Regna Darnell and Stephen O. Murray
Although there have been many biographies of Franz Boas over the years since his death in 1942, the breadth of his six-plus decade career has eluded the capacity of any single biographer to capture its complexity or to fully assess his contributions across academic disciplines, the professionalization of American science in universities, and his public activism. Previous efforts have ranged from uncritically laudatory to unmitigatedly disparaging or have focused on limited parts of his oeuvre such as race and diversity, political activism, disciplinary contributions to anthropology, linguistics, folklore, education, and Native American Studies.
Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt combines a conversational and readable style with a systematic and comprehensive revisionist account of Boas and Boas scholarship. Familiarity with Boas’s diverse disciplines and the employment of a professional translator for the German that was his first language allows her to unpack his evolving theories and methods for contemporary audiences in a range as diverse as Boas’s own.
The first work, The Emergence of the Anthropologist, begins with Boas’s family background and the Germany of the times in which he was born. Like Tristram Shandy, his birth is not the beginning of the story. Zumwalt, like Douglas Cole before her, chose a “natural” cutoff date of 1906, when Boas left the American Museum of Natural History to concentrate on developing anthropology as an academic discipline and training a cadre of students who shared his vision for Americanist anthropology. In terms of his professional achievements to this point, documentation is relatively straightforward, in that Boas’s career remained largely within the bounds of anthropology as understood in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But to Boas himself, it was far from straightforward.
The story crisscrosses continents, national traditions, and disciplinary actors and includes multiple disappointments and dead ends. Zumwalt has searched out and incorporated Boas materials from archives throughout the United States as well as from his papers at the American Philosophical Society, often relying on her own translations. Much of this material is previously unknown in English-language sources. It fleshes out Boas’s early education and the fluid character of the disciplines he explored before opting for anthropology as his primary professional identity. The path from psychophysics, physical geography, cultural geography, and physical anthropology to cultural anthropology and ethnography emerges as a gradual one, each new set of interests retaining insights and methods from his prior endeavors. Boas was not alone in this fluidity; his mentors also pursued research questions and developed methodologies not clearly bounded by disciplinary labels. The social sciences were not as discrete as those of their descendants familiar to us today. Boas adopted important parts of his mature position from each of these directions. Throughout his career, he would continue to incorporate methods and perspectives from other disciplines (e.g., applying Indo-European linguistic techniques to unwritten Indigenous languages of the Americas).
Zumwalt’s treatment of Boas’s cartography and ethnology among the Eskimo (now called Inuit in Canada) of Baffin Island is particularly detailed and revealing, drawing extensively on the geographic researches of Ludger Müller-Wille. The transition to the Northwest Coast and the interaction of the region’s cultures and languages would occupy Boas for the rest of his life. Zumwalt chronicles his anxiety at separation from his family to establish a baseline that fieldwork collaborators and students could pursue under his direction from afar.
Later recollections of Boas by later generations of colleagues, students, and his own children and grandchildren inevitably focus on the mature Boas, on the often more self-confident, aloof, and formal persona of the public intellectual at the forefront of his discipline. This volume captures the uncertainties and vicissitudes of his earlier career, in which later successes were only ambitious dreams. Zumwalt interweaves the professional and the personal, revealing the love story of Boas and Marie as well as the conflicts of loyalty Boas suffered balancing his family in America against often conflicting loyalties to his parents, sisters, and other family, as well as to colleagues and mentors remaining in Germany. Zumwalt uses his own words to highlight the poignancy of his struggles in this early period: his difficulties in learning English, precarious employment, and failure to realize his grand ambitions quickly. Readers are led to consider the period in his life before the end of the story was known. We see the young Boas from his own point of view.
Shaping Anthropology and Working for Social Justice, the forthcoming second work of this biography, turns to the more mature and decisive Boas, professionalizing Americanist anthropology according to his view of its proper scope and expanding his influence through the students he trained at Columbia. Zumwalt emphasizes the continuity between the early idealism of Europe’s 1848 failed revolutions that Boas acquired from his mother and took with him into professional practice as well as in his personal life. Tendrils extending beyond his home discipline increasingly led Boas out of the ivory tower: his political commitments, played out across continents, and his passionate belief in anthropology as holding a key to solving the problems of living in challenging times. Though his emphasis moved from antiracism in America to resistance to Nazi oppression, Zumwalt argues that Boas remained rooted throughout in the elusive values of the early years chronicled in the present work that sets the stage.