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Franz Uri Boas [a] (July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942) was a German-American anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. [22] He was a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology".
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 ...
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.
Cultural relativism is a principle that was established as axiomatic in anthropological research by Franz Boas and later popularized by his students. Boas first articulated the idea in 1887: "...civilization is not something absolute, but ... is relative, and ... our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes."
Boas examines beliefs that more accomplished civilizations must have higher intelligence and "discovered little evidence to support them." He then examines the debate on nature versus nurture and finds that the heritability of IQ and the ratio of intellectual giftedness of people within a civilization were "at best a possible, but not a necessary, element determining the degree of advancement ...
The approach is conventionally understood as having been developed by Franz Boas, who developed the discipline of anthropology in the United States. [1] [2] A 2013 re-assessment of the evidence has indicated that the idea of four-field anthropology has a more complex 19th-century history in Europe and North America. [3]
Franz Boas, founder of American anthropology, like his German forerunners, maintained that the shared language of a community is the most essential carrier of their common culture. Boas was the first anthropologist who considered it unimaginable to study the culture of a foreign people without also becoming acquainted with their language.