognized that the most diverse sets of cultural behavior could be transmitted to the growing child with equal success that a newborn child among the Eskimos became an adult Eskimo, a complete version of Eskimo culture, with the same inevitability that a newborn Hawaiian became a Hawaiian. Among these students of primitive society there was, therefore, a tendency to emphasize the inevitability and complete effectiveness of the transmission of culture to the new generation on the one hand, and on the other, the extreme flexibility of the human organism which was capable of taking on such diverse behavior patterns.

Mead was very focused on the progression of the training and education of future cultural anthropologists as well. Field experiencing and on the job training is very important, as she states, "Adequate field experience does not necessarily require analyzing a whole culture, with grammar, social organization, musical instruments, basketry techniques, and ritual idiom, starting from the beginning, although this is undoubtedly incomparably the best training." (Mead, 1952)

Margaret Mead, not unlike Franz Boas, was constantly interested in extending the audience for anthropology. In fact, she eventually wrote a children's book, People and Places (1959) that advised the young readers to use social science to end war. Mead was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom following her death, in 1978. (McDermott, 2006)

We can clearly see similarities between Boas and Mead's professional outlook and opinions, and it is evident that Mead simply invested her time and efforts into furthering the scientific discipline of anthropology and honing in on the key areas that need attention and improvement. All of the Boasians transformed anthropology in the United States and shaped the way culture is now perceived relative, holistic, and pluralistic. In Boas and Mead's practice, they combined moral commitment, scientific evidence, and new insights to challenge mainstream assumptions. They strove to create an anthropological tradition of involvement in political and social issues.

Bibliography

Boas, Franz. (1901). The Mind of Primitive Man. The Journal of American Folklore, 14,
1-11.

Boas, Franz. (1920a). The Methods of Ethnology. In P. Erickson, and L. D. Murphy
(Eds.), Readings for a History of Anthropological Theory (pp. 99-105). New
York: Broadview Press.

Boas, Franz. (1920b). The Influence of Environment upon Development. Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 6, 489-493.

Boas, Franz. (1928). Family Traits as Determined by Heredity and Environment.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America,
14, 496-503.

Darnell, Regna. (2006). Scientist and Public Intellectual. In J. B. R. Cherneff, and E. Hochwald
(Eds.), Visionary Observers (pp.1-24). Omaha: University of Nebraska Press.
Freeman, Derek. (1983). Margaret Mead and Samoa. Cambridge, London: Harvard University
Press

Kroeber, Alfred. (1949). An Authoritarian Panacea. American Anthropologist, 51(2), 318-320.
McDermott, Ray. (2006). A Century of Margaret Mead. In J. B. R. Cherneff, and E. Hochwald
(Eds.), Visionary Observers (pp. 55-86). Omaha: University of Nebraska Press.
Mead, Margaret. (1928). Introduction [Coming of Age in Samoa]. In P. Erickson, and L.
D. Murphy (Eds.), Readings for a History of Anthropological Theory (pp. 124-
129). New York: Broadview Press.

Mead, Margaret. (1933). More Comprehensive Field Methods. American Anthropologist,
35, 1-15.

Mead, Margaret. (1940). Social Change and Cultural Surrogates. Social Psychology of
Education, 14, 92-109.

Mead, Margaret. (1952). The Training of the Cultural Anthropologist. American
Anthropologist, 54, 343-346.

Patterson, Thomas C. (2001). A Social History of Anthropology in the United States.
New York: Oxford University Press.

[source]