Analysis: A Macat Analysis of Franz Boas's Race, Language and Culture

De: Anna Seiferle-Valencia

Narrado por: Macat.com

Born in 1858, Franz Boas permanently changed the standards and practices of anthropology. A German-born secular Jew, he became known for his distinctive approach to the discipline - non-hierarchical, open to diverse inputs, and unbiased.

Throughout his career, Boas used his scholarship to effect social change. His work convinced his colleagues to abandon the theories that had decided one race (Caucasian) and one culture (Western European) were more fully developed and worthier than others. In Boas' wake, anthropologists everywhere have been challenged to conduct their research and present their findings ethically. Boas spoke out against eugenics - the science of improving a population by controlled breeding - long before leaders in Nazi Germany embraced it. He was also a keen supporter of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

Boas' 1940 work Race, Language and Culture brings together a half-century's worth of his groundbreaking scholarship in one volume. Some 75 years after its initial publication, it remains a key text in the field of anthropology.

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the godfather of today's junk social sciences

The text, though not bad and overall informative, reads like a hymn to the godfather (Boas) of the political activist who plays the scientist with an eye to the political outcome of one's "research". In a 1990 book (Franz Boas, Social Activist), Marshall Hyatt makes clear Boas was of one mind with such nice people as Black NAACP, organized labor and...the Communist Party of the USA. That Boas is rightfully regarded as the forefather of today's social scientists is no surprise.

Disappointing

This is not what I’d expect for ‘critical thinking’ categorization. While the subject matter fulfills the description, the read summary is simplistic and repetitive, well beyond the repetition of the subtitles of each section, basically verbatim back to backstage the end of a module and the immediate beginning of the just previewed next module. A very superficial overview of a seminal work.