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3.2: Historical Particularism

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    5578
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    Franz_boas.jpg
    Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\) - Franz Boas, Father of American Anthropology

    Franz Boas and his students developed historical particularism early in the twentieth century. This approach claims that each society has its own unique historical development and must be understood based on its own specific cultural and environmental context, especially its historical process. Its core premise was that culture was a “set of ideas or symbols held in common by a group of people who see themselves as a social group” (Darnell 2013: 399). Historical particularists criticized the theory of the nineteenth-century social evolution as non-scientific and proclaimed themselves to be free from preconceived ideas. Boas believed that there were universal laws that could be derived from the comparative study of cultures; however, he thought that the ethnographic database was not yet robust enough for us to identify those laws. To that end, he and his students 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 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 particularists showed that this labeling is based on insufficient evidence and claimed that societies cannot be ranked by the value judgment of researchers. Historical particularists were also responsible for showing the need for long-term, intensive fieldwork in order to produce accurate descriptions of cultures. One important part of doing that was to learn the language of the study group.

    LEARN MORE ABOUT THE ANTHROPOLOGISTS

    Lewis Henry Morgan: https://rochester.edu/College/ANT/morgan/bio.html

    References

    1. Darnell, Regna. “Historical Particularism.” In Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, edited by R. Jon McGee and Richard L. Warms, 397-401. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Reference, 2013.
    2. Francisconi, Michael J. “Theoretical Anthropology.” In 21st Century Anthropology: A Reference Handbook, Vol. 1, edited by H. James Birx, 442-452. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Reference, 2010.
    3. Frey, Rodney. “Historical-Particularism-as exemplified by Franz Boas (1858-1942).” University of Idaho. Accessed February 27, 2015.http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~rfrey/220histpart.htm.
    4. Graber, Robert Bates. “Social Evolution.” In 21st Century Anthropology: A Reference Handbook, Vol. 1, edited by H. James Birx, 576-585. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Reference, 2010.
    5. Turner, Jonathan. “Spencer, Herbert.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 8, edited by William A. Darity, 57-59. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008.

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