ANTHROPOLOGISTS

FRANZ BOAS
Franz Uri Boas was a German-born American anthropologist and a
pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of
American Anthropology". His work is associated with the
movements known as historical particularism and cultural
relativism
H e b el iev ed t ha t a l l p eo p l e h a v e equ a l ca p a cit y f o r
development, and there are no separate 'races' as his
contemporaries argued. Ultimately, he made the case that
cultures should be studied from their own perspective
rather than outsiders judging that culture. This point of
view would become known as cultural relativism. Think of
cultural relativism as you visiting a friend's house and just
noting what you observe without judging it based on the
values of your own household.
HISTORICAL PARTICULARISM
CULTURAL RELATIVISM
Ruth Benedict
• Boas had a major impact on anthropologists
throughout the 20th century, including his student Ruth
Benedict. Benedict came to believe that over time a
culture takes on a particular personality. Some traits
become very important to a culture, while many other
possible traits are excluded. This is a bit like saying that
if you visit your friend's house and find that, above all,
they value neatness and order, then that characteristic
may play a strong role in their way of life, leading them
to always be early, to keep things constantly organized,
and to value cleanliness, even to an extreme. They have
chosen these traits as central to their identity out of a
whole array of possible ways to function.
• Benedict argued that each culture develops its own
traits and characteristics that guide the various rituals,
beliefs, and values of that culture, a view often described
as 'personality writ large.' She applied this theory not to
households, but to entire cultural groups of people.
Culture is “Personality Writ Large”
In her widely translated book Patterns of Culture (Routledge, 1934), Ruth
Fulton Benedict wrote, “A culture, like an individual, is a more or less
consistent pattern of thought and action”. Each culture, she held, chooses
from “the great arc of human potentialities” only a few characteristics which
become the leading personality traits of the persons living in that
culture. “These traits comprise an interdependent constellation of aesthetics
and values in each culture which together add up to the culture’s unique
form or shape, its wholeness.”
In the book’s forward, Margaret Mead succinctly stated that Fulton
saw “human cultures as ‘personality writ large.’” To say that another way,
what you can say about a person, you can also say about a culture. In a
proper sentence describing a culture or a person, you can substitute the
word ‘culture’ for the word ‘person’, and vice versa and the sentence will still
make perfect sense. In fact, if you think of your culture as a person, with the
full range of human needs and desires, you can get to know it and work with
it most efficiently.
Writ large
Margaret Mead
• Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who
featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media
during the 1960s and the 1970s. She earned her bachelor's
degree at Barnard College of Columbia University and her M.A.
and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia
• Mead entered DePauw University in 1919 and transferred
to Barnard College a year later. She graduated from Barnard in
1923 and entered the graduate school of Columbia University,
where she studied with and was greatly influenced by
anthropologists Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict (a lifelong friend).
Mead received an M.A. in 1924 and a Ph.D. in 1929.
• In 1925, during the first of her many field trips to the South Seas,
she gathered material for the first of her 23 books, Coming of Age
in Samoa (1928; new ed., 2001), a perennial best seller and a
characteristic example of her reliance on observation rather than
statistics for data. The book clearly indicates her belief in cultural
determinism, a position that caused some later 20th-century
anthropologists to question both the accuracy of her observations
and the soundness of her conclusions
Coming of age in Samoa
• In 1925, Margaret Mead journeyed to the South Pacific territory of American Samoa. She
sought to discover whether adolescence was a universally traumatic and stressful time
due to biological factors or whether the experience of adolescence depended on one's
cultural upbringing. After spending about nine months observing and interviewing
Samoans, as well as administering psychological tests, Mead concluded that adolescence
was not a stressful time for girls in Samoa because Samoan cultural patterns were very
different from those in the United States. Her findings were published in Coming of Age
in Samoa (1928), a vivid, descriptive account of Samoan adolescent life that became
tremendously popular. It was published in more than a dozen editions in a variety of
languages and made Mead famous. One of the reasons for the popularity of the book was
that Mead had revised the introduction and conclusion of her original manuscript, adding
two chapters that dealt directly with the implications of her findings for child rearing in the
United States.
• Though it was a popular success and has been used in numerous undergraduate
anthropology classes, Coming of Age in Samoa has received varying degrees of
criticism over the years. Some of her results have been called into question by other
anthropologists, and she has been criticized for romanticizing Samoan life and
downplaying evidence contrary to her main argument. In addition, some Samoans have
found her depiction of Samoan adolescent sexuality offensive.
• In addition to her popular volume on Samoan adolescence, Mead wrote a more technical
account of Samoan culture entitled The Social Organization of Manu'a (1930).
Cultural determinism
• Through her other findings over ensuing years, Mead became a
vocal proponent of cultural determinism, the theory that a
culture ultimately shapes an individual's perceptions and
stances on sexual behavior and general character. Mead
was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom
in 1979.
• the Greeks are a great example of how cultural determinism
can influence individual beliefs. The Greeks believed that only
those born and raised in Greece could understand their culture
and that only those who could speak their language could
understand their ideals and beliefs.
Bronisław Kasper Malinowski.
Bronisław Kasper Malinowski, (born April 7, 1884, Kraków,
Pol., Austria-Hungary—died May 16, 1942, New Haven, Conn.,
U.S.), one of the most important anthropologists of the 20th
century who is widely recognized as a founder of social
anthropology and principally associated with field studies of the
peoples of Oceania.
Malinowski was born in Krakow, Poland, in 1884, to an upper-
middle-class family. He was an excellent student who focused on
mathematics and physical sciences at the Jagiellonian University
where he earned his doctorate in philosophy in 1908 when he was
only 24. Since his childhood, Malinowski suffered from poor health,
falling ill frequently. And so the same happened during his time at
university when he was forced to spend some time in bed. While
laying in his bed, Malinowski read James Frazer’s “The Golden
Bough” which inspired him to become an anthropologist.
Social anthropology
• Social anthropology is the study of human society and cultures
through a comparative lens. Social anthropologists seek to
understand how people live in societies and how they make their
lives meaningful. Anthropologists are concerned with such questions
as: Why do people do what they do?
• Bronisław Kasper Malinowski is one of the most influential
anthropologists of the 20th century and is regarded as the father of
ethnography.
• In 1914, he traveled to the Trobriand Islands in Melanesia with the
intention of studying the Kula ring, a ceremonial exchange system,
and remained there for several years. Malinowski lived among the
natives of the island and observed their behavior, cultural patterns,
and their economic, political, as well as their kinship systems. Hence,
with his work, he improved the practice of participant observation
which is the basic anthropological approach in ethnographic
fieldwork.
The Kula ring
Ethnography
Ethnography is a research method central to knowing the
world from the standpoint of its social relations. It is a
qualitative research method predicated on the diversity of
culture at home (wherever that may be) and
abroad. Ethnography involves hands-on, on-the-scene
learning — and it is relevant wherever people are relevant.
Ethnography is the primary method of social and cultural
anthropology, but it is integral to the social sciences and
humanities generally, and draws its methods from many
quarters, including the natural sciences. For these reasons,
ethnographic studies relate to many fields of study and
many kinds of personal experience – including study abroad
and community-based or international internships.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
(born November 28,
1908, Brussels, Belgium—died
October 30, 2009, Paris, France),
French social anthropologist and
leading exponent of structuralism,
a name applied to the analysis of
cultural systems (e.g., kinship and
mythical systems) in terms of the
structural relations among their
elements. Structuralism has
influenced not only social
science but also the study
of philosophy, comparative
religion, literature, and film.
• The most important contribution made by Levi-Strauss during
his anthropological investigations was the difference between
“hot” and “cold” societies. Cultures in Western Europe that
altered significantly and remained open to greatly divergent
influences were termed as “hot”, while the cultures that changed
marginally over time were “cold”. An ideal example of a “cold”
society was said to be the Amazonian Indians. He suggested a
“savage” mind and a “civilized” mind shared the same structure
and that human characteristics are the same in every region of
the world.
 Structuralism
• Lévi-Strauss' structuralism is the idea that every system, including a social system, has a
particular structure. The structure of a system determines the position of the whole. It also
affects the position of each part of the whole. Structural laws are in place that affect the
position of the whole and its parts in the event of changes. These structural laws are built
to encourage coexistence with external systems. Change is avoided unless absolutely
necessary.
• Claude Lévi-Strauss' idea of structuralism was unique in that it considered structures to
be real, living things. They have meaning and importance outside of being a simple
strategy for organizing elements of a group.
• Another central element of structuralism was that the idea that basic elements of all
cultures are the same — or, at least, that the systems of societal structures are meant to
bring about the same events or preserve the same institutions. Claude Lévi-Strauss
asserted that despite cultural differences, the human brains of all individuals had
the same priorities and viewpoints. Thus, the basic elements of all societies were the
same regardless of the external fringe symbolism or rituals assigned to these elements by
individual cultures.
The Elementary Structures of Kinship / Claude
Lévi-Strauss
• In the first chapter of The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Lévi-
Strauss develops the idea that culture is not fair or superimposed on
life. "There is some strange behavior of the species that the
individual can go back to in the face of these things." There is no pre-
cultural character of man . The absence of rules seems to be a good
criterion for differentiating nature and culture, however, constancy
and regularity exist in both. In this sense, Lévi-Strauss defines that
the character of the norm belongs to the other person, while the
universal character belongs to nature. There is no articulation
mechanism between nature and culture. The prohibition of incest is a
rule (the normative character of the institution indicates the field of
culture) of universal character (of the field of nature).
• For Lévi-Strauss, the prohibition of incest is the culture itself. Distinguished
intellectuals have developed explanations for the prohibition of incest,
explanations of which can be divided into three types:
• The first type seeks to maintain the dual character of the prohibition
(separating nature and culture). The prohibition would be a way to protect
men from the nefarious character of consanguine (blood-related)
marriage But it is scientific proof that from the standpoint of heredity, "the
prohibitions on marriage do not seem justified." This is an instrumental
view: culture would be understood as society's solution to nature's
problems.
• The second type of explanation eliminates the term culture and explains
the prohibition by its natural character: man would have an instinctive
horror of incest. The criticism of this explanation lies in the fact that if this
were really instinctive, there would be no need for the prohibition. But
prohibition is a social rule, albeit a universal one.
• Third-type explanations also eliminate a term, nature. The prohibition would be a
purely social rule, and the physiological character would be just an accidental
aspect. Linking incest to totemism, the prohibition would thus be a vestige of the
exogamy (intermarriage) rule. Levi-Strauss claims that a historical explanation
does not exhaust the problem. So the third type of explanation is vague.

• TOTEMISM (A totem could be a grizzly bear, oak tree, catfish, or just about any other living thing. Like a flag,
a totem means a lot to the people it represents. special design or visual object representing a quality, type, group, etc).
• Before Claude Levi Strauss, the totemic phenomena was used by Western
thinkers to show the primitiveness of native people. In "Totemisn" (literally:
"totemism Today") Levi Strauss is trying to uproot this perception. In the past
accounts of these peoples were called "the study of uncivilized peoples", he
changes the name to "the study of peoples without language" and tries to show
us that the totemic thinking, that we decide which animal or object is our totem, it
is not because we are irrational. They choose animals because of the binary
contrasts - they need to distinguish between them and the natural world, so they
put them in front of the beast. The totemic thought is also a logical thought, like
Western thought.
Lewis Henry Morgan
Lewis Henry Morgan (November 21, 1818 – December 17, 1881)
was a pioneering American anthropologist and social theorist who
worked as a railroad lawyer. He is best known for his work
on kinship and social structure, his theories of social evolution, and
his ethnography of the Iroquois. Interested in what holds societies
together, he proposed the concept that the earliest human domestic
institution was the matrilineal clan, not the patriarchal family.

Morgan was not only an academic but also very involved in

the local communities, specifically the Seneca. He was a
champion of progressive thought about "primitive" cultures
and the value that they held. Through his work and
friendships with the Seneca people and later other groups
Morgan developed the first comprehensive study on kinship
systems and terminology called, Systems of Consanguinity
and Affinity of the Human Family.
Throughout his lifetime he wrote many books and was
interested in a wide range of topics from the theory of
cultural evolution to the intimate lives of beavers.
The Seneca People

• During the 1840s, Lewis Henry Morgan befriended Ely

Parker of the Seneca tribe and the Tonawanda Reservation.
With his help, Morgan was able to study the culture and
the structure of Iroquois society. He noticed that they used
different terms than Europeans to designate individuals by
their relationships within the extended family and he had
the creative insight to recognize this was meaningful in
terms of their social organization. Morgan was adopted into
the Seneca tribe in 1846 and in 1851 he published  The
League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois , which
presented the complexity of Iroquois society in a path-
breaking ethnography that was a model for future
anthropologists.
The Iroquois system
• The Iroquois system is based a principle of bifurcate (split) merging.
Ego distinguishes between relatives on his mother's side of the family and
those on his father's side (bifurcation) and merges father with father's
brother (A) and mother with mother's sister (B).
• In Ancient Society Morgan subdivided human cultures into three broad
categories:
• Savagery (simple hunters)
• Barbarism (village farmers and herders)
• Civilization (cities and states)
• Unlike Tylor, who continued to believe in the essential unity of humanity,
Morgan injected a racist element into his evolutionary model by arguing that
from "the Middle Period of barbarism, however, the Aryan and Semitic
families seem fairly to represent the central threads of this progress, which in
the period of civilization has been gradually assumed by the Aryan family
alone." His theory thus contributed to the popular idea of social Darwinism.
His ideas were taken up by archaeologists like William Matthew Flinders
Petrie and V. Gordon Childe. Morgan's unilinear evolutionary scheme held a
particular appeal to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who added Communism
to Morgan's three stages as the culminating phase in the evolution of human
society. While his evolutionary scheme and social Darwinist bent have been
rejected by anthropologists since the early 20th century, Morgan's emphasis
on the connection between society and technology still has great appeal
among many archaeologists interested in a more materialist, Marxian, or
openly Marxist approach (his theories were official academic policy in the
former Soviet Union because of their incorporation within Marxist ideology).