While her writings analyze the impact of cultural values, customs, and ideologies on the individual, she never portrayed culture as deterministic but claimed that individuals have the capacity to change the conditions under which they live. ![]() On that theoretical foundation, throughout the 1930s she wrote critically of a contemporary American culture that suppressed and marginalized individuals whose temperaments did not fit the dominant ethos-one of ambition, competition, individualism, and narrow definitions of gender identity. In comparing societies on this basis, Benedict qualified the “cultural relativism” for which she is often known, and proposed an anthropology that produced critical culture consciousness as the basis for change. She extended her analysis of the integrity and character of a configuration to assess the freedom and opportunity provided to individuals. The concept of configuration figured in the writings she did over the next two decades, including her 1946 study of Japanese culture, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Her 1934 book, Patterns of Culture, offers an analysis of cultures in terms of dominant character or, as she writes, a “configuration” based on selection from a wide arc of possible ways of organizing life. At the end of his career Boas guided a network of former student anthropologists, who spread across the country to university departments, museums, and government agencies, imprinting his social science more broadly in the world of learned knowledge.įranz Boas is a magisterial biography of Franz Boas and his influence in shaping not only anthropology but also the sciences, humanities, social science, visual and performing arts, and America’s public sphere during a period of great global upheaval and democratic and social struggle.Ruth Fulton Benedict, an American anthropologist (1887–1948), is best known for her contribution to the “culture and personality” school of American anthropology. He assisted German and European émigré intellectuals fleeing Nazi Germany to relocate in the United States and was instrumental in organizing the denunciation of Nazi racial science and American eugenics. entry into World War I, reveals his struggle against the forces of nativism, racial hatred, ethnic chauvinism, scientific racism, and uncritical nationalism.īoas was instrumental in the American cultural renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, training students and influencing colleagues such as Melville Herskovits, Zora Neale Hurston, Benjamin Botkin, Alan Lomax, Langston Hughes, and others involved in combating racism and the flourishing Harlem Renaissance. ![]() ![]() Boas’s emergence as a prominent public intellectual, particularly his opposition to U.S. Zumwalt takes the reader through the most vital period in the development of Americanist anthropology and Boas’s rise to dominance in the subfields of cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics. ![]() Franz Boas: Shaping Anthropology and Fostering Social Justice is the second volume in Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt’s two-part biography of the renowned anthropologist and public intellectual. Franz Boas defined the concept of cultural relativism and reoriented the humanities and social sciences away from race science toward an antiracist and anticolonialist understanding of human biology and culture.
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