Historical Particularism
Historical Particularism claims that each society has its own unique historical development and must be understood based on its own specific cultural context, especially its historical process. Historical Particularists criticized the theory of the Nineteenth-century Evolutionism as non-scientific and claimed themselves to be free from preconceived ideas. They collected a vast amount of first-hand cultural data by conducting ethnographic fieldwork. Based on these raw data, they described particular cultures instead of trying to establish general theories that apply to all societies.
The Historical
Particularists valued fieldwork and history as critical methods of cultural
analysis. At the same time, the anthropologists in this theoretical school had
different views on the importance of individuals in a society. For example,
Frantz Boas saw each individual as the basic component of a society. He
gathered information from individual informants and considered such data
valuable enough for cultural analysis. On the other hand, Alfred Kroeber did
not see individuals as the fundamental elements of a society. He believed a
society evolves according to its own internal laws that do not
directly originate from its individuals. He named this cultural aspect
superorganic and claimed that a society cannot be explained without considering
this impersonal force.
Historical Particularism was a dominant theoretical trend in anthropology during the first half of the twentieth century. One of the achievements of the Historical Particularists was that they succeeded in excluding racism from anthropology. The Nineteenth-century Evolutionists explained cultural similarities and differences by classifying societies into superior and inferior categories. Historical Particualrists showed that this labeling is based on insufficient evidence and claimed that societies cannot be ranked by the value judgment of researchers.
Source:
- McGee, R. Jon and Richard L. Warms. 2004 Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History. New York: McGraw Hill.