Race is one of the most bedeviling of anthropological characteristics. The concept, with the barest tips of its roots in biological and the rest of the plant firmly grafted to cultural and sociological ideals, is one of the first concepts that anthropologists dealt with vigorously in terms of the history of the profession and both helped establish it as a discipline in its own right (distinct from history, political economy, philosophy, comparative religion and ethics) and has kept it from being entirely assimilated into the post-colonial mindset. Like the poor for the rest of humanity, the idea of race û for both good and ill û seems always to be with the anthropologist.
This paper examines the views and research on race held and performed by Franz Boas, one of the preeminent members of the profession in its first professional decades and still a major shaper of our (anthropological) ideas about what race is and what race means. Boas spent a good deal of his time as an anthropologist refining and even perhaps reforming his ideas about the importance and constitution of race and this paper examines how his views changed over the course of his life and looks briefly at the legacy on race that modern anthropology owes to Boas.
It is tempting to think that an interest in race was part of BoasÆs birthright, although to make such an assumption may simply be giving into vulgar stereotypes. But it is true that Boas was born in Prussia in 1858 and thus born to a time and place where race as a construct had far greater importance than it did in at least in some other parts of the world.
By the time that Boas would die in New York in 1942, he would have shifted in large measure away from his early focus on race and have become the founder of the relativistic, culture-centered school of anthropology that would become dominant in the 20th century and will most likely remain the most important anthropological paradigm of the 21st centu...