FranzGood is a US-based German anthropologist known as “Father of American Anthropology”. One of the greatest exponents of the culturalist current in anthropology, his influence extended to beyond his time, he is one of the greatest anthropologists since the emergence of this discipline as a science.
he was an important opponent of scientific racism, which portrayed race as a biological concept, and cultural evolutionism, which ranked cultures treating Western European modern society as the last stage to be reached by too much.
Good introduced the paradigm of cultural relativism, which fights the hierarchical classification of cultures based on their cultural differences, was pioneer in the ethnographic method, in which the coexistence of the researcher with the people studied is part of the research process. Boas revolutionized the concept of culture and the way of studying cultures. He is a fundamental author for anyone interested in anthropology.
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Franz Boas Biography
Franz Uri Good was born on July 9, 1858, in Minden, Germany., coming from a Jewish family. Son of the merchant Meier Boas and the kindergarten teacher Sophie Meyer, Boas had a liberal creation and, from an early age, he had contact with ideas that echoed the Revolutions of 1848, also called Spring of the Peoples, which took place in central and eastern Europe and claimed civil and political liberties.
His parents embraced the Enlightenment ideals, and that profoundly influenced his education. While still in his childhood, Boas showed interest in the study of natural sciences, and in junior high studies, he leaned towards the study of natural history.
started your university studies in geography, physics and mathematics, at the Universities of Heidelberg and Bonn. In 1881, got a doctorate in physics, by the University of Kiel, with the research Contributions to understanding the color of water. He worked in the Department of Geography at the University of Berlin. Between the years 1883 and 1884, he made a Northern Canadian geographic expedition, on Baffin Island, to study the effects of geographic features on the culture of the Eskimos. In this his interest in studying cultures intensified.
In 1886, he returned to Berlin to complete his studies, and his thesis on Eskimo culture earned him the title of professor (privatdozent) in geography. In the same year, he made a ethnographic expedition to British Columbia to study the natives of the northwest coast, especially the people kwakiutl, which later became a systematic target of his research.
In 1887, Franz Boas naturalized american and married Marie Krackowizer. His pioneering work was The central Eskimos, published in 1888 in the Sixth Annual Report of the US Department of Ethnology. In 1889 he taught at Clark University and headed the newly created department of Anthropology, but in 1892 he resigned his post in protest at his alleged violation of academic freedom.
From then on, he was invited to be Curator of Anthropology at the Field Museum, in Chicago, where he worked until 1894. In 1896, he was assistant curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History and was appointed professor of physical anthropology at Columbia University. In 1899 he was promoted to professor of anthropology at that same university, where he was director of the department of anthropology, createdthe first US doctorate in anthropology and worked for the rest of his career.
His influence on his students extended to research programs and other departments of anthropology, from so that Boas contributed profoundly in shaping the North American bias in this area in the first half of the 20th century. Among his most renowned students are the renowned anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead and the Brazilian thinker Gilberto Freyre.
Good directed numerous periodicals, was co-founder of the American Association of Anthropology (1902), and chaired the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1931). He wrote several books, between them the mind of primitive man (1911), fundamental text of anthropology, primitive art (1927) and race, language and culture (1940), collection compiled by him containing his most important texts.
Franz Boas had six children: Helene, Ernst Philip, Hedwig, Gertrud, Henry Herbert and Marie Franziska. He died at the age of 84, on December 21, 1942, in New York City, United States.
cultural anthropology
cultural anthropology is one of the great divisions of Theanthropology, the others are: biological anthropology, prehistoric anthropology, linguistic anthropology and psychological anthropology. Cultural anthropology is a current developed in the US based especially on the work of Franz Boas. It marks the consolidation of anthropology as an autonomous discipline, independent of sociology.
Covers everything that constitutes a society: economic production, kinship relations, language, psychology, arts, religion, knowledge systems, techniques, political and legal organization. Still, its focus is directed to the behavior of individuals as elucidators of culture, rather than institutions and their functioning. Thus, the different forms of contact: interaction, assimilation, acculturation, diffusion, as well as languages, are the elements for apprehending reality.
cultural anthropology anchors his investigations in the ethnographic method and comparative analysis. The notion of culture is pluralistic and based on historical and social characteristics, not biological ones. Boas was fundamental so that racialist conceptions, which attributed certain behaviors and cultural traits to the physical characteristics of a people, were supplanted.
See more: Structuralism - scientific analysis method that has had a large space in anthropology
Civilization
Franz Boas was critic of the conception of civilization stemming from evolutionary theories from the beginning of anthropology, influenced by colonialism and racialism, which established modern, Western, European and North American societies as the apex of civilization. For evolutionary anthropology, human history was unique and divided into three stages: savagery, barbarism and civilization. Until then, the word culture and the word civilization were associated with cultural traits of Western societies, seen as a pattern of refinement, sophistication, complexity, progress.
Westernized societies, that is, colonized, would be on the way to civilization, and non-colonized societies were considered primitive. Boas showed that it is possible to differentiate without ranking. he brought a new paradigm by giving the word culture a plural and relativistic perspective, that is, cultures, taken based on the German conception of “the spirit of a people” (kultur) and understood as a historically conditioned whole, which could not be fragmented or hierarchical.
Thus each people has in its culture complexity, sophistication, refinement, but in its own standards and, therefore, cannot be evaluated based on those of another culture. Boas did not see human mentality as uniform, nor societal development as a single, predetermined path. On the contrary, he affirmed multiplicity as a factor in understanding societies.
Ethnology
Ethnology is the ethnic study, the systematic analysis of data collected by the ethnographic method, the interpretation and description of a people based on their culture, folklore, languages and also the comparison between cultures. in your book the methods of ethnology (1920), Boas criticizes the evolutionist method and proposes another one that studies each society in its own dynamics and according to its own history and circumstances, without establishing a model by which it is classified as backward or modern, good or bad.
The evolutionist method tried, following the mold of the natural sciences, to establish universal laws for the development of civilization that, analytically applied to different peoples, it would place them in different civilizational stages justifiable by relations causal. For Boas, “classifying is not explaining”. he saw each society as a systemic whole that should be understood in its context, not deriving from another society or evolving into another society, therefore, should be studied in its specific processes in the present, and not according to laws universals.
In the opposite way of the evolutionist method, which used Western civilization as a parameter for the others, Boas stated that “only ethnology opens up the possibility of to judge our own culture objectively, insofar as it allows us to abandon the supposedly self-evident way of thinking and feeling that determines the foundations of this culture".
Read more: Ethnocentrism - worldview that qualifies one culture over others
Ethnography
Ethnography is the combination of two words: ethno (nation) and spelling (to write). It is one of the main methods of anthropology and consists of descriptive studies of cultures and their written compilation. Before this term was created or this method was developed, observations and notes on customs, beliefs and cultural characteristics of other ethnic groups on the part of travelers and missionaries, information that was sometimes passed on to researchers who interpreted.
These early researchers of anthropology as a science were called cabinet anthropologists because they didn't. made direct observation of the people they analyzed, based on theories and, at most, on data collected by the 3rd.
Still in the second half of the nineteenth century, this practice fell into decline, the researchers started to live with the analyzed community, to learn the language and the cosmovision, to share their way of life for a period of time, in order to build a study capable of describing the studied people as they see themselves. This way of apprehending reality in the social sciences is also called participant observation and fieldwork.
Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski, especially the second, are considered the fathers of ethnography as an anthropological method. One of Boas' great contributions was to break with the evolutionary perspective of categorizing simple and complex, inferior and superior, primitive and civilized societies.
Boas studied societies as autonomous wholes, he did not start from the idea that one society was derived from another and that there were stages from barbarism to civilization. He emphasized the importance of field research and access to the language of the people studied for their understanding, thus, direct observation by the researcher has become an indispensable part of search.
Boas sought the meaning of customs in the particular context in which they were practiced. The observation resulted in a meticulous description and faithful re-transcription of the collected data, in his own words: “In the field, everything must be annotated: from the constituent materials of the houses to the notes of the melodies sung by the Eskimos, and this in detail, and in the detail of the detail".
This practice allows the anthropologist diving into the universe of the people studied and to depart from their preconceptions as far as possible, so as to describe that society as a member of it would describe it, or as closely as possible. Thus, it becomes possible for the other not to be portrayed according to the researcher's society cosmovision, but his own.
This method reshaped 20th century anthropology and allowed it, within the human sciences, to be the place where the ethnocentrism of Western societies is questioned and the otherness, this that is, putting oneself in the other's shoes in order to understand them goes from a method of studying difference to an ethical principle inside and outside situations of search.
Franz Good's Phrases
"All the service, therefore, that a man can perform for mankind must serve to promote the truth."
“(…) Anthropology data teach us a greater tolerance to forms of civilization different from ours, that we must learn to look at the foreign races with greater sympathy and with the conviction that, as all races have contributed in the past to cultural progress, a one way or another, they will be able to advance the interests of humanity if we are only willing to give them a chance. fair."
“Courtesy, modesty, good manners, compliance with defined ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, good manners and defined ethical standards is not universal. It's instructive to know that patterns differ in the most unexpected ways.”
“Eugenics must not, therefore, delude us into the belief that we should try to create a race of supermen, even if it is our aim to eliminate all suffering and pain. (...) Eugenics is not a panacea that will cure human diseases; it is a dangerous sword that can turn its tip against those who rely on its strength.”
By Milka de Oliveira Rezende
Sociology Professor
