![]() ![]() Many anthropologists in Boas’ day busied themselves in activities like describing and measuring the skulls of various groups of people and using this data to draw conclusions about the intellectual and moral characteristics of people. During the 19th and 20th centuries, scientific racism had many proponents, not just in Europe and North America but as far away as China and Japan (Dikötter, 1992). Scientific racists pushed the idea that race was a biological characteristic and that it was possible to explain human behavior by appealing to racial differences. Moreover, Boas was a vehement opponent of the scientific racism of the era (Liron, 2003). For Boas cultural developments were in many ways just accidents of history (Franz Boas, 2017). Boas insisted that cultural ideas and practices diffused across groups who were living in proximity and interacting within similar environments. Instead, he argued that culture was a historical, not an evolutionary development. In fact, Boas is responsible for a number of tendencies in American anthropology:įor one thing, as we have just suggested, Boas rejected the idea that culture was something that evolved within societies by stages from lower forms to higher. Boas’ studies convinced him of the sophistication of Native cultures, so in contrast to Tylor, Boas and his students rejected the idea of indigenous cultures as inferior stages along the route to civilized refinement presumably represented by “Western” cultures (Franz Boas, 2017). Boas spent many years studying Native American cultures, and over the course of his career, he collected volumes of information on linguistics, art, dance, and archaeology. Unlike the British scholars of the time, Boas insisted that the study of culture should be based on careful observation, not speculation, which was the tendency of writers like Matthews and Tylor. Without the contributions of Boas, American anthropology might have developed very differently. In 1896, Boas immigrated to the United States (Liron, 2003). Boas embraced both, as a student of physics on the one hand and geography on the other. Educated in Germany, Boas was exposed to two competing intellectual traditions, the Naturwissenschaften (natural sciences) and the Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences). Boas was a German of Jewish heritage (though from a not religiously observant family). \)įranz Boas is widely regarded as the father of cultural anthropology in the United States.
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