Prove it: Anthropological Theory

This week's debate: Boas vs. Kroeber:

Debate Beginnings

Franz Boas entered the anthropological scene at a time where anthropology was beginning to gain momentum as an exciting new field and it offered an opportunity to get some idea of the dynamics of culture, its growth, development, adaptation and the way they spread, etc… all of which would be fundamental to understanding our own culture and our own way of life. This kind of research was innovative and pioneering, and it offered very exciting prospects of knowledge and understanding.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

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Boas was the first white social anthropologist to remove race as a determinant from concepts of human sociology and to rather explore the thoughts, feelings and activities of tribes and peoples once considered inferior. Boas used his science to explain and challenge the assumptions of culture superiority and social evolution. Maybe Kroeber was right to criticize Boas' lack of theory, and the fact that Boas may have rejected physics in favor of history as a model for his anthropological research. But what is without question is Boas' great positive influence on the emerging science of anthropology...

Franz Boas

Early anthropology introduced race to justify exploitation and humiliation of “primitive” cultures and the nagging emerging truth was that people were unequal. Boas was the first white social anthropologist to remove race as a determinant from concepts of human sociology and to rather explore the thoughts, feelings and activities of tribes and peoples once considered inferior. He was an advocate of cultural relativism (though the term hadn't been coined yet!!), which is the idea that what is morally wrong or socially undesirable in one culture may be fine in another and that individual choices and actions must be understood in within the context of the individual's own culture. Boas used his science to explain and challenge the assumptions of culture superiority and social evolution.

A.L. Kroeber

Like his mentor Boas, Kroeber was very much a believer in the principal of cultural relativism. However, while he was Boas`s first PhD in anthropology in North America, Kroeber was highly critical of his former teacher and he was the first to scorn the evolutionist’s search for selected facts to grace abstract evolutionary theories. “The Nature of Culture” and “The Configuration of Cultural Growth” were two of Kroeber’s biggest publications where he attempted to gather evidence of human behavior among people in their natural environments by studying linguistics, concrete cultural phenomena, and patterns of culture. It is said that Kroeber's influence was so strong that many of his contemporaries adopted his style of beard and mustache as well as his views as a social scientist.