Franz Boas
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40 free Franz Boas trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Franz Boas is often called the father of American anthropology, and he earned the title the hard way. He arrived as an outsider with a doctorate in a different subject, spent a year in the Arctic that changed his view of what was worth studying, and then spent half a century arguing that no people is born superior to another. This quiz follows him from a small town in northern Europe to the far north, the Pacific Northwest and a New York lecture hall. Expect questions on his fieldwork and the people who worked alongside him, the books and ideas that reshaped the study of culture, his public fights over race and academic freedom, and a few surprises from his private life. It also covers the remarkable students he trained, several of whom became more famous than their teacher. It suits anthropology students revising for an exam, quiz hosts after a social studies round, and anyone curious about where modern ideas of culture came from. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
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Q 01A 1911 remark by Franz Boas on Inuit vocabulary grew into the popular myth of dozens of words for what?
Snow
Snow got four Inuit words in the example Boas gave: on the ground, falling, drifting and in a drift. He was showing how languages divide up the world, and later retellings kept inflating the count.
Q 02Which student of Franz Boas became nationally famous with her 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa?
Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead argued that teenage turmoil comes from culture, not biology, and Boas wrote the foreword. Decades later Derek Freeman attacked her Samoan findings in two books.
Q 03Which Harlem Renaissance novelist studied anthropology under Franz Boas before collecting folklore in Florida?
Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston turned that fieldwork into Mules and Men, a 1935 collection of African-American folklore from Florida and New Orleans. Two years later came her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Q 04Franz Boas died suddenly in 1942 in the arms of which anthropologist, then a wartime exile in New York?
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss had escaped Vichy France and was teaching in New York when Boas, aged 84, collapsed at a faculty club meal. He went on to lead the structuralist school of anthropology.
Q 05Where in the Canadian Arctic did Franz Boas live among the Inuit in 1883–84, drawing him towards anthropology?
Baffin Island
Baffin Island was meant to be a geography project on how the environment shapes Inuit migration. Relying on his hosts for food and shelter, Boas grew more interested in how people lived.
Q 06Which NAACP co-founder invited Franz Boas to give the 1906 commencement address at Atlanta University?
W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois taught at Atlanta, where Boas told the graduates about African achievements such as iron smelting and argued that their ancestry gave no grounds for any claim of inferiority.
Q 07Franz Boas earned his 1881 doctorate, with a dissertation on the color of water, in which subject?
Physics
Physics trained Boas to measure, yet judging slight differences in the color of water proved so hard that he became intrigued by how perception shapes what an observer records.
Q 08Which gift-giving feast of the Pacific Northwest did Franz Boas document while Canada outlawed it from 1885 to 1951?
Potlatch
Potlatch hosts gave away or destroyed wealth to show their power, and the feasts carried on underground despite jail terms. Boas wrote in 1888 that the ban had failed.
Q 09Which Arctic explorer brought six Greenland Inuit to New York in 1897 after Franz Boas asked for one?
Robert Peary
Robert Peary delivered the group to the museum where Boas worked, and four soon died of tuberculosis. A boy named Minik was left stranded in the city, and Boas has been widely criticized for his part.
Q 10At which New York university did Franz Boas teach from 1896, training a generation of American anthropologists?
Columbia
Columbia made Boas a professor of anthropology in 1899, and he stayed for the rest of his career. His graduates went on to found departments from Berkeley to Northwestern.
Q 11Franz Boas, the 'Father of American Anthropology', was born in 1858 in the town of Minden in which country?
Germany
Germany was not yet a unified state in 1858, and Minden belonged to Prussia. Boas settled in America in 1887, put off by growing antisemitism and the lack of academic posts at home.
Q 12Which student of Franz Boas wrote Patterns of Culture and a wartime study of Japan, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword?
Ruth Benedict
Ruth Benedict came to study under Boas in 1921 and found in him a kind of father figure. He made her an assistant professor a decade later, and Patterns of Culture followed in 1934.
Q 13Which student of Franz Boas went on to work with Ishi, known as the last of California's Yahi people?
Alfred Kroeber
Q 21Which people of northern Vancouver Island were the main subject of Franz Boas's fieldwork on Canada's Pacific coast?
Kwakiutl
Kwakiutl is the name Boas popularized, though it properly belongs to a single community at Fort Rupert. The wider group calls itself Kwakwaka'wakw.
Q 22Which Tlingit-English ethnologist, raised at Fort Rupert, wrote thousands of pages of texts for Franz Boas?
George Hunt
George Hunt grew up among the people Boas studied and spoke their language, and Boas taught him to write it. Hunt also gathered hundreds of objects for display at the 1893 World's Fair.
Q 23The American Anthropological Association censured Franz Boas in 1919 after he accused four colleagues of what?
Spying
Alfred Kroeber earned the first anthropology doctorate Boas supervised in New York, in 1901, then built the program at Berkeley. His daughter was the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin.
Q 14Which linguist trained by Franz Boas shares a hypothesis about language and thought with Benjamin Lee Whorf?
Edward Sapir
Edward Sapir was a philology student when a Boas seminar on Native American languages changed the direction of his career. His own student Whorf developed the idea that language shapes how people think.
Q 15Which principle, central to the work of Franz Boas, holds that each culture must be judged by its own standards?
Cultural relativism
Cultural relativism holds that cultures cannot be ranked as higher or lower. Boas never used the phrase himself; it became common among anthropologists only after his death.
Q 16Which 1911 book by Franz Boas attacked the claim that some races are born more intelligent than others?
The Mind of Primitive Man
The Mind of Primitive Man grew out of lectures at Boston's Lowell Institute and argued that no race is innately superior. The Nazis burned Boas's books in May 1933.
Q 17After settling in New York in 1887, Franz Boas took his first American job as assistant editor of which journal?
Science
Science offered Boas the post in January 1887, after a field trip to Canada's Pacific coast. He chose to stay in America and married Marie Krackowizer the same year.
Q 18Franz Boas helped build the anthropology exhibits for the 1893 World's Fair held in which American city?
Chicago
Chicago's fair marked 400 years since Columbus reached the Americas, and Boas led about a hundred assistants preparing its displays. The collections became the basis of the Field Museum.
Q 19The Jesup North Pacific Expedition, organized by Franz Boas in 1897, compared peoples on either side of which strait?
Bering
Bering was the strait in question: for five years the expedition studied the peoples of Siberia, Alaska and Canada's northwest coast to trace the ties between Asia and America.
Q 20Measuring 17,821 immigrants and their children, Franz Boas found that which supposedly fixed racial trait could change?
Head shape
Head shape was treated as a stable racial marker, yet Boas found that American-born children differed from their immigrant parents. Environment, he argued, shapes the body too.
Spying for the US government under cover of fieldwork was, Boas wrote, a betrayal of everything a scholar stands for. Members voted 20 to 10 against him, and the censure stood until 2005.
Q 24Which weekly magazine printed the angry 1919 letter from Franz Boas that led fellow anthropologists to censure him?
The Nation
The Nation ran the letter and the backlash was swift: a rival fumed about ending the 'Hun regime' Boas held over American anthropology, and Boas gave up his seat on the National Research Council.
Q 25To which elderly president of the Weimar Republic did Franz Boas address an open letter protesting against Hitlerism?
Paul von Hindenburg
Paul von Hindenburg was the man who had made Hitler chancellor. Boas also answered Nazi attacks on 'Jewish' scholarship with a public statement signed by more than 8,000 fellow researchers.
Q 26At which Massachusetts university did Franz Boas lead a new anthropology department before resigning in protest in 1892?
Clark
Clark lost Boas in a dispute over academic freedom with its president, the psychologist G. Stanley Hall. In 1909 the same campus hosted Sigmund Freud's only lectures in the United States.
Q 27In which country did Franz Boas help create the International School of American Archaeology and Ethnology?
Mexico
Mexico City hosted the school, and Boas lectured at the National University there in 1910 and 1911. His student Manuel Gamio is often called the father of modern Mexican anthropology.
Q 28The scars that criss-crossed the face of Franz Boas came from which pastime of his university days at Heidelberg?
Saber duels
Saber duels over petty slights were a student ritual, and Boas fought his first in 1877 after a quarrel over a shared rented piano. He came home each vacation with new scars.
Q 29Abraham Jacobi, uncle by marriage and adviser of Franz Boas, is called the father of which American medical field?
Pediatrics
Pediatrics got its first department at a general hospital under Jacobi, at Mount Sinai in New York. A veteran of the 1848 revolutions, he had once stayed with Karl Marx in England.
Q 30In which city's Royal Ethnological Museum did Franz Boas meet Nuxalk visitors, sparking his Pacific Northwest research?
Berlin
Berlin was where Boas worked under Adolf Bastian, who taught that all peoples share the same mental capacity. Once his postdoctoral thesis was accepted, Boas left for Canada's Pacific coast.