biography
pronunciation:
[bohas]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1858–1942)
|
| biography:
| Cultural anthropologist, born in Minden, NW Germany. A merchant's son, raised in a liberal environment, he became interested in natural history as a boy and studied geography at the universities of Heidelberg, Bonn, and Kiel. On his first field trip, to the Canadian Arctic (1883–4), he studied Eskimo tribes, and from then on his intellectual interests turned to ethnology and anthropology. He emigrated to the USA (1886), where he studied the Indian tribes of the Pacific Northwest, and worked in Massachusetts and Illinois before obtaining a post as lecturer at Columbia University in New York City. Promoted to full professor in 1899, he trained several generations of anthropologists. As a scholar, his emphasis was to draw on ethnology, physical anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics, and to collect data about cultures, especially those passing from the scene. With his students he established new and more complex concepts of culture and race, as outlined in his collection of papers, Race, Language and Culture (1940). With the rise of Hitler in Germany he began to speak out against racism and intolerance, and he wrote and lectured widely in opposition to the Nazis. His other works include The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) and Anthropology and Modern Life (1928). |
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