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86-492: In physical anthropology , protoculture is the passing of behaviours from one generation to another among non- human primates . For example, tool usage is learned between generations within chimpanzee troops. One troop of chimpanzees may exhibit a learned behavior unique from another troop of chimpanzees, such as various tool usage. Some chimpanzee troops have been observed consuming aspilia , for medicinal purposes, because it has been seen to remove intestinal parasites, and

172-426: A European origin of modern humans. In 1951 Sherwood Washburn , a former student of Hooton, introduced a "new physical anthropology." He changed the focus from racial typology to concentrate upon the study of human evolution, moving away from classification towards evolutionary process. Anthropology expanded to include paleoanthropology and primatology . The 20th century also saw the modern synthesis in biology:

258-615: A collection arranged according to tribes, in order to teach the particular style of each group". His approach, however, brought him into conflict with the President of the Museum, Morris Jesup , and its director, Hermon Bumpus . By 1900 Boas had begun to retreat from American museum anthropology as a tool of education or reform (Hinsley 1992: 361). He resigned in 1905, never to work for a museum again. Some scholars, like Boas's student Alfred Kroeber , believed that Boas used his research in physics as

344-589: A course on aesthetics with Kuno Fischer at Heidelberg. These factors led Boas to consider pursuing research in psychophysics , which explores the relationship between the psychological and the physical, after completing his doctorate, but he had no training in psychology . Boas did publish six articles on psychophysics during his year of military service (1882–1883), but ultimately he decided to focus on geography, primarily so he could receive sponsorship for his planned Baffin Island expedition. Boas took up geography as

430-416: A culture were not a product of conscious design, but rather the outcome of diverse mechanisms that produce cultural variation (such as diffusion and independent invention), shaped by the social environment in which people live and act. Boas concluded his lecture by acknowledging the importance of Darwin's work: "I hope I may have succeeded in presenting to you, however imperfectly, the currents of thought due to

516-406: A friend of Karl Marx , who was to advise him throughout Boas's career. Due to this, Boas was granted the independence to think for himself and pursue his own interests. Early in life, he displayed a penchant for both nature and natural sciences. Boas vocally opposed and refused to convert to Christianity , but he did not identify himself as a religious Jew. This is disputed however by Ruth Bunzel ,

602-594: A geographer in Germany, Boas decided to stay in the United States. Possibly he received additional motivation for this decision from his romance with Marie Krackowizer, whom he married in the same year. With a family underway and under financial stress, Boas also resorted to pilfering bones and skulls from native burial sites to sell to museums. Aside from his editorial work at Science , Boas secured an appointment as docent in anthropology at Clark University , in 1888. Boas

688-604: A geographical expedition to northern Canada, where he became fascinated with the culture and language of the Baffin Island Inuit. He went on to do field work with the indigenous cultures and languages of the Pacific Northwest. In 1887 he emigrated to the United States, where he first worked as a museum curator at the Smithsonian, and in 1899 became a professor of anthropology at Columbia University , where he remained for

774-573: A key role in organizing the American Anthropological Association (AAA) as an umbrella organization for the emerging field. Boas originally wanted the AAA to be limited to professional anthropologists, but William John McGee (another geologist who had joined the BAE under Powell's leadership) argued that the organization should have an open membership. McGee's position prevailed and he was elected

860-422: A lively interest in public matters; the founder about 1854 of the kindergarten in my hometown, devoted to science. My parents had broken through the shackles of dogma. My father had retained an emotional affection for the ceremonial of his parental home, without allowing it to influence his intellectual freedom. From kindergarten on, Boas was educated in natural history , a subject he enjoyed. In gymnasium , he

946-512: A minor in geography, which would explain why Fischer was one of Boas's degree examiners. Because of this close relationship between Fischer and Boas, some biographers have gone so far as to incorrectly state that Boas "followed" Fischer to Kiel, and that Boas received a PhD in geography with Fischer as his doctoral advisor. For his part, Boas self-identified as a geographer by the time he completed his doctorate, prompting his sister, Toni, to write in 1883, "After long years of infidelity, my brother

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1032-685: A model for his work in anthropology. Many others, however—including Boas's student Alexander Lesser , and later researchers such as Marian W. Smith, Herbert S. Lewis , and Matti Bunzl—have pointed out that Boas explicitly rejected physics in favor of history as a model for his anthropological research. This distinction between science and history has its origins in 19th-century German academe, which distinguished between Naturwissenschaften (the sciences) and Geisteswissenschaften (the humanities), or between Gesetzwissenschaften (the law - giving sciences) and Geschichtswissenschaften (history). Generally, Naturwissenschaften and Gesetzwissenschaften refer to

1118-595: A perfect example of a nomothetic science, and history, an idiographic science. Moreover, he argued that each approach has its origin in one of the two "interests" of reason Kant had identified in the Critique of Judgement —one "generalizing", the other "specifying". (Winkelband's student Heinrich Rickert elaborated on this distinction in The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science ;: A Logical Introduction to

1204-519: A protégée of Boas, who called him "the essential protestant; he valued autonomy above all things." According to his biographer, "He was a jewish German, preserving and promoting German culture and values in America." In an autobiographical sketch, Boas wrote: The background of my early thinking was a German home in which the ideals of the revolution of 1848 were a living force. My father, liberal, but not active in public affairs; my mother, idealistic, with

1290-423: A society, he explained that "... they get the specimens; they get explanations of the specimens; they get connected texts that partly refer to the specimens and partly to abstract things concerning the people; and they get grammatical information". These widening contexts of interpretation were abstracted into one context, the context in which the specimens, or assemblages of specimens, would be displayed: "... we want

1376-548: A soft place to sit when they are tired of standing. He explained regional variations in human features as the result of different climates. He also wrote about physiognomy , an idea derived from writings in the Hippocratic Corpus . Scientific physical anthropology began in the 17th to 18th centuries with the study of racial classification ( Georgius Hornius , François Bernier , Carl Linnaeus , Johann Friedrich Blumenbach ). The first prominent physical anthropologist,

1462-423: A student of Carl Ritter , rekindled Boas's interest in geography and ultimately had more influence on him than did Karsten, and thus some biographers view Boas as more of a geographer than a physicist at this stage. In addition to the major in physics, Adams, citing Kroeber, states that "[i]n accordance with German tradition at the time   ... he also had to defend six minor theses", and Boas likely completed

1548-498: A way to explore his growing interest in the relationship between subjective experience and the objective world. At the time, German geographers were divided over the causes of cultural variation. Many argued that the physical environment was the principal determining factor, but others (notably Friedrich Ratzel) argued that the diffusion of ideas through human migration is more important. In 1883, encouraged by Theobald Fischer, Boas went to Baffin Island to conduct geographic research on

1634-555: A wide range of cultural recordings, including music with written song texts and translations. The music recordings produced during this study became a model for later studies in ethnomusicology. Boas attempted to organize the research gathered from the Jessup Expedition into contextual, rather than evolutionary, lines. He also developed a research program in line with his curatorial goals: describing his instructions to his students in terms of widening contexts of interpretation within

1720-510: Is no genetic difference between Jew and non-Jew nor and superior race. Later this discussion was distributed by Congregation B'nai B'rith in Cincinnati, Ohio. In the late 19th century anthropology in the United States was dominated by the Bureau of American Ethnology , directed by John Wesley Powell , a geologist who favored Lewis Henry Morgan 's theory of cultural evolution . The BAE was housed at

1806-455: Is otherwise unpalatable. This article relating to anthropology is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Biological anthropology As a subfield of anthropology, biological anthropology itself is further divided into several branches. All branches are united in their common orientation and/or application of evolutionary theory to understanding human biology and behavior. Biological Anthropology looks different today from

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1892-591: The American Museum of Natural History , Franz Boas requested that Arctic explorer Robert E. Peary bring one Inuk from Greenland to New York. Peary obliged and brought six Inuit to New York in 1897 who lived in the basement of the American Museum of Natural History. Four of them died from tuberculosis within a year of arriving in New York, one returned to Greenland, and a young boy, Minik Wallace , remained living in

1978-845: The Royal Ethnological Museum in Berlin, where he was introduced to members of the Nuxalk Nation of British Columbia, which sparked a lifelong relationship with the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest . Simultaneously, he became studied the methodologies of ethnomusicologists Carl Stumpf , Erich von Hornbostel , and George Herzog ; practices he would later utilize in his own work in ethnomusicology. In 1886, Boas defended (with Helmholtz's support) his habilitation thesis, Baffin Land , and

2064-651: The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and the Smithsonian's curator for ethnology, Otis T. Mason , shared Powell's commitment to cultural evolution. (The Peabody Museum at Harvard University was an important, though lesser, center of anthropological research). It was while working on museum collections and exhibitions that Boas formulated his basic approach to culture, which led him to break with museums and seek to establish anthropology as an academic discipline. During this period Boas made five more trips to

2150-597: The University of Berlin in 1809, and his work in geography, history, and psychology provided the milieu in which Boas's intellectual orientation matured. Historians working in the Humboldtian tradition developed ideas that would become central in Boasian anthropology. Leopold von Ranke defined the task of the historian as "merely to show as it actually was", which is a cornerstone of Boas's empiricism. Wilhelm Dilthey emphasized

2236-405: The University of Kiel instead due to family reasons. At Kiel, Boas had wanted to focus on the mathematical topic of C.F. Gauss 's law of the normal distribution of errors for his dissertation, but he ultimately had to settle for a topic chosen for him by his doctoral advisor, physicist Gustav Karsten , on the optical properties of water. Boas completed his dissertation entitled Contributions to

2322-501: The 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus 's arrival in the Americas. Boas had a chance to apply his approach to exhibits. Boas directed a team of about one hundred assistants, mandated to create anthropology and ethnology exhibits on the Indians of North America and South America that were living at the time Christopher Columbus arrived in America while searching for India. Putnam intended

2408-485: The Baffin Island expedition. At the time, Virchow was involved in a vociferous debate over evolution with his former student, Ernst Haeckel . Haeckel had abandoned his medical practice to study comparative anatomy after reading Charles Darwin 's The Origin of Species , and vigorously promoted Darwin's ideas in Germany. However, like most other natural scientists prior to the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics in 1900 and

2494-659: The Boasians ridiculed and rejected was the then dominant belief in orthogenesis —a determinate or teleological process of evolution in which change occurs progressively regardless of natural selection . Boas rejected the prevalent theories of social evolution developed by Edward Burnett Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Herbert Spencer not because he rejected the notion of "evolution" per se, but because he rejected orthogenetic notions of evolution in favor of Darwinian evolution. The difference between these prevailing theories of cultural evolution and Darwinian theory cannot be overstated:

2580-648: The Clark faculty, resigned in protest of the alleged infringement by Hall on academic freedom. Anthropologist Frederic Ward Putnam , director and curator of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University , who had been appointed as head of the Department of Ethnology and Archeology for the Chicago Fair in 1892, chose Boas as his first assistant at Chicago to prepare for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition or Chicago World's Fair,

2666-595: The Enlightenment. In Germany, the Enlightenment was dominated by Kant himself, who sought to establish principles based on universal rationality. In reaction to Kant, German scholars such as Johann Gottfried Herder (an influence to Boas) argued that human creativity, which necessarily takes unpredictable and highly diverse forms, is as important as human rationality. In 1795, the great linguist and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt called for an anthropology that would synthesize Kant's and Herder's interests. Humboldt founded

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2752-495: The Exposition provided the first of a series of shocks to Franz Boas's faith in public anthropology. The visitors were not there to be educated. By 1916, Boas had come to recognize with a certain resignation that "the number of people in our country who are willing and able to enter into the modes of thought of other nations is altogether too small ... The American who is cognizant only of his own standpoint sets himself up as arbiter of

2838-467: The Exposition where visitors to the Midway could learn about other cultures. Boas arranged for fourteen Kwakwaka'wakw aboriginals from British Columbia to come and reside in a mock Kwakwaka'wakw village, where they could perform their daily tasks in context. Inuit were there with 12-foot-long whips made of sealskin, wearing sealskin clothing and showing how adept they were in sealskin kayaks. His experience with

2924-487: The German physician Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) of Göttingen , amassed a large collection of human skulls ( Decas craniorum , published during 1790–1828), from which he argued for the division of humankind into five major races (termed Caucasian , Mongolian , Aethiopian , Malayan and American ). In the 19th century, French physical anthropologists, led by Paul Broca (1824–1880), focused on craniometry while

3010-515: The German tradition, led by Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902), emphasized the influence of environment and disease upon the human body. In the 1830s and 40s, physical anthropology was prominent in the debate about slavery , with the scientific, monogenist works of the British abolitionist James Cowles Prichard (1786–1848) opposing those of the American polygenist Samuel George Morton (1799–1851). In

3096-468: The Historical Sciences ; Boas's students Alfred Kroeber and Edward Sapir relied extensively on this work in defining their own approach to anthropology.) Although Kant considered these two interests of reason to be objective and universal, the distinction between the natural and human sciences was institutionalized in Germany, through the organization of scholarly research and teaching, following

3182-475: The Pacific Northwest. His continuing field research led him to think of culture as a local context for human action. His emphasis on local context and history led him to oppose the dominant model at the time, cultural evolution . Boas initially broke with evolutionary theory over the issue of kinship. Lewis Henry Morgan had argued that all human societies move from an initial form of matrilineal organization to patrilineal organization. First Nations groups on

3268-508: The Perception of the Color of Water, which examined the absorption, reflection, and polarization of light in water, and was awarded a PhD in physics in 1881. While at Bonn, Boas had attended geography classes taught by the geographer Theobald Fischer and the two established a friendship, with the coursework and friendship continuing after both relocated to Kiel at the same time. Fischer,

3354-540: The Royal Ethnological Museum Boas became interested in the Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, and after defending his habilitation thesis, he left for a three-month trip to British Columbia via New York. In January 1887, he was offered a job as assistant editor of the journal Science . Alienated by growing antisemitism and nationalism as well as the very limited academic opportunities for

3440-506: The World's Columbian Exposition to be a celebration of Columbus' voyage. Putnam argued that showing late nineteenth century Inuit and First Nations (then called Eskimo and Indians) "in their natural conditions of life" would provide a contrast and celebrate the four centuries of Western accomplishments since 1493. Franz Boas traveled north to gather ethnographic material for the Exposition. Boas had intended public science in creating exhibitions for

3526-510: The application of the scientific method. Opposed to the narrow or vertically arranged studies which Maurice Fishberg conducted which completely ignored the Jewish ethnicity i.e. culture, religion, and even family in the case of adoptions Franz Boas looked at all of those factors as well as across multiple generations and in multiple geographic locations to determine there to be no discernable genetic difference between Jews and non-Jews. This combined with

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3612-407: The bottom to deities at the top. This became the main system through which scholars thought about nature for the next roughly 2,000 years. Plato's student Aristotle ( c. 384–322 BC) observed in his History of Animals that human beings are the only animals to walk upright and argued, in line with his teleological view of nature, that humans have buttocks and no tails in order to give them

3698-437: The central analytical concept of anthropology. Among Boas's main contributions to anthropological thought was his rejection of the then-popular evolutionary approaches to the study of culture, which saw all societies progressing through a set of hierarchic technological and cultural stages, with Western European culture at the summit. Boas argued that culture developed historically through the interactions of groups of people and

3784-528: The centrality of "understanding" to human knowledge, and that the lived experience of a historian could provide a basis for an empathic understanding of the situation of a historical actor. For Boas, both values were well-expressed in a quote from Goethe: "A single action or event is interesting, not because it is explainable, but because it is true." The influence of these ideas on Boas is apparent in his 1887 essay, "The Study of Geography", in which he distinguished between physical science, which seeks to discover

3870-440: The claims by racial anthropologists of the day that held head shape to be a stable racial trait. Boas also worked to demonstrate that differences in human behavior are not primarily determined by innate biological dispositions but are largely the result of cultural differences acquired through social learning. In this way, Boas introduced culture as the primary concept for describing differences in behavior between human groups, and as

3956-468: The development of the modern synthesis , Virchow felt that Darwin's theories were weak because they lacked a theory of cellular mutability. Accordingly, Virchow favored Lamarckian models of evolution. This debate resonated with debates among geographers. Lamarckians believed that environmental forces could precipitate rapid and enduring changes in organisms that had no inherited source; thus, Lamarckians and environmental determinists often found themselves on

4042-500: The diffusion of ideas and that consequently there was no process towards continuously "higher" cultural forms. This insight led Boas to reject the "stage"-based organization of ethnological museums, instead preferring to order items on display based on the affinity and proximity of the cultural groups in question. Boas also introduced the idea of cultural relativism , which holds that cultures cannot be objectively ranked as higher or lower, or better or more correct, but that all humans see

4128-423: The disciplines of archaeology , the study of material culture and history, and physical anthropology , the study of variation in human anatomy, with ethnology , the study of cultural variation of customs, and descriptive linguistics, the study of unwritten indigenous languages, Boas created the four-field subdivision of anthropology which became prominent in American anthropology in the 20th century. Franz Boas

4214-619: The forms of artifacts reflect some natural process of progressive evolution. Boas, however, felt that the form an artifact took reflected the circumstances under which it was produced and used. Arguing that "[t]hough like causes have like effects like effects have not like causes", Boas realized that even artifacts that were similar in form might have developed in very different contexts, for different reasons. Mason's museum displays, organized along evolutionary lines, mistakenly juxtapose like effects; those organized along contextual lines would reveal like causes. In his capacity as Assistant Curator at

4300-518: The growth of what Max J. Kholer called Hitlerism or later Nazism in Germany resulted in a national summit where Franz Boas who had legally and scientifically been determined to be the factually correct opinion on the genetics of the Jewish people presided as guest of honor as Maurice Fishberg along with Ellsworth Huntington discredited their prior works before The Judaens and the Jewish Academy of Sciences on March 4, 1934, to emphatically state that there

4386-403: The hominin fossil record—then the focus shifts to human biological variation. Some editors, see below, have rooted the field even deeper than formal science. Attempts to study and classify human beings as living organisms date back to ancient Greece. The Greek philosopher Plato ( c. 428– c. 347 BC) placed humans on the scala naturae , which included all things, from inanimate objects at

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4472-649: The idea does not appear quite definitely expressed in Darwin's discussion of the development of mental powers, it seems quite clear that his main object has been to express his conviction that the mental faculties developed essentially without a purposive end, but they originated as variations, and were continued by natural selection. This idea was also brought out very clearly by Wallace, who emphasized that apparently reasonable activities of man might very well have developed without an actual application of reasoning. Thus, Boas suggested that what appear to be patterns or structures in

4558-512: The impact of the physical environment on native Inuit migrations. The first of many ethnographic field trips, Boas culled his notes to write his first monograph titled The Central Eskimo , which was published in 1888 in the 6th Annual Report from the Bureau of American Ethnology. Boas lived and worked closely with the Inuit on Baffin Island, and he developed an abiding interest in the way people lived. In

4644-510: 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. However, scientific racism still persisted in biological anthropology, with prominent figures such as Earnest Hooton and Aleš Hrdlička promoting theories of racial superiority and

4730-407: The laws governing phenomena, and historical science, which seeks a thorough understanding of phenomena on their own terms. Boas argued that geography is and must be historical in this sense. In 1887, after his Baffin Island expedition, Boas wrote "The Principles of Ethnological Classification", in which he developed this argument in application to anthropology: Ethnological phenomena are the result of

4816-858: The mother's line. At first, Boas—like Morgan before him—suggested that the Kwakiutl had been matrilineal like their neighbors to the north, but that they were beginning to evolve patrilineal groups. In 1897, however, he repudiated himself, and argued that the Kwakiutl were changing from a prior patrilineal organization to a matrilineal one, as they learned about matrilineal principles from their northern neighbors. Boas's rejection of Morgan's theories led him, in an 1887 article, to challenge Mason's principles of museum display. At stake, however, were more basic issues of causality and classification. The evolutionary approach to material culture led museum curators to organize objects on display according to function or level of technological development. Curators assumed that changes in

4902-426: The museum. Boas staged a funeral for the father of the boy and had the remains dissected and placed in the museum. Boas has been widely critiqued for his role in bringing the Inuit to New York and his disinterest in them once they had served their purpose at the museum. Boas was appointed a lecturer in physical anthropology at Columbia University in 1896, and promoted to professor of anthropology in 1899. However,

4988-551: The music they recorded into music notation , and Fillmore also worked on the music Boas and Gilman recorded during the Columbian Exposition. After the exposition, the ethnographic material collected formed the basis of the newly created Field Museum in Chicago with Boas as the curator of anthropology. He worked there until 1894, when he was replaced (against his will) by BAE archeologist William Henry Holmes . In 1896, Boas

5074-427: The next decade, as well as his instructions to future students. (See Lewis 2001b for an alternative view to Harris'.) Although context and history were essential elements to Boas's understanding of anthropology as Geisteswissenschaften and Geschichtswissenschaften , there is one essential element that Boasian anthropology shares with Naturwissenschaften : empiricism. In 1949, Boas's student Alfred Kroeber summed up

5160-765: The northern coast of British Columbia, like the Tsimshian , and Tlingit , were organized into matrilineal clans. First Nations on the southern coast, like the Nootka and the Salish , however, were organized into patrilineal groups. Boas focused on the Kwakiutl , who lived between the two clusters. The Kwakiutl seemed to have a mix of features. Prior to marriage, a man would assume his wife's father's name and crest. His children took on these names and crests as well, although his sons would lose them when they got married. Names and crests thus stayed in

5246-551: The orthogeneticists argued that all societies progress through the same stages in the same sequence. Thus, although the Inuit with whom Boas worked at Baffin Island , and the Germans with whom he studied as a graduate student, were contemporaries of one another, evolutionists argued that the Inuit were at an earlier stage in their evolution, and Germans at a later stage. Boasians argued that virtually every claim made by cultural evolutionists

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5332-509: The people with whom it came into contact, must be considered This formulation echoes Ratzel's focus on historical processes of human migration and culture contact and Bastian's rejection of environmental determinism. It also emphasizes culture as a context ("surroundings"), and the importance of history. These are the hallmarks of Boasian anthropology (which Marvin Harris would later call " historical particularism "), would guide Boas's research over

5418-716: The perpetual darkness of the Arctic winter, Boas reported, he and his traveling companion became lost and were forced to keep sledding for twenty-six hours through ice, soft snow, and temperatures that dropped below −46 °C. The following day, Boas penciled in his diary, I often ask myself what advantages our 'good society' possesses over that of the 'savages' and find, the more I see of their customs, that we have no right to look down upon them ... We have no right to blame them for their forms and superstitions which may seem ridiculous to us. We 'highly educated people' are much worse, relatively speaking ... Boas went on to explain in

5504-416: The physical and psychical character of men, and of its development under the influence of the surroundings ... 'Surroundings' are the physical conditions of the country, and the sociological phenomena, i.e., the relation of man to man. Furthermore, the study of the present surroundings is insufficient: the history of the people, the influence of the regions through which it has passed on its migrations, and

5590-412: The reconciling of Charles Darwin 's theory of evolution and Gregor Mendel 's research on heredity. Advances in the understanding of the molecular structure of DNA and the development of chronological dating methods opened doors to understanding human variation, both past and present, more accurately and in much greater detail. Franz Boas Franz Uri Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 21, 1942)

5676-411: The rest of his career. Through his students, many of whom went on to found anthropology departments and research programmes inspired by their mentor, Boas profoundly influenced the development of American anthropology. Among his many significant students were A. L. Kroeber , Alexander Goldenweiser , Ruth Benedict , Edward Sapir , Margaret Mead , Zora Neale Hurston , and Gilberto Freyre . Boas

5762-414: The same entry that "all service, therefore, which a man can perform for humanity must serve to promote truth." Before his departure, his father had insisted he be accompanied by one of the family's servants, Wilhelm Weike who cooked for him and kept a journal of the expedition. Boas was nonetheless forced to depend on various Inuit groups for everything from directions and food to shelter and companionship. It

5848-512: The same side of debates. But Boas worked more closely with Bastian, who was noted for his antipathy to environmental determinism. Instead, he argued for the "psychic unity of mankind", a belief that all humans had the same intellectual capacity, and that all cultures were based on the same basic mental principles. Variations in custom and belief, he argued, were the products of historical accidents. This view resonated with Boas's experiences on Baffin Island and drew him towards anthropology. While at

5934-461: The study of phenomena that are governed by objective natural laws, while the latter terms in the two oppositions refer to those phenomena that have to mean only in terms of human perception or experience. In 1884, Kantian philosopher Wilhelm Windelband coined the terms nomothetic and idiographic to describe these two divergent approaches. He observed that most scientists employ some mix of both, but in differing proportions; he considered physics

6020-416: The three principles of empiricism that define Boasian anthropology as a science: One of the greatest accomplishments of Boas and his students was their critique of theories of physical, social, and cultural evolution current at that time. This critique is central to Boas's work in museums, as well as his work in all four fields of anthropology. As historian George Stocking noted, however, Boas's main project

6106-410: The various anthropologists teaching at Columbia had been assigned to different departments. When Boas left the Museum of Natural History, he negotiated with Columbia University to consolidate the various professors into one department, of which Boas would take charge. Boas's program at Columbia was the first Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) program in anthropology in America. During this time Boas played

6192-437: The way it did even twenty years ago. Even the name is relatively new, having been 'physical anthropology' for over a century, with some practitioners still applying that term. Biological anthropologists look back to the work of Charles Darwin as a major foundation for what they do today. However, if one traces the intellectual genealogy back to physical anthropology's beginnings—before the discovery of much of what we now know as

6278-431: The work of the immortal Darwin which have helped to make anthropology what it is at the present time." During Maurice Fishberg's time as a medical examiner he recorded skull and nose measurements of Jewish immigrants through which he originally asserted a genetic difference between Jews and non-Jews to describe them as another race along with Joseph Jacobs. However his theories were largely discredited by Franz Boas through

6364-400: The world through the lens of their own culture, and judge it according to their own culturally acquired norms. For Boas, the object of anthropology was to understand the way in which culture conditioned people to understand and interact with the world in different ways and to do this it was necessary to gain an understanding of the language and cultural practices of the people studied. By uniting

6450-490: The world." Boas collaborated with Benjamin Ives Gilman to record music performed by Kwakwakaʼwakw musicians who were appearing at the Columbian Exposition. He had previously collaborated with Alice Cunningham Fletcher at the Bureau of American Ethnology in making several recordings of Indigenous music of North America . Boas and Fletcher partnered with music educator John Comfort Fillmore (1843–1898) in transcribing

6536-402: Was a German-American anthropologist and ethnomusicologist . He was a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the movements known as historical particularism and cultural relativism . Studying in Germany, Boas was awarded a doctorate in 1881 in physics while also studying geography . He then participated in

6622-491: Was a difficult year filled with tremendous hardships that included frequent bouts of disease, mistrust, pestilence, and danger. Boas successfully searched for areas not yet surveyed and found unique ethnographic objects, but the long winter and the lonely treks across perilous terrain forced him to search his soul to find a direction for his life as a scientist and a citizen. Boas returned to Berlin to complete his studies. His interest in indigenous communities grew as he worked at

6708-629: Was appointed Assistant Curator of Ethnology and Somatology of the American Museum of Natural History under Putnam. In 1897, he organized the Jesup North Pacific Expedition , a five-year-long field-study of the nations of the Pacific Northwest, whose ancestors had migrated across the Bering Strait from Siberia. This was the first comprehensive anthropological survey of the north circumpolar region, and Boas and his students made many sound and film recordings during this trip. These included

6794-464: Was born on July 9, 1858, 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. Boas's parents were liberal; they did not like dogma of any kind. An important early influence was the avuncular Abraham Jacobi , his mother's brother-in-law and

6880-489: Was concerned about university president G. Stanley Hall 's interference in his research, yet in 1889 he was appointed as the head of a newly created department of anthropology at Clark University. In the early 1890s, he went on a series of expeditions which were referred to as the Morris K. Jesup Expedition. The primary goal of these expeditions was to illuminate Asiatic-American relations. In 1892 Boas, along with another member of

6966-460: Was contradicted by the data, or reflected a profound misinterpretation of the data. As Boas's student Robert Lowie remarked, "Contrary to some misleading statements on the subject, there have been no responsible opponents of evolution as 'scientifically proved', though there has been determined hostility to an evolutionary metaphysics that falsifies the established facts". In an unpublished lecture, Boas characterized his debt to Darwin thus: Although

7052-467: Was most proud of his research on the geographic distribution of plants. When he started his university studies, Boas first attended Heidelberg University for a semester followed by four terms at Bonn University , studying physics, geography, and mathematics at these schools. In 1879, he hoped to transfer to Berlin University to study physics under Hermann von Helmholtz , but ended up transferring to

7138-493: Was named Privatdozent in geography. While on Baffin Island he began to develop his interest in studying non-Western cultures (resulting in his book, The Central Eskimo , published in 1888). In 1885, he went to work with physical anthropologist Rudolf Virchow and ethnologist Adolf Bastian at the Royal Ethnological Museum in Berlin. Boas had studied anatomy with Virchow two years earlier while preparing for

7224-435: Was one of the most prominent opponents of the then-popular ideologies of scientific racism , the idea that race is a biological concept and that human behavior is best understood through the typology of biological characteristics. In a series of groundbreaking studies of skeletal anatomy, he showed that cranial shape and size was highly malleable depending on environmental factors such as health and nutrition, in contrast to

7310-712: Was re-conquered by geography, the first love of his boyhood." In his dissertation research, Boas's methodology included investigating how different intensities of light created different colors when interacting with different types of water; however, he encountered difficulty in being able to objectively perceive slight differences in the color of water, and as a result became intrigued by this problem of perception and its influence on quantitative measurements. Boas, due to tone deafness , would later encounter difficulties also in studying tonal languages such as Laguna . Boas had already been interested in Kantian philosophy since taking

7396-478: Was to distinguish between biological and cultural heredity, and to focus on the cultural processes that he believed had the greatest influence over social life. In fact, Boas supported Darwinian theory, although he did not assume that it automatically applied to cultural and historical phenomena (and indeed was a lifelong opponent of 19th-century theories of cultural evolution , such as those of Lewis H. Morgan and Edward Burnett Tylor ). The notion of evolution that

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