Franz Boas

Boas trained as a physicist before turning to anthropology, and rebuilt the discipline in the United States around fieldwork: living among the people being studied, learning their language, and recording culture in its own terms rather than ranking it against a fixed European standard. His 1911 measurements of the skulls of immigrants and their American born children, showing head shape changed with environment within a generation, were used to argue against the then common claim that race fixed mental capacity, an early empirical challenge to scientific racism from within anthropology itself. He trained many of the field's most influential early American anthropologists, including Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, and helped establish cultural relativism, judging a practice by its own cultural context rather than an outside standard, as a working method rather than only a moral stance.