ANTHR310 Chapter Notes - Chapter 3: Franz Boas, Cultural Relativism, Ethnocentrism
12 Jan 2017
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Knowledge is a form of power: what any of us know about gender is affected by politics, history, and culture. The commitment to engaged a(cid:374)thropology is(cid:374)"t (cid:449)ithout ethi(cid:272)al a(cid:374)d politi(cid:272)al differences, especially in a globalized world. In the first few decades of the 20th century, franz boas, the founder of american anthropology, was concerned with earlier anthropological accounts of other cultures. Boas wished to overcome this ethnocentrism; he argued that to comprehend an unfamiliar culture requires understanding that culture on its own terms. This is k(cid:374)o(cid:449)(cid:374) as (cid:862)(cid:272)ultural relati(cid:448)is(cid:373)(cid:863: one way to achieve this is through living with people of another culture for an extended period doing fieldwork. Fieldwork is a unique thing to anthropology and separates it from other social sciences like sociology or political sciences. Boas believed that intimate knowledge could only be gained through participant-observation. Cultural relativism entails understanding the difference between judgement of ethnocentrism and cultural relativism.
