«I will always remain as a physician... hungering for knowledge, hungering for understanding». Franz Boas's Psychophysics and Anthropology of Sound

This contribution addresses the training in phsychophysics, experimental and natural sciences that loom large Franz Boas (Minden, 1858 – New York, 1942), the German Jewish scientist who became the recognized founding father of American anthropology as a discipline. The most recent biographical and critical studies centered on Boasian multifaceted legacy and theoretical intakes highlight that «Boas grew into anthropology from his interest in science» (Lévi Zumwalt, 2019, p. 330); nevertheless, even if his personal and academic background as a German Jew is acknowledged, it is not yet «fully explored nor understood» (Müller-Wille, 2014, pp. 26 – 27). In this regard, the aim of the presentation will be firstly to illuminate the German academic background that led Boas acquiring a dual competence in both scientific and philosophical fields, particularly as regards the psychophysics; secondly, to demonstrate how this youth psychophysical training enabled Boas to develop a methodology later applied to the study of phonetics, sound, music, through the gradual stages that led him to a braoden reorientation in the social sciences (Stocking, 1968, p. 135). During the academic years in Heidelberg (1877), Bonn (1877 – 1879), Kiel (1879 – 1881), the young Boas was trained in mathematics, physics, chemistry, geography and philosophy, discussing his doctoral dissertation on physics about the optical properties of water (1881). Thanks to the neo-Kantian philosopher Benno Erdmann (1851 – 1921), he was then encouraged in focusing mainly on psychophysics: hence, while volunteering military service between 1881 and 1882, Boas wrote a number of articles in which he exposed his interpretation of psychophysical assumptions. At the time, Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801 – 1887) was the unavoidable reference for those dealing with the psychophysics in the second half of the ninetheeth century, after the publishing of his two-volume Elemente der Psychophysik (1860). In this work the German philosopher and physicist, trained in medicine, exposed a set of experimental procedures for relating measured sensory stimulus to reported sensation, contributing to the birth of experimental psychology. The Boasian psychophysical interpretation stressed the role played by the subjective state of mind, precisely the degree of attention, during the discrimination process of two stimuli (e.g., two lenghts, weights, colours), just noticeably different from each other (Boas, 1881a, 1882a, 1882b, 1882c, 1882d, 1882e). In moving from psychophysics to the vast array of ethnographic fieldwork, ethnomusicological pioneering studies and the development of the four-field model in anthropology, Franz Boas broadened his epistemological interests, without giving up the empirical methodology accrued in his German academic years. This is particularly noticeable in his painstaking research devoted to the Native Indian and Arctic languages and sounds, as the second part of the contribution aims to demonstrate. Boasian fieldwork was marked by a systematic attempt to approach foreign sound system with an inductive method ensuring the correctness of transcribing and spelling. The psychophysical training and framework led him to deal rigorously with the phenomena of mishearing, the problem of sound-blindness and the biasing filter on the perception of sounds (Boas, 1889). More specifically, by underscoring the apperception of a new sound stimuli through similar, already known sounds. Boas would endorse a relativistic approach to perception and mental representations of sounds, fostering his eventual lifelong, hectic concern about an antiracist theory of human mental functions. Following a biographical contextualisation, the above mentioned historical and methodological issues can therefore be evinced by enlightening the role of Boasian contribution in the realms both of the scientific methodology – ingrained in his early psychophysics training – and of the anthropological fieldwork. So far the critical literature has not paid a thorough attention to his psychophysic early essays, that offer instead a privileged look in observing his methodological issues regarding the problem of measurement, bias and perception. At stake are Boasian empirical research, intertwoven with philosophical and psychophysical assumptions that offer a historical and epistemological perspective not only to the psychophysical debate, but also to the psychoacoustics, ethnomusicology and anthropology.