Who Is Franz Boas? Cultural Relativism, Scientific Racism, Anthropology, Four Field Approach & More! 

Did you know I wrote a course on human evolution? 🧬🦍🦧🐒🌱🌳 Check it out HERE: www.socratica.com/courses/human-evolution

Thanks for this -- I appreciate what you're doing. As a historian who is working on Great Plains cultures and the "invasion" of the European Empires, I discovered the wonderful work of one of Boas's students, Gene Weltfish, who also taught at Columbia (until they blacklisted her in the McCarthy era). Her book "The Lost Universe" on the Pawnee peoples is exemplary, especially in terms of its interdisciplinary approach. Also love the work of Boasians Frank Speck and A. Irving Hallowell. Thanks again and good luck with all!

This was informative! I am currently reading Boas' The Primitive Man, and the understandings he claims in this piece struck me as perpetuating White superiority through academic discourse. Specifically this quote here: “While in most languages we find numeral systems based upon the 10, we find that certain tribes in Brazil, and others in Australia, have numeral systems based on the 3, or even on the 2, which involve the impossibility of expressing high numbers. Although these numeral systems are very slightly developed as compared with our own, we must not forget that the abstract idea of number must be present among these people, because, without it, no method of counting is possible.” (Boas, 1901, p. 4) Although he offers his connections to the mind of man, I took his reading to reflect his own (maybe subconscious) mind/culture preserving bias through the lens of knowledge production and the cultures (peoples) who had the capacity to obtain it. I'm still learning, but I can see now how racist elements are carried through history in "official" academic spaces that create a false sense of entitlement and superiority.

YOU ARE A QUEEN!! thank you so much for this and what you do

Thank you so much for this video, It will help me lots for my homework!!

Thank you Alivia.

Thanks Alivia

this was really helpful omg thank uu!!

OMG I love you... I understood better than 1 semester of lessons with my Professor with uncountable PhD's!!!

Please do a video on functionalism. It seems they are very interesting!

Thank you!😊

i’m loving these research style videos about pivotal anthropologist 💗 you’re editing is great and i love the memes you used, great job!

If all cultures are equal, then cultures based on racism and exploitation are equal to those based on egalitarianism.

Interesting

I am very grateful I've come across your channel. Anthropology is my favorite branch of social science. You made me love this field more. Thank you!

"We know[sic] today that race is not a biological thing🤡" "Franz Boas is so great[sic] because he opposed scientific racism [eg. evolutionary anthropology]🤡" Wow thanks so much Olivia, I just wanted to learn about Franz Boas but you not only told me about him, you also told me how I am supposed to feel about him too!🙄

Thanks alivia for the great explanation . We got the video that we need especially I have waited for this for a long time. Love yu .

Definitely interested in the topic of scientific racism.

if you haven't made the video on scientific racism, i'm interested! :)

Please make a video on theories

What were the major criticisms of the Boasian Relatavist framework?

What were the connections between racism and physics? That’s the first time I ever heard that about Boas.

The legend of the 19 century explained by the legend of the 21st. Another great video Alivia

Currently reading magret mead coming of age in samoa and wow its crazy to think how only 100 years creates such different ideas from todays day and age.

Is the work of Franz Boas valuable for current day anthropology? If yes how ? In which ways ?

Your video will be more useful for anthropology students in india

Great video! I think scientific racism would be a good topic. Would be interested to see your take on more modern/famous anthropologists.

This is great! I was going to do a video on Franz Baos for my channel but I found that he is well covered. This video was great and you should totally do a video on scientific bigotry! That is what drew me to Baos actually.... It must have been four years ago now but I was mocked based on what people presumed my genetics to be thanks to my religion. I started fighting eugenics when the California Department of Fair Housing and Employment told me it was "scientific that Jews are blood diseased" and 'oh but of course it wasn't personal', in a discrimination hearing. Since then I tried to figure out why they thought such eugenic stereotypes were scientific and I came across many champions who resisted such hate fueled ideologies like Franz Baos and Raphael Falk and Curt Stern. Great people! Anyway, I was going to do a video on Franz but I guess I'll just comment and figure out who to make a musicology video on next!

while Boas brought about a lot of development in theoretical anthropology, and he was responsible for a push forward, he was not perfect and was also a product of his own times. while we can be grateful for his contributions, we also need to look beyond and go beyond. Franz boas went to the US fleeing political turmoil in Europe and growing anti-semitism before ww1 (connection to the war between France and Germany and the loss of Alsace-lorraine). when he arrived in the US, he witnessed the racism, segregation, lynching of black people as well as the great dispossession of Native American lands. this is also something that prompted him to criticise (now know as the basin takedown) evolutionism in academics. By doing this, he was actually excluded from main circles of academics by those he criticised (Morgan for example). this is why he became a professor and that his students ended up being women, as because of his position he was not taken seriously enough to teach to men (lol!). that is how we got our Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Mead etc. however, even though he strongly advocated against racism and it is true that he affected museum display curation, he also had his faults in this regard. He actually also did what was popular at the time, human display of cultures. It was popular with evolutionists, and he used this medium as well. Historical particularism (hp) itself has its faults: - does not account for change nor does it have theoretical space for it = static representations - bounded vision of cultures - prone to essentialism keep it up!

Good work. Not sure if you know this, but Boas did a lot of important work with W.E.B. Du Bois as well. Their joint work was important to the rise of the academic side of civil rights and the seeds for the end of scientific racism.

Forgot to mention in the video-I was a guest on the Comfortable Spot Podcast this week with Ken Sweeney! So, if you want to listen to a long conversation about what makes anthropology so amazing, definitely go give it a listen 🎧Here's the link! thecomfortablespotpodcast.com/2023/05/08/alivia-brown/

Great video on a great subject! Admittedly, I am highly biased toward Boas, and seeing the centrality of Boasian anthropology restored to archaeology more generally (from Manuel Gamio, Robert Lowie, and Frederica de Laguna onward). Some of my favorite/most used Boas factoids are: For Boas, receiving his education was literally a life-and-death struggle; due to prejudices against him, within the German university system at that time, he bore the real scars of duels he had to fight during his time in school. His methods were so innovative that he found it difficult to find research funding. The major funding institutions of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century simple didn’t recognize ideas like historically particular cultural relativism or participant observation as legitimate ways to undertake scholarly research. He supervised Zora Neale Hurston for some of her post-graduate work. On a personal note, I think Zora would be much better understood as using Sapir’s ideas about language as a way to bring her reader’s into a highly nuanced, culturally-influenced worldview. Her fieldwork from Jamaica and Haiti was published as _Tell My Horse_; it’s great! He died at a luncheon, during a conference/workshop, at which he’d given a speech. Also present at that same luncheon was Claude Levi-Strauss. It was the first time they’d actually met, after having been seated near each other at the head table. On a sadder note than his own death, it is a shame that one of the reasons Boas had to spend so much of his time on the fight against scientific racism was that people were being rounded up in encampments in Europe at that time; and, the divisive rumor being sown in the US, at that time, was that Europe was rounding up it’s undesirables (criminals, the chronically ill, those seen as disabled, etc.), for the express reason of sending them to the US, specifically to undermine the country’s development. The shame being that 100-150 years have gone by, and we still keep finding ourselves faced with that same situation over and over again. My favorite quote that is attributed to Boas is: _“What I want to live and die for is equal rights for all, equal possibilities to learn and work for rich and poor alike !”_ Cole, Douglas. 1983. “The Value of a Person Lies in His _Herzensbildung_.” Franz Boas’ Baffin Island Letter Diary, 1883-1884. In George W. Stocking (ed.) _Observers Observed : Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork_. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.

All countries and cultures are equal? How about Saudi Arabia and the way women have been historically mistreated there? I could give more examples. I must state moral and cultrual relativism is a distortion of reality in my opiniin.

History is not always pleasant but it’s always interesting

Can you share your views on marriage with respect to anthropology ? Its a hot topic here nowadays

On the one hand you claim evaluating a culture from an absolute standard leads to a subjective evaluation, then immediately say that cultural absolutism is "bad [sic]" and cultural relativism is "good [sic]". Its hard to listen to, embarrassing actually. Can you actually advocate for cultural relativism and describing your viewpoints as "good[sic]" and your opponents as "bad[sic]?"🤮

Cultures are not equal. For example, 1930's German culture was murderous to humanity. A culture is "better" to the extent STEM education and John Locke's "Inalienable Rights" are paramount.

If no culture is better than another, why does everyone want to live in White countries? Why didn't sub-saharan Africa have two story buildings before Europeans turned up? Why didn't Boas settle long-term with the inuits? Why was cannibalism normalized in Pre-European Australia? Why did Native Americans practice human sacrifice on little girls until the late 19th century when pioneers outlawed it? Do you or Boas have any answers? Also, it's worth noting that Boas wasn't European and had a great deal of animosity towards western civilization.

I don’t like him.

Of course some cultures are better then others 🤦

Boaz ruined anthropology.

I completely reject his idea that race is nothing more than a cultural construct.

Do you really believe that all cultures are created equal ? That is the most moronic idea I have ever heard. Tell that to someone who lives around cannibals.