Q 01/05

A 1911 remark by Franz Boas on Inuit vocabulary grew into the popular myth of dozens of words for what?

A) Seal

B) Wind

C) Snow

D) Fish

Answer · why

C) 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,...

Q 02/05

Which student of Franz Boas became nationally famous with her 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa?

A) Margaret Mead

B) Mary Leakey

C) Mary Douglas

D) Hortense Powdermaker

Answer · why

A) Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead argued that teenage turmoil comes from culture, not biology, and Boas wrote the foreword. Decades later Derek Freeman attacked her Samoa...

Q 03/05

Which Harlem Renaissance novelist studied anthropology under Franz Boas before collecting folklore in Florida?

A) Nella Larsen

B) Georgia Douglas Johnson

C) Dorothy West

D) Zora Neale Hurston

Answer · why

D) 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 la...

Q 04/05

Franz Boas died suddenly in 1942 in the arms of which anthropologist, then a wartime exile in New York?

A) Marcel Mauss

B) Claude Lévi-Strauss

C) Bronisław Malinowski

D) Alfred Radcliffe-Brown

Answer · why

B) 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...

Q 05/05

Where in the Canadian Arctic did Franz Boas live among the Inuit in 1883–84, drawing him towards anthropology?

A) Baffin Island

B) Ellesmere Island

C) Victoria Island

D) Banks Island

Answer · why

A) 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 ...