Boasian Anthropology and the Critique of American Culture

Anthropologists and Their Traditions across National Borders

“…1911b), corn (1907) and tobacco (1924) into East Asia.1 His association with American anthropology, indeed the very existence of an early anthropological project in China, is largely forgott en. As an anthropology graduate student, I found Laufer's name on a course syllabus, an article on the origin of the word "shaman" (Laufer 1917), but did not recognize him as one of our own, much less a protégé of Franz Boas, whose students included nearly all the luminaries of early twentieth-century American anthropology (Handler 1990). Maurice Freedman's summation of the history of China anthropology makes no mention of Laufer, describing China anthropologists as relative latecomers to the discipline (Freedman 1979).…”

Definitional Argument in Evolutionary Psychology and Cultural Anthropology

“…Like their claims about the unity of the natural sciences, no evidence is ever offered to show how biology has been banished from the social sciences apart from Franz Boas and the founding of American cultural anthropology is a topic that has spawned a vast literature (Baker 1998;Barkan 1992;Briggs and Bauman 1999;Cravens 1978;Darnell 1990;Degler 1991;Gilkerson 1986;Gossett 1963;Handler 1990;Helbring 1994;Hoover 1981;Risjord 2000;Stocking 1968;Williams 1996). Boas's project for an autonomous cultural anthropology was predicated on freeing anthropology from Herbert Spencer's notion of lockstep cultural stages and passive adaptation to competitive environments, which in the context of late l9th century America carried classist, racist, and sexist implications.…”

Boas and Holism

“…A ttempting to develop a "neo-Boasian" anthropology (Handler 1990(Handler , 2004Hitchens 1994;Lewis 2001;Bashkow et al 2004;Bunzl 2004;Bashkow 2004;Rosenblatt 2004;Orta 2004), some anthropologists are currently presenting Boas as an anthropologist with a deep sense of historicity, of the individual, of agency (Lewis 2001;Bunzl 2004;Orta 2004), an anthropologist of theoretical relevance for present anthropological practice. I believe these claims should not go unchallenged.…”