From his childhood to his teenage years, Franz Boas developed a firm educational foundation in science. With his botanizing box, his hammer to uncover fossils, his glass herbarium, and his rooftop garden at home, Franz studied nature and cultivated his interests. His mother and father paid close attention to their son’s education and encouraged him to pursue his hobbies in natural science. They closely monitored his educational achievements, as well as his challenges, which resulted from his recurrent illnesses as a young child. In the botanical garden at the University of Jena, Franz learned, as he wrote at the age of nineteen, “that true science does not consist in describing single plants but in the knowledge of their structure and lives and in the comparison of all classes of plants with one another.” He was fascinated from an early age with comparing “isolated things with each other.” He also learned his limitations—for instance, when he attended Kuno Fischer’s lectures on aesthetics at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität in Heidelberg. He had difficulty, he admitted, in following “abstract things,” in separating “the essential from the inessential.” The pathway was in place that would lead Boas from his focus on mathematics to physics, cultural geography, and then to ethnography. Keenly interested in languages, he relished learning Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and French at the Gymnasium. He studied English privately and began studying Russian in Heidelberg; he studied Danish and Inuktitut (the Greenlandic variety) in his study in Minden in preparation for his travels to Baffin Land; and later at Clark University, he began the study of Spanish.1
Franz cherished his childhood dream of traveling to Africa to study the people and then as a teenager, to the North or the South Pole. When he entered Berlin’s scientific circles, he was advised to tell Adolph Bastian that he wanted to travel—the mark of a serious scientist. Boas’s Erstlingsreise, his first voyage, to Baffin Land, had all the components for what later he would call his fieldwork. He worked hard to capture the Inuit view of the world. He learned their language, ate their foods, traveled with them by skin boat and dog sled. He shifted from physics to the study of living peoples, but he never abandoned cultural geography. Later, among the Bella Coola in the Northwest Coast, Boas found “veritable gods who live in Walhalla.” In the course of his work in Baffin Land and the Northwest Coast, as well as in shaping the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, Boas developed his approach to anthropology, which included the following: anthropometry, later called physical anthropology; linguistics; folklore and mythology; ritual and religion; and material culture. In all this, his stress was on collecting from the people. The texts were, Gladys Reichard wrote in her tribute to her mentor, the “strongest rocks” in Boas’s work. They reflected “his belief that what people record of themselves in their own words will in the last analysis reveal their motivations and ideas most accurately.”2
Boas’s emphasis on collaborative and long-term research were central to his approach to the study of anthropology. In Baffin Land he worked with James Mutch at the Scottish whaling station; with Ssigna, the Inuit hunter and guide; and with Wilhelm Weike, his assistant in all things. In the Northwest Coast, he developed collaborations with George Hunt and James Teit that lasted for decades. And the Jesup North Pacific Expedition comprised an international, multiteam group of colleagues that spanned two continents and many years. Boas grew into anthropology from his interest in science. By the 1890s his embrace of it was total: his approach to life had become singularly, intensely focused, on anthropology. At eighteen, he had written his sister Toni, “I just want to work until I have achieved something.” Achieve something he did, and, in the process, he took a central place in creating a discipline for himself and for his students: that of anthropology.3