 |
Business | Industries | Finance | Tax |
| Index: > A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z |
|
|||||
Although born and educated in Germany, he moved to the United States of America in part to escape growing anti-semitism in Germany. After working for the American Museum of Natural History, and teaching at Clark University, he founded the first PhD program in anthropology in America, at Columbia UniversityColumbia University officially known as Columbia University in the City of New York is a private institution of higher education. It is one of the world's foremost research universities and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1754 under a royal charter.
Boas was strongly committed to empiricismEmpiricism is the school of Epistemology (in philosophy or psychology) that virtually all knowledge is the result of our experiences. See John Locke's Tabula rasa or "blank slate" theory. Radical Empiricism holds that our knowledge is essentially nothing, and was skeptical and critical of attempts to formulate "scientific laws" of cultureThe word culture comes from the Latin root colere (to inhabit, to cultivate, or to honor). In general it refers to human activity; different definitions of culture reflect different theories for understanding, or criteria for valuing, human activity.. He was also a strong advocate of ethnographicEthnography refers to the qualitative description of human social phenomena, based on months or years of fieldwork. Ethnography may be " holistic", describing a society as a whole, or it may focus on specific problems or situations within a larger social fieldwork. Boas argued that specific cultural traits — behaviors, beliefs, and symbols — had to be understood in terms of their local context. As such, he was a major contributor to the anthropological concept of cultural relativism.
Boas also encouraged the "four field" concept of anthropology, and contributed not only to cultural anthropology but to physical anthropologyPhysical anthropology sometimes called "biological anthropology," studies the mechanisms of biological evolution, genetic inheritance, human adaptability and variation, primatology, primate morphology, and the fossil record of human evolution. See also: R, linguisticsBroadly conceived, linguistics is the study of human language, and a linguist is someone who engages in this study. The study of linguistics can be thought of along three major axes, the endpoints of which are described below: Synchronic and diachronic Sy, and archeology as well. In physical anthropology he challenged various uses of the notion of race, and argued that there was no necessary or strong connection between race and culture.
He was well known for studying the skull sizes of the children of immigrant parents. This work discovered that the bodies of the children of immigrant parents born in the home country and born in the US were different, perhaps due to environmental conditions. This allowed people to see that differences between races were not immutable.
His first doctoral student was Alfred L. Kroeber, another pioneer of American anthropology. He also trained Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. He was, via Kroeber, an influence on Claude Lévi-Strauss.
One of his students at Columbia also included, anthropologist, folklorist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston.
His ambitious Jesup Expedition focused on human migration from Asia to the Americas. His most important work is perhaps The Mind of Primitive Man .
Boas, Franz Boas, Franz Boas, Franz| Politics | Business | Finance |
 |
 |
 |
|