SITE
AMNH
BIO
HUMANITIES
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INUIT
REVIEW Potlatch
pioneer in the field of ethnology
Boas, Franz, anthropologist, ethnologist, folklorist and linguist (Minden, Westphalia, 9 July. 1858 - New York, December 21, 1942). In collaboration with his students, Boas defines the intellectual and professional orientation of American anthropology. It stresses the need to address the study of the history of cultures using an empirical method. His work highlights the historical factors that combine and blend to give each company its distinctive character. Boas
primarily interested in historical geography, but the pioneering work he performs in INUIT OF BAFFIN ISLAND (1883-1884) led him to conclude that the customs of a people do not only geography and often develop against environmental constraints. From 1886 he focused his research definitive Coast Indians Northwest. The richness of their art and their mythology more convinced of the need to consider the psychological characteristics as well as geographical data in his research. These characteristics are developed over the centuries by borrowing traits from other cultures, modifying and integrating them a new culture.
His many students are the greatest legacy of Boas. The brightest of them, Edward Sapir, was the first director of what is now the CANADIAN MUSEUM OF CIVILIZATION. For many years, Boas dominated American anthropology and is a mentor to most of the first women working in this occupation, including Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. He worked tirelessly and effectively to wrest the public's belief in the race and to adopt a scientific conception of culture as a basis to explain the main differences among human groups. RJ PRESTON
It is mainly devoted to the study of American Indians. Formed by the natural sciences, it focuses on observation, on the need for descriptive and empirical basis of research in ethnology. His physical anthropology leads to the radical critique of the concept of race. He rejects the two major schools of his time, evolutionism and diffusionism, and develop a physical and cultural anthropology (psychological research processes unique to each people in language, art, myth and religion) who also claims the importance of individual experiences to the study and understanding of peoples. His thoughts profoundly influenced American anthropology of the early nineteenth century. encarta
"If you ask me, a gun to his head, what was the greatest advancement of anthropology in the last century, I would say without hesitation that it is to have laid bare the fallacy of racist, a discovery that actually goes back to work by Franz Boas in New York in the early twentieth century. Boas showed that there were no mentally irreducible differences between human communities and that, fundamentally We all think the same way. In particular, there is nothing that resembles a primitive thought. The "pansy" has no real existence. We are all primitives. We are all products of evolution also long. The differences between cultures regarding the mental habits are the result of any innate biological determinant or any historical process type. We built our cultural differences, we can get rid of it if we want. "
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
Professor at the University of London
Boas, will attack front all the racial theories and demonstrate that the very notions of race, climate change, displacement geographical areas may alter the body of men and some innate traits, are innate immemorial. We find it also in the works of Durkheim who shares it the same way.
Both are of Jewish culture. They therefore lived intensively this look, this sense of exclusion that could lay next to their knowledge about their Jewishness, they lived inside. They questioned the scientific basis of race science. ceishs
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