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Author: Marshall Hyatt
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
Considered the father of modern American anthropology, Franz Boas introduced the relativistic, culture-centered methods and principles of inquiry that continue to dominate the field. This study analyzes the development of his thought and his contributions to racial and ethnic theory in the context of his own ethnicity and personal experience with persecution. The author focuses primarily on Boas's attempt to fuse science with political and social activism--an effort to insure that his ideological contributions to science had practical relevance to the difficult issues facing American society. Hyatt fills in the details of Boas's background, from his early years in Germany to his emigration to the United States in the late 1880s, and discusses his pivotal role in transforming anthropology from an amateur pursuit into a rigorous academic discipline. The author examines Boas's attacks on those who used science to promulgate theories of racial inferiority based on alleged differences in mental ability. He traces the origins of Boas's own theories and the use he made of them in working for equal rights for immigrants and African Americans. This is the first biographical study to focus on the historical meaning of Boas's contributions and the motivating forces that shaped his work. Essential for courses in race and ethnicity, sociology, the history of anthropology, 20th-century American history, American intellectual history, theories of culture, and related subjects.
Author: Marshall Hyatt
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Get Book Here
Book Description
Considered the father of modern American anthropology, Franz Boas introduced the relativistic, culture-centered methods and principles of inquiry that continue to dominate the field. This study analyzes the development of his thought and his contributions to racial and ethnic theory in the context of his own ethnicity and personal experience with persecution. The author focuses primarily on Boas's attempt to fuse science with political and social activism--an effort to insure that his ideological contributions to science had practical relevance to the difficult issues facing American society. Hyatt fills in the details of Boas's background, from his early years in Germany to his emigration to the United States in the late 1880s, and discusses his pivotal role in transforming anthropology from an amateur pursuit into a rigorous academic discipline. The author examines Boas's attacks on those who used science to promulgate theories of racial inferiority based on alleged differences in mental ability. He traces the origins of Boas's own theories and the use he made of them in working for equal rights for immigrants and African Americans. This is the first biographical study to focus on the historical meaning of Boas's contributions and the motivating forces that shaped his work. Essential for courses in race and ethnicity, sociology, the history of anthropology, 20th-century American history, American intellectual history, theories of culture, and related subjects.
Author: Vernon J. WilliamsJr.
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813188644
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 243
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Book Description
In this thought-provoking reexamination of the history of "racial science" Vernon J. Williams argues that all current theories of race and race relations can be understood as extensions of or reactions to the theories formulated during the first half of the twentieth century. Williams explores these theories in a carefully crafted analysis of Franz Boas and his influence upon his contemporaries, especially W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, George W. Ellis, and Robert E. Park. Historians have long recognized the monumental role Franz Boas played in eviscerating the racist worldview that prevailed in the American social sciences. Williams reconsiders the standard portrait of Boas and offers a new understanding of a man who never fully escaped the racist assumptions of 19th-century anthropology but nevertheless successfully argued that African Americans could assimiliate into American society and that the chief obstacle facing them was not heredity but the prejudice of white America.
Author: Alan H. McGowan
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527566897
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
This book chronicles the life and political action of Franz Boas, a ground-breaking anthropologist whose work denied the notion of racial superiority and introduced the notion of cultural relativity. In addition, he was a fierce pacifist who opposed the entry of the United States into World War I, and organized a powerful organization protecting the free speech of those accused of left-wing sympathies. He was among the first to recognize the strength of a scientist speaking out on political issues. The book will appeal to those interested in issues of race relations and free speech, and those interested in the role of science and scientists in the larger society.
Author: Franz Boas
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
ISBN: 1473395976
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 195
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Book Description
This early work by Franz Boas was originally published in 1928 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'Anthropology and Modern Life' is a work on the study of humans and their lives in various societies. Franz Boas was born on July 9th 1958, in Minden, Westphalia. Even though Boas had a passion the natural sciences, he enrolled at the University at Kiel as an undergraduate in Physics. Boas completed his degree with a dissertation on the optical properties of water, before continuing his studies and receiving his doctorate in 1881. Boas became a professor of Anthropology at Columbia University in 1899 and founded the first Ph.D program in anthropology in America. He was also a leading figure in the creation of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Franz Boas had a long career and a great impact on many areas of study. He died on 21st December 1942.
Author: Zoe Burkholder
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0199751722
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
Between the turn of the twentieth century and the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, the way that American schools taught about "race" changed dramatically. This transformation was engineered by the nation's most prominent anthropologists, including Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead, during World War II. Inspired by scientific racism in Nazi Germany, these activist scholars decided that the best way to fight racial prejudice was to teach what they saw as the truth about race in the institution that had the power to do the most good-American schools. Anthropologists created lesson plans, lectures, courses, and pamphlets designed to revise what they called "the 'race' concept" in American education. They believed that if teachers presented race in scientific and egalitarian terms, conveying human diversity as learned habits of culture rather than innate characteristics, American citizens would become less racist. Although nearly forgotten today, this educational reform movement represents an important component of early civil rights activism that emerged alongside the domestic and global tensions of wartime.Drawing on hundreds of first-hand accounts written by teachers nationwide, Zoe Burkholder traces the influence of this anthropological activism on the way that teachers understood, spoke, and taught about race. She explains how and why teachers readily understood certain theoretical concepts, such as the division of race into three main categories, while they struggled to make sense of more complex models of cultural diversity and structural inequality. As they translated theories into practice, teachers crafted an educational discourse on race that differed significantly from the definition of race produced by scientists at mid-century.Schoolteachers and their approach to race were put into the spotlight with the Brown v. Board of Education case, but the belief that racially integrated schools would eradicate racism in the next generation and eliminate the need for discussion of racial inequality long predated this. Discussions of race in the classroom were silenced during the early Cold War until a new generation of antiracist, "multicultural" educators emerged in the 1970s.
Author: Charles King
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0525432329
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 482
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Book Description
2020 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winner Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award From an award-winning historian comes a dazzling history of the birth of cultural anthropology and the adventurous scientists who pioneered it—a sweeping chronicle of discovery and the fascinating origin story of our multicultural world. A century ago, everyone knew that people were fated by their race, sex, and nationality to be more or less intelligent, nurturing, or warlike. But Columbia University professor Franz Boas looked at the data and decided everyone was wrong. Racial categories, he insisted, were biological fictions. Cultures did not come in neat packages labeled "primitive" or "advanced." What counted as a family, a good meal, or even common sense was a product of history and circumstance, not of nature. In Gods of the Upper Air, a masterful narrative history of radical ideas and passionate lives, Charles King shows how these intuitions led to a fundamental reimagining of human diversity. Boas's students were some of the century's most colorful figures and unsung visionaries: Margaret Mead, the outspoken field researcher whose Coming of Age in Samoa is among the most widely read works of social science of all time; Ruth Benedict, the great love of Mead's life, whose research shaped post-Second World War Japan; Ella Deloria, the Dakota Sioux activist who preserved the traditions of Native Americans on the Great Plains; and Zora Neale Hurston, whose studies under Boas fed directly into her now classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Together, they mapped civilizations from the American South to the South Pacific and from Caribbean islands to Manhattan's city streets, and unearthed an essential fact buried by centuries of prejudice: that humanity is an undivided whole. Their revolutionary findings would go on to inspire the fluid conceptions of identity we know today. Rich in drama, conflict, friendship, and love, Gods of the Upper Air is a brilliant and groundbreaking history of American progress and the opening of the modern mind.
Author: Anna Seiferle-Valencia
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1351352733
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 120
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Book Description
Franz Boas’s 1940 Race, Language and Culture is a monumentally important text in the history of its discipline, collecting the articles and essays that helped make Boas known as the ‘father of American anthropology.’ An encapsulation of a career dedicated to fighting against the false theories of so-called ‘scientific racism’ that abounded in the first half of the 20th-century, Race, Language and Culture is one of the most historically significant texts in its field – and central to its arguments and impact are Boas’s formidable interpretative skills. It could be said, indeed, that Race, Language and Culture is all about the centrality of interpretation in questioning our assumptions about the world. In critical thinking, interpretation is the ability to clarify and posit definitions for the terms and ideas that make up an argument. Boas’s work demonstrates the importance of another vital element: context. For Boas, who argued passionately for ‘cultural relativism,’ it was vital to interpret individual cultures by their own standards and context – not by ours. Only through comparing and contrasting the two can we reach, he suggested, a better understanding of humankind. Though our own questions might be smaller, it is always worth considering the crucial element Boas brought to interpretation: how does context change definition?
Author:
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496233328
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 645
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Book Description
Author: Franz Boas
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803269846
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 408
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Book Description
"The introductory volume to the Franz Boas Papers: Documentary Edition, which examines Boas' stature as public intellectual in three crucial dimensions: theory, ethnography and activism"--
Author: Tracy Teslow
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107011736
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 415
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Book Description
This book explores how physical anthropologists struggled to understand variation in bodies and cultures in the twentieth century, how they represented race to professional and lay publics, and how their efforts contributed to an American formulation of race that has remained rooted in both bodies and cultures, as well as heredity and society.
