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It also rejected ideas of cultural evolution which ranked societies and cultures according to their degree of "evolution", assuming a single evolutionary path along which cultures can be ranked hierarchically, rather Boas considered societies varying complexities to be the outcome of particular historical processes and circumstances—a ...
Franz Boas was born on July 9, 1858, [30] in Minden, Westphalia, the son of Sophie Meyer and Feibes Uri Boas.Although his grandparents were observant Jews, his parents embraced Enlightenment values, including their assimilation into modern German society.
Historical particularism (coined by Marvin Harris in 1968) [1] is widely considered the first American anthropological school of thought. Closely associated with Franz Boas and the Boasian approach to anthropology , historical particularism rejected the cultural evolutionary model that had dominated anthropology until Boas.
Franz Boas, a German-born anthropologist, was the instigator of the movement known as 'cultural particularism' in which the emphasis shifted to a multilinear approach to cultural evolution. That differed to the unilinear approach that used to be favoured in the sense that cultures were no longer compared, but they were assessed uniquely.
In the late 19th century, German-American anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942) strongly impacted biological anthropology by emphasizing the influence of culture and experience on the human form. His research showed that head shape was malleable to environmental and nutritional factors rather than a stable "racial" trait. [ 10 ]
Psychological anthropology is an interdisciplinary subfield of anthropology that studies the interaction of cultural and mental processes.This subfield tends to focus on ways in which humans' development and enculturation within a particular cultural group—with its own history, language, practices, and conceptual categories—shape processes of human cognition, emotion, perception ...
In an article in the journal Science, Boas argued that this approach to cultural evolution ignored one of Charles Darwin's main contributions to evolutionary theory: It is only since the development of the evolutional theory that it became clear that the object of study is the individual, not abstractions from the individual under observation.
Boas says the primary difference between primitive and civilized society is a shift from irrationality to rationality caused by "an improvement of the traditional material that enters into our habitual mental operations." Boas concludes the book with an examination of racism in the United States. He expresses his hope that anthropology can lead ...