Introduction

Summary

Having accepted an editorship at Science after research trips to Baffinland and the Pacific Northwest, the young Franz Boas, not yet the eminence he would become, penned an essay laying out the theoretical conclusions he had drawn following his time in the field. Though ostensibly concerned with geography – Boas had trained as a geographer – the essay addresses methodological problems that would later shape the discipline of cultural anthropology, which coalesced under Boas’s leadership in the early decades of the twentieth century.