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Franz Uri Boas [a] (July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942) was a German-American anthropologist and ethnomusicologist. [22] ... Race, Language, and Culture. University ...
The Mind of Primitive Man is a 1911 book by anthropologist Franz Boas which takes a critical look at the concept of primitive culture. [1] The work challenged widely held racist and eugenic claims about race and intelligence, particularly white supremacy.
Another important aspect of Boasian anthropology was its perspective of cultural relativism which assumes that a culture can only be understood by first understanding its own standards and values, rather than assuming that the values and standards of the anthropologist's society, can be used to judge other cultures. In this way Boasian ...
Thus, Boas's student Melville Herskovits summed up the principle of cultural relativism thus: "Judgements are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his own enculturation." Boas pointed out that scientists grow up and work in a particular culture, and are thus necessarily ethnocentric.
Boas believed that the sweep of cultures, to be found in connection with any sub-species, is so vast and pervasive that there cannot be a relationship between culture and race. [11] Cultural relativism involves specific epistemological and methodological claims. Whether or not these claims require a specific ethical stance is a matter of debate.
For Boas, the four-field approach was motivated by his holistic approach to the study of human behavior, which included integrated analytical attention to culture history, material culture, anatomy and population history, customs and social organization, folklore, grammar and language use.
The idea of cultural emphasis is rooted form the work of Franz Boas, who is considered to be one of the founders of American Anthropology. [2] Franz Boas developed and taught concepts such as cultural relativism and the "cultural unconscious", which allowed anthropologists who studied under him, like Edward Sapir and Ruth Benedict, to further study and develop ideas on language and culture.
Salvage ethnography is the recording of the practices and folklore of cultures threatened with extinction, including as a result of modernization and assimilation. It is generally associated with the American anthropologist Franz Boas [citation needed]; he and his students aimed to record vanishing Native American cultures. [1]