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Jarred James Breaux The first section of the documentary, Franz Boas: The Shackles of Tradition, highlights
the life of Franz Boaz. Boaz is considered to be “the founding father of American
Anthropology.” An Inuit man, Anakshoe, was interviewed in the video. In 1883, Boaz went to
the Canadian Arctic as a geographer to map the coastline and to study the Inuit (Eskimo). He
wanted to gain the knowledge of the routes the Inuit used to travel. Boaz was intrigued by the
Inuit's knowledge of geography. They were exceptional map makers and drew maps in the snow
of the terrain that could easily be recognized. The Inuit knew the distances between places by the
days it took to travel there. One of the key anthropological issues was what affected the culture
of the Inuit. Boaz realized that the Inuit culture was not restricted by its environment.
The video goes on to explain more about Boaz's life and his migration to the United
States. The second part of the video introduces the Kwakiutl tribe in British Columbia, Canada.
He and his colleague, George Hunt, stayed with the Kwakiutl and studied their culture. After
publishing papers on the Kwakiutl, he got a job as Curator of the Museum of Natural History in
New York while he was also a professor at Columbia University. He collected artifacts from
different tribes. Since he lived among these people, he was able to explain exactly what each
artifact was. He also realized that the language of the people was also part of their culture.
The most interesting part of the video was after Boaz was appointed to a project by the
government to study immigrants coming into the United States. He studied different races to see
if “racial characteristics place limitations on your human potential.” He concluded that race was
a very small factor in the biology of humans. ]Just before he died at a supper in Paris, his last
words were that he had a new theory about race.
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