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Articles: Arts and Culture | Franz Boas
- Mr. Vachaspati V.
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This is continuation of the series that is on ‘Culture and Civilization’.
Franz boas:
Born in Germany, studied Physics and mathematics and later geography, received his doctorate in 1881 on the color of see-water. He joined a joint expedition to the Baffin islands as Geographer in 1883-84, which helped to read psychology.
Boas passed very balanced ideas and worked systematically to destroy the evolutionary theories in anthropology, which had no scientific foundation. He developed a strong anti-evolutionary posture, and out of his own fieldwork, he developed his new historical method. Along side his aversion for theory, he only presented a ‘theoretical rationale for changing to the historical method and pointed out how the anthropological problem must be rephrased’.
Certain basic assumptions guided his theoretical and methodological orientation to the study of man. His postulate was that the ‘human process is structured, retaining an inner core that remains relatively stable in the free of altered conditions. Outer form coordinates with inner structure, but outer form change with circumstances. In many ways Boaz approach to cultural processes paralleled the genetic model, where an inner structure or genotype accounted for phenotypic, but varied according to environmental conditions.
Although Boaz never committed himself explicitly to the concept of the ‘Psychic unity of Mankind’, he seems shared Bastian’s view in this respect. Being stimulated by his linguistic data, he began to think that people perceived and categorized things in nature as a result of common psychological structure.
For Boas, the study of the history of mankind was the first and most immediate object. He wrote that, “We must follow the gradual development of the manifestations of culture”. The second important thing was the discovery of the cultural development of different people from their foundations and laws of such development. That’s why he criticized the ‘COMPARATIVE METHOD’ and recommended that the Historical Method replace it; and the later was to be based upon the principle that like phenomena were not always due to the same causes, and that in every single instance a common cause must be empirically established. As the comparative method of classical evolutionists and diffusionists had been barren of definite results, he exhorted upon the scholars to eschew the vain endeavor of reconstructing a uniform systematic history of evolution of culture. He never maintained the proposition that there were no regularities in history, but what he emphasized was that the amount of regularity had been over-estimated by some anthropologists. For him, speculation and conjectural history ran counter to professional ethics. Hence, he struggled to improve the standard of discipline by striking a balance between nomothetic (giving or enacting laws or based on law) and ideographic (the use of ideograms; representation of objects or ideas by graphic symbols)
Methods, while insisting on methodological vigor.
Boas laid the emphasis on the study of specific cultures in their particular historical context. It was not his aim to abandon the research for lawful regularities in history, but to replace the comparative method, which was untenable. And for him this way the only way through which the amount and nature of regularities or ‘inductive historical research’. Hence boas’ approach is termed as Historical Speculative.
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