AlokeKumar/anthropology

FRANZ BOAS

(1858-1942)

The German-born American anthropologist Franz Boas established the modern structure of anthropology and applied anthropological findings to problems in education, race relations, nationalism and internationalism, war and peace, and the struggle for democracy and intellectual freedom.

Anthropology in America was essentially non-professional when Franz Boas began its study. The science was not established at any university; amateurs and semiprofessionals were active in it. Its subject matter comprised a miscellany of information about the evolution of man and his works; its theory was an accumulation of 19th-century speculations about race, geographical determinism, and unilinear (orthogenetic) cultural evolution.

Boas restructured anthropology in fundamental contributions on race (physical type) and human biology (growth); on linguistics (Native American languages); on cultures, in inductive field studies (Eskimo and Northwest Coast) and comparative studies; and on the aims, methods, and theory of the field. By 1911, when he published The Mind of Primitive Man, he provided anthropology with the framework used thereafter by most anthropologists and many other social scientists. The cultural anthropological principle that learning and habit (socialization rather than instinct and/or heredity) are the basis of human institutional behavior and its diversity in societies became fundamental in social sciences and social philosophy.

Boas was born in Minden, Germany, on July 9, 1858. He grew up in a home "where the ideals of the revolution of 1848 were a living force" and where he "was spared," by parents who had given up their formal Jewish faith, "the struggle against religious dogma that besets the lives of so many young people."

Boas attended the universities of Heidelberg, Bonn, and Kiel, completing his doctorate at Kiel in 1881. His principal dissertation was in physics; it involved him, however, in problems of psychophysics (forerunner of experimental psychology) - questions of human perception which became key problems of his later anthropological work.

Boas came to anthropology circuitously. He started his career as geographer, and his first research - an expedition to Baffin Land (1883-1884) - was geographical. But with the ethnology he did on that expedition (published as The Central Eskimo, 1888), Boas made his choice. He studied anthropometry with Rudolf Virchow and started research on the Northwest Coast, in British Columbia, in 1885 as an anthropologist.

In 1886, Boas began his investigations of the Native Americans of British Columbia. He secured at Clark University his first position in the United States in 1889, and was associated with the American Museum of Natural History from 1895 to 1905. Boas began to lecture at Columbia in 1896, and in 1899 became its first professor of anthropology, a position he held for 37 years.Boas died on Dec. 21, 1942.

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MARGARET MEAD

(1901-1978)

Margaret Mead's famous quote "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has" is not only powerfully true but also desperately urgent now for all of us to understand that we as individuals must take action. We have taken our beautiful planet to the very edge and there may not be time for us to save it- but how could we forgive ourselves if we failed to even try, what would we tell our children and grandchildren!?

Margaret Mead was arguably the most renowned anthropologist of all time, contributing to the development of the discipline, as well as, introducing its insights to thousands of people outside the academy. Her work continues to contribute to the understanding of people around the world today. A prolific writer, she produced 44 books and more than 1,000 articles. Her publishing were translated into many languages.

The oldest of four children, Mead was born on December 16, 1901 in Philadelphia. She was a graduate of Barnard College and received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1929. While attending Barnard, she developed a keen interest in anthropology. It was there she met Ruth Benedict and Franz Boas, who became intellectual influences on Mead at Columbia. Boaz supervised her first research in Samoa.

Mead focused on child-rearing and personality in Samoa, New Guinea, and Bali resulting in such ethnographies as Coming of Age in Samoa in 1928 and Growing Up in New Guinea in 1930. In Bali she pioneered the use of photography for anthropological research, taking over 30,000 photographs of the Balinese.

Margaret Mead held positions with the American Museum of Natural History from 1926, and retired as emeritus curator of ethnology in 1969. She held prominent positions in various organizations and received numerous awards.

Mead served as president of the Society for Applied Anthropology, the World Federation of Mental Health, and the American Anthropological Association. She was the first woman anthropologist to become president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1979.

In recent years, some of Mead's early research on Samoa has been questioned, most notably by Australian anthropologist Derek Freeman. Nevertheless, her life-time achievements eclipse the controversy surrounding her earliest fieldwork. Margaret died in 1978 having lived a much enriched life. Margaret Mead was a forceful person who had a great impact on the world of anthropology and environment.

This spot is for Leah from Ontario, Canada, who likes Anthropology. For more on her visit : leeeah.stumbleupon.com [leeeah.stumbleupon.com]