Franz Boas
Franz Boas is considered one of the founders of academic anthropology and is also credited with the theory of Historical Particularism. This theory claims that each society has its own unique historical development and must be understood based on its own historical context.
Until Boas presented Historical Particularsim, many anthropologists believed that societies develop according to one universal order of cultural evolution. This belief, called the Unilineal Evolution, explained cultural similarities and differences among societies by classifying them into three sequential stages of development: savagery, barbarism and civilization. Boas criticized this belief as based on insufficient evidence. For example, Unilineal Evolution claims that matrilineal kin systems preceded patrilineal kin systems and that religions based on animism developed before polytheistic religions. Boas argued that this ordering is merely an assumption because there is no historical evidence or way to demonstrate its validity. He also criticized Unilineal Evolution for its method of gathering and organizing data. At that time many anthropologists relied on missionaries or traders for data collection and anthropologists themselves rarely went to the societies that they were analyzing. Boas argued that those armchair anthropologists organized that second-hand data in unsystematic manners to fit their preconceived ideas.
Based on his principle that cultural theories should be derived from concrete ethnographic data, Boas strongly advocated fieldwork. He developed the method of participant observation as a basic research strategy of ethnographic fieldwork. Based on this method Boas collected a vast amount of first-hand cultural data from Native American tribes in the United States. Using detailed ethnographic studies he argued that a society is understandable only in its own specific cultural context, especially its historical process. Boas did not deny the existence of general laws on human behavior and developed the position that those laws could be discovered from the understanding of a specific society. In later years Boas became skeptical about the possibility of deriving cultural laws because he realized that cultural phenomena are too complex.
Besides presenting the theory of Historical Particularism, Boas left a tremendous impact on the development of anthropology. By claiming that societies cannot be ranked by the degree of savagery, barbarity or civility, Boas called for an end of ethnocentrism in anthropology. Also because of his influence, anthropologists began to do ethnological fieldwork to gather sound evidence. His position that culture must be understood in its own context has been passed on to anthropologists as a basic approach to cultural analysis.
Sources:
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Moore, Jerry D. 1996 Visions of Culture : An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press.
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Scupin, Raymond and Christopher R. Decorse. 2000 Anthropology: A Global Perspective. UpperSaddle River: Prentice Hall.