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GERMAN CULTURE AND GERMAN SCIENCE IN THE BILDUNG OF FRANZ BOAS JULIA E. LISS The last entry in Franz Boas' compendium of his life's work, Race, Language and Culture (1940) is "The Study of Geography" (1887)-a peculiar but nonetheless well-marked place for an essay seminal to Boas' anthropological and scientific point of view. This is not, however, a seminal work in the sense of laying out a research strategy for future development. Couched as a defense of geography, it in fact explores more elusive questions about the temperament ofscientists and styles of scientific inquiry. Considered in conjunction with his early life and career, it enables us to see the scientific and the personal as mutually reinforcing and illuminating, and to appreciate the basis of certain enduring and unresolved tensions in Boas' life and work. In the most immediate sense, "The Study of Geography" addressed these tensions through a comparison between the historical and physical sciences. Both, Boas suggested, started from the "foundation" of "the establishment of facts" and aspired "to the same end-to find the eternal truth." But in method, assumptions, and temperament the two moved along different trajectories . Whereas the first stressed "the investigation of phenomena themselves ," for "their own sake," the latter sought the discovery of laws in which the phenomena were only a means to that end. Like cosmography and the historical sciences with which it was allied, geography allowed for the "subjective connection" arising in "the mind of the observer." In contrast, the physical sciences focussed on phenomena that were presumed to have an "objective unity." Although Boas sought to justify geography and cosmography as worthy Julia E. Liss is a member of the History Department of Scripps College in Claremont, California. She is presently working on a study of Franz Boas, cosmopolitanism, and the development of American anthropology (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming ). 155 156 JULIA E. LISS scientific enterprises, he granted the legitimacy of both approaches. Because each of them originated "in a different desire of the human mind," a choice between them could only be subjective, "being a confession of the answerer as to which is dearer to him-his personal feeling towards the phenomena surrounding him, or his inclination for abstractions; whether he prefers to recognize the individuality in the totality, or the totality in the individuality." The temperament of the scientist decided that choice: on the one hand, the "logical and aesthetic demands" of the physicist; on the other the" 'affective' impulse " of the cosmographer (1887: 641-43,645). Ultimately, Boas provided few answers in this essay. If anything, he heightened tensions which endured in his own future work, between wholes and parts, universals and particulars, objective and subjective interpretations, and emotional (affective) and rational (aesthetic) approaches. At the end of the essay, Boas spoke of "the impulse which induces us to devote our time and work to this study" as a matter of "gratifying the love for the country we inhabit , and the nature that surrounds us" (1887:647). At the time the essay was first published, in English, that country was the United States, to which he had just immigrated at the age of twenty-nine. But the country in which he had grown up, and the nature that he had enjoyed from childhood, was that ofhis native Germany. It was there that he had struggled with these emotional, intellectual, and epistemological tensions as he encountered them in his formal education, in the dynamics of family relations, and in his psychological development. That Boas wrote in these same terms about these very problems in his correspondence with family and friends provides not only evidence about his state of mind as a young man, but, more significantly, casts light on the confluence of person, culture, and profession which, Boas himself suggested , helped to define the scientific enterprise. Observing Nature, Understanding Culture: Religion, Science, and Humanism in the Minden GYmnasium Years Born in Minden, Westphalia, a province of Prussia, on July 8, 1858, Boas was raised in a solidly middle-class, Jewish family. His relationship to his religious heritage was ambiguous. Much later, he felt that his limited religious education made it difficult to understand the power of religious belief for others, and blamed his upbringing for the shock of finding that a friend adhered to the "authority of tradition" (Boas 1938: 201). But according to his daughter, Franziska , Boas "originally was brought up as an orthodox Jew," and his sister, Hedwig Lehmann, recalled that all the...

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