Modern anthropology and the problem of the racial type: the photographs of Franz Boas

Abstract

Franz Boas is best known for his pioneering work in the area of cultural anthropology. However in the 1890s, Boas created hundreds of anthropometric photographs as part of a vast study aimed at documenting the physical characteristics of Native Americans. The primary purpose of the Jesup Expedition, as the study was called, was to discover the racial origins of America’s Native peoples, but the data collected and the knowledge gained were also later used by Boas to report on the physical changes occurring to migrant children in the USA, and to mount an attack on the scientific credibility of the racial theories being used to hound and discriminate against Jewish and other racial minorities in Germany and Europe.

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