Historical particularism: what is it and what does this anthropological approach propose?

Let us see what the anthropological current of Franz Boas' historical particularism consists of.

At the beginning of the 20th century, many anthropologists who studied non-Western cultures could not avoid doing so with a deep ethnocentric bias or avoid seeing them as less advanced and wilder simply because they were not like European-based cultures.

To make matters worse, Darwin's findings were interpreted and applied to societies in a rather racist way by Galton and his followers, believing that the development of cultures followed a pattern similar to the Biological one, and that all human groups followed a series of steps in order to get from barbarism to civilization.

However, this changed with the emergence of Franz Boas and historical particularismThe anthropological school that takes special consideration to the history of each culture and understands that they are not comparable. Let's see a little more in depth what this current of thought sustained.

What is historical particularism?

Historical particularism is a current of anthropology that mainly criticizes the linear evolutionary theories spread throughout the 19th century.. These theories were based on evolutionism applied to the anthropological field, specifically social Darwinism, which was based on evolution by adaptation and survival-improvement; and Marxism, which defended social evolution explained by class struggle.

Historical particularism holds that it is necessary to analyze the characteristics of each social group from the group itself, not with external visions that induce all kinds of research biases. In addition, it emphasizes the cultural historical reconstruction of each social group, it emphasizes the cultural historical reconstruction of such a group in order to better understand it and to understand how and why it has arrived. and understand how and why it has reached the cultural complexity it expresses.

This current is considered to have been founded by Franz Boas, an American anthropologist of German Jewish origin who rejected several of the ideas derived from the evolutionary thesis on culture. He defended that each society was a collective representation of its historical past and that each human group and culture were the product of unique historical processes, neither replicable nor comparable.not replicable or comparable to those that had occurred in other groups.

Origins

At the beginning of the 20th century, several anthropologists began to revise the evolutionary schemes and doctrines defended by both social Darwinists and Marxist communists. Both currents of thought had tried to explain how cultures are produced, but had done so in too linear a fashion, ignoring the fact that human diversity is too extensive to expect that two human groups would come to experience the same thing and behave identically.

Franz Boas rejected unilinear evolutionism, i.e., the idea that all societies must follow the same path by necessity and that it reaches a certain degree of evolution. by necessity and that it reaches a particular degree of development in the same way that others have been able to do so. Historical particularism was contrary to this idea, showing that different societies can reach the same degree of development by different paths.

According to Boas, the attempts that had been made during the 19th century to discover laws of cultural evolution and to schematize the stages of cultural progress were based on rather scanty empirical evidence.

Main ideas and achievements of this current

Boas' historical particularism argued that aspects such as diffusion, similar environments, trade and experiences of the same historical events can create similar cultural traits, but this does not necessarily lead to the same result in terms of complexity. According to Boas, three traits can be used to explain cultural traditionsenvironmental conditions, psychological factors and historical connections, the latter being the most important feature and the one that gives its name to this school of thought.

Another of the ideas defended by historical particularism, being one of the main ones, is that of cultural relativism. It is against the idea that there are superior or inferior forms of culture, and that terms such as "barbarism" and "civilization" demonstrate the ethnocentrism, even of those anthropologists who claimed to be objective. People cannot help thinking that our culture is the most normal, sophisticated and superior, while other cultural expressions are seen as deficient, primitive and inferior the more different they are from our reference human group.

Boas shows a relativistic vision in his work "Mind of Primitive Man" (1909) in which he says (1909) in which he explicitly states that there are no superior or inferior forms of culture, since each culture has a value of its own and it is not possible to make a minimal comparison between them. Boas asserted that we should not compare different cultures from an ethnographic point of view, since in this way we are qualifying other cultures on the basis of our own culture, and he believed that this was the methodology used by many social evolutionists.

To counteract the ethnocentric theories of many social evolutionists, Boas and his followers stressed the importance of carrying out fieldwork when one wanted to learn about non-Western cultures, getting to know these peoples first hand. Thanks to this vision, many ethnographic reports and monographs began to emerge at the beginning of the 20th century, produced by the followers of this school and which came to demonstrate that social evolutionists had ignored many of the complexities of the peoples they themselves had labeled "primitive"..

Another of the most important achievements of Boas and his school was to demonstrate that race, language and culture are independent aspects. It was observed that there were peoples of the same race who had similar cultures and languages, but there were also those who did not speak the same language or have the same cultural traits, only sharing racial aspects. This undermined the social Darwinist notion that biological and cultural evolution went hand in hand and formed a simple process.

Franz Boas had an interest in geography, specifically in the relationship between the geographical and the psychophysical, which is why he decided to travel and conduct his fieldwork with Eskimos on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. While there, he acquired the conviction against ecological determinism, so much shared by German geographers. He believed that history, language and civilization were independent of the natural environment.and are very partially influenced by it. In other words, the relationship between societies and their environment is not direct, and is mediated by their history, language and culture.

Criticism of historical particularism

Boas' historical particularism has had an important influence on other anthropologists and great thinkers of the twentieth century. Among them we can find Edward Sapir, Dell Hymes and William Labov, who would found sociolinguistics and ethnolinguistics based on Boas' fieldwork and his views on the relationship between language and territory, showing their own points of view. He also influenced other great references in anthropology, such as Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead and Ralph Linton. But despite all this, he was not spared from some criticism.

Among the most critical of historical particularism is Marvin Harris, an American anthropologist who had great influence on cultural materialism. Harris considered that this current and, in particular, the method used by Boas himself, focused too much on the native's point of view, that is, his unconscious structure that the inhabitant himself would not know how to describe in empirical terms.that is, his unconscious structure that the inhabitant himself would not know how to describe in empirical or objective terms (Emic) and did not give due importance to the scientific point of view and avoided comparisons in his research (Etic).

In other words, for Harris, historical particularism had acquired an overly subjective, ethnocentric point of view, but with the culture itself as the object of study. Thus, he considered that this resulted in Boas' works showing a profound absence of analysis. He also accused Boas of being obsessed with fieldwork, since he believed that it was the basis of all ethnographic work, to such an extent that it was the only tool used to collect data.

Marvin Harris was also of the opinion that Boas made excessive use of the inductive method, obtaining general conclusions from the cultures of the cultures in which he worked.obtaining general conclusions about cultures from particular premises. Harris himself was of the opinion that in science it was fundamental and essential to use the deductive method and that this would avoid the analysis of individual premises or factors, which in many cases were not so important as to be included in the anthropological work once the exploration had been completed.

Bibliographical references:

• Kuper, Adam (1988), The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion, ISBN 0-415-00903-0.
• Lesser, Alexander (1981), "Franz Boas" in Sydel Silverman, ed. Totems and Teachers: Perspectives on the History of Anthropology, ISBN 0-231-05087-9
• Stocking, George W., Jr. (1968), "Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology", ISBN 0-226-77494-5