Historical Particularism

Historical particularism is an anthropological approach developed principally by Franz Boas from the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth century, in direct opposition to the unilinear cultural evolutionism that dominated much earlier anthropological thought, including the work of theorists such as Lewis Henry Morgan, which had ranked cultures along a single fixed sequence of stages culminating in Western industrial society. Boas argued instead that each culture must be understood as the product of its own unique, specific historical trajectory, shaped by its own particular circumstances, migrations, environment and contact with neighboring peoples, rather than as an example of a universal stage that every society must pass through in the same fixed order. This approach placed heavy emphasis on detailed, firsthand fieldwork documenting the specific history and practices of individual cultures, rather than on constructing sweeping comparative schemes from secondhand or fragmentary reports, and Boas trained a generation of American anthropologists, including Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead and Alfred Kroeber, in this historically grounded, fieldwork-centered method. Historical particularism laid much of the intellectual groundwork for the later principle of cultural relativism, since insisting that each culture be understood on its own historical terms rather than measured against a universal evolutionary yardstick pointed directly toward evaluating cultural practices within their own context rather than against an outside standard. The approach marked a major turning point away from the broad evolutionary anthropology of the nineteenth century and toward the more historically and empirically grounded anthropology that followed.