12/25/2023 0 Comments Franz boas![]() Even as a schoolboy he wanted to study cultural history, to travel to “unknown lands,” to learn about primitive peoples and these interests were nourished by his studies in human geography. He later was appointed docent in geography at the University of Berlin.Įthnology, however, had a stronger appeal. It was as a geographer that he planned his Arctic expedition of 1883–1884 to Baffin Land. But he also wrote three theses in geography, his favorite subject in the Gymnasium, and he began his career as a geographer. He took his doctorate at Kiel in 1881 physics and mathematics attracted him, and his principal doctoral thesis, Beitrdge zur Erkenntniss der Farbe des Wassers (1881), led him into problems of psychophysics, the forerunner of experimental psychology. At school and the Gymnasium in Minden, and at the universities of Heidelberg, Bonn, and Kiel, he received the thorough German education of his time in sciences, mathematics, languages, and humanities. His critique of nineteenth-century unilineal (orthogenetic) cultural evolution established both the historicity of cultural developments and the primary role of culture in human history.īoas was born in Minden, Westphalia. His leadership in the study of American Indian languages became the established reference point for the development of structural linguistics and for questions of the relation of language to thought and culture. Boas led physical anthropology from taxonomic “race” classification into a field of viable research in human biology, and he exposed and eliminated traditional ambiguities in the area of race and culture study. To Boas can be credited a critical reconstruction of anthropology and its principal branches as well as the emergence of the modern concept of culture-a concept central to the integration of anthropology as the study of man “as a member of social groups,” and fundamentally influential with respect to all modern thinking in behavioral sciences. He became the most influential anthropologist of his time, a major force in the academic and professional development of the science, considered by many the architect of its modern structure. He visited the United States in 18 in the course of expeditions to the Arctic and British Columbia and began his American career in New York in 1887. Franz Boas (1858–1942), American anthropologist, was born and educated in Germany. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |