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Franz Boas: cultural history for the present, or obsolete natural history?
Author(s) -
Verdon Michel
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
journal of the royal anthropological institute
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.62
H-Index - 62
eISSN - 1467-9655
pISSN - 1359-0987
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9655.2007.00435.x
Subject(s) - atomism , epistemology , ethnography , historicity (philosophy) , interpretation (philosophy) , natural (archaeology) , agency (philosophy) , meaning (existential) , sociology , genius , cultural history , natural history , aesthetics , anthropology , philosophy , history , art history , archaeology , law , biology , botany , linguistics , politics , political science
Recently, some neo‐Boasian anthropologists have portrayed Boas as an anthropologist with a deep sense of history, of the individual, and of agency. Focusing on Boas's ethnographic practice rather than his theoretical and programmatic statements, I first find an ‘atomistic’ (opposite of holistic) ethnographer, and a deep convergence between this atomism and Linnaean‐type natural history. In Foucault and Jacob's interpretation of natural history, this means studying socio‐cultural phenomena through their external manifestations, and removes historicity, and even individual cultures, from Boas's ethnography. Reviewing possible counter‐evidence from the holistic Boas (his work on style, meaning, the ‘genius of a people,’ texts, secondary explanations, and psychology), I retrieve the same natural historian, and the same atomism. All these facets of his practice thus appear as surface manifestations of this underlying épistémè , which provides a single interpretative framework making it possible to integrate most of his ethnographic work. Overall, this worldview leaves little, or no, room for individuals and their agency.