Exam 7: The Boasian Revolution

The goal of Boas's "salvage ethnography" was to engage in as much theoretical debate as possible so that the pressing anthropological questions of evolution vs. diffusion could be settled once and for all.

Eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant claimed that our perceptions of the world are constrained by pre-existing categories of mind, such as moral ideas and individual concepts of space and time.

Boas might be considered an early proponent of the deductive approach in anthropology, allowing his theory to guide his collection and interpretation of data.

The idea that all great inventions originated just once, in ancient Egypt, was a claim advanced by the German Kulturkreis school of diffusion.

Boas criticized the notion of "psychic unity" by pointing out that the same trait in different cultures often served quite different purposes.

Widespread concern about "absorbing semicivilized states" into the United States repeatedly prevented American presidents from seeking annexation of Central American and Caribbean territories.

Boas basically shared Comte's and Durkheim's "organismic" view that all the elements of a culture stood in some kind of functional relationship to one another.

Boas argued that in principle there were no differences between the goals of the natural sciences and the social sciences.

U.S. and British colonialism in the nineteenth century was based on the idea of bringing democracy to people living in the colonized parts of the world.

According to Langness, one of the implications of Ernest Haeckel's "Biogenetic Law" is that the thought and behavior of "savages" is like that of children in civilized societies.