Franz Boas: The Father Of Anthropology

Who was Franz Boas, and what was his influences on racialism and what was he trying to accomplish through the usage of methodology; was he successful in his ventures. Franz Boas was a German-American anthropologists and pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the “Father of American Anthropology”. This gentleman was born to be a philosopher from the time he was born, for he grew up learning to love books; for he was a natural at reading and loved to learn about natural science. Over the years, Boas took on many different challenges from working in museums, to teaching anthropology at different universities around the world in regards to “race” and anthropology; as well as introducing Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution to which

Because of his believes Boas wanted outsider to look at each race individually not as a whole, and come up with their own reactions as to what they found compared to what we classify as social standards during that time in history during the nineteenth century.

However, things soon changed, and during the twentieth century things took on yet another turn for anthropologists, for they believed that their “race” unlike any other; was above the rest. “This is known as racialism, the belief that there are distinctive biological “races” and that one can rank and categorize superior and inferior biological “races” within the human species” (Scupin, 2012, pg. 4). It was then that everything about “race”, ethnicity, and culture made perfect sense, for those earlier miss-conceptions that were outdated by those critiques no longer was being considered, for anthropologists now had information that obtained actual and detailed facts. One of those known critiques was Franz Boas, a well-educated young man that loved anthropology and loved to study different cultures abroad; such as those living in the

Meaning his contributions were right on key, for he took his research and categorized our originality as to race, and provided us the information needed as to his beliefs, that racialism should be divided into different groups when considering our biological traits. However, many people today’s society disagree with Boas finding saying that this classification only creates hatred, known as racism, and feel that they are in a class all to the own; which is superior to others. Because of this reality many races today are being miss-treated, shun upon, bullied; just because they possess a different understanding as to Boas theory. His theory was design for us to realize that each of us are unique, and different in many shapes and forms; whether it be through our color, size, features, behavioral traits; or speech. Unfortunately, people miss-understood what Boas was trying to unveil, and took it upon themselves to make judgements; instead of looking as to what he uncovered that no one else could. He showed us that although he once believed “that his race was superior, and that no one is above the rest” (Scupin, pg. 5), one thing is certain we all were put on this earth by one person and one person only our creator and