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Although some sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists have suggested that Boas was opposed to Darwinian evolution, Boas, in fact, was a committed proponent of Darwinian evolutionary thought. In 1888, he declared that "the development of ethnology is largely due to the general recognition of the principle of biological evolution".
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.
The term is also associated with the empirical social sciences and with the work of Franz Boas. Historicism tends to be hermeneutic because it values cautious, rigorous, and contextualized interpretation of information; or relativist, because it rejects notions of universal, fundamental and immutable interpretations. [4]
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.
Franz Boas (1858–1942), one of the pioneers of modern anthropology, often called the "Father of American Anthropology" Franz Boas (1858–1942) established academic anthropology in the United States in opposition to Morgan's evolutionary perspective. His approach was empirical, skeptical of overgeneralizations, and eschewed attempts to ...
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 ...