Agriculture developed in different continents (the Americas and Asia) at the same time and because there was no trans-oceanic communication during its formation, we can say that it was independent invention. ĭiffusion is the spread of an idea from culture to culture and independent invention is where the culture forms a new idea on it’s own without any influence from another culture. This data resulting from ethnography helps us understand other cultures and how they are similar and different to other cultures. Ethnology is usually done when anthropologists go into, "the field"- meaning they travel to a country and live with the people there to get the best possible taste and experience of their culture. Ethnology is a comparison of cultures using ethnographic data, society, and culture. Cultural relativism also led to the formation of ethnology. 3 Ethnocentrism leads us to make premature judgements about a culture and the people that are a part of that culture. ![]() 2 Cultural Relativism brought attention to the problem of Ethnocentrism which is the belief that one’s own culture is more valuable or better than another. The idea that a person’s activities or beliefs should be understood in the terms and values of their own culture, not someone else’s. The most notable and attributed ideas of Boasian anthropology though are cultural relativism, diffusion, historical particularism, and salvage ethnography. Boasian anthropology changed the idea of culture, as a whole, from what a person, "ate, drank, religious views and their music tastes," to the complete “mental and physical reactions and activities that characterize the individuals of a social group." Boasian anthropology is known to divide the anthropology discipline to include the four subfields of linguistic, biological, archaeological, and cultural anthropology, a view that is still popular in anthropology departments of many universities today. Franz Boas professionalized the holistic study of anthropology from the 1880s into the twentieth century.The American anthropologist, Franz Boas, founded Boasian Anthropology: he introduced the idea that culture was what differed between races and ethnicities and, therefore, was what must be studied to understand humanity. Leibniz, researchers in these fields categorized peoples primarily according to their languages. Ethnography and ethnology focused not on “other” cultures but on all peoples of all eras. ![]() Before Boas delves deeper into issues concerning anthropology’s academic origins to present a groundbreaking study that reveals how ethnology and ethnography originated during the eighteenth rather than the nineteenth century, developing parallel to anthropology, or the “natural history of man.”īefore Boas argues that anthropology and ethnology were separate sciences during the Age of Reason, studying racial and ethnic diversity, respectively. ![]() The history of anthropology has been written from multiple viewpoints, often from perspectives of gender, nationality, theory, or politics. Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press
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