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Boas and Holism

A Textual Analysis

University of Montreal, Quebec

Some anthropologists advocate going back to Boas’s anthropology to retrieve his sense of the individual and agency, among other things. Such a "psycho-logical Boas" could only exist in his holistic works. Elsewhere, I argued in a very synthetic way that Boas’s ethnography was not holistic. Here, I move a step further; perusing the very texts that famous commentators have singled out to prove Boas’s holism, I discover no holism; I find history as mere movement in space, and no individual agents; hence, no real psychology or agency. I only discern cultural fragments randomly assembling to form regional cultures.

Key Words: neo-Boasian anthropology • Boas • holism • history of anthropology

Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Vol. 36, No. 3, 276-302 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0048393106289793


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