Franz Boas

Franz Boas , born the July 9th 1858 with Minden in Westphalia and dead the December 21st 1942 with New York, is a American anthropologist of German origin often designated like the " founding father of anthropology américaine". It is the first great figure of anthropology to reject the evolutionism. Often regarded as one of the principal representatives of the American school of the Diffusionnisme, it will quickly take its distances with this movement to develop an innovative personal thought at the origin of the whole of the American cultural anthropology. At the origin of this rupture, its introduction of the concepts of cultural Relativisme and historical Particularism in anthropolgie. He was the professor of a whole generation of American anthropologist of which Alfred Louis Kroeber, Robert Harry Lowie, Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict.

Boas did not have of cease in its life to give opinions, as well in the scientific sphere as political, against all Racisme and Racialisme.

Biography

Boas was born with Minden (Westphalia) in 1858 in a family Juif Ashkénaze. It is first of all formed with the Mathématiques and the Physique in several German universities: Heidelberg, Bonn and Kiel. In 1881, it obtains in the latter a doctorate on the variations of the color of water.

It is directed then towards the Géographie and leaves in 1883 in Baffin Island. It begins there a study on the influence from the environment on the lifestyle of the Eskimo. This experiment will prove to be crucial for Boas. By living parmis they, it acquires the certainty which the history of people has an impact much larger on its social and cultural characteristics that its natural environment. This expérince also will give birth to at Boas the interest for these people which one still qualifies at the time of primitive, for their cultural singularity that it is a question of safeguarding. Still very near to the geography, Boas is made anthropologist.

Work

In 1921, it carried out work relating to the consequences of the migration S. Those consisted in comparing the first and second generations of migrants to the populations of origin remained sedentary. The main object of its studies was to measure the impact of the new environment on the migrants.

Franz Boas is before all an untiring investigator of the Indian cultures and eskimo: its theory is that the anthropologists were to abstain from making theories. According to him, each culture is the product of a contingent history: there are no laws of the development, only of the singular processes. Franz Boas is the father of the relativism. It dissociates the study of the races of that of the cultures. Against the evolutionism, he affirms that no culture is developed more than another. It treaty each culture like an original synthesis, equipped with a " style" , which is expressed through the language, the beliefs, the habits, art, and constitutes a whole. The world is divided into cultural surfaces. (Culture: the universal one with the private individual. Coordinated by Nicolas Journet. - Editions Social sciences, 2002).

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