Early Boas

Abstract

The paper «The Aims of Ethnology» (1888) best demonstrates the origins of Boasian anthropology. Several versions of the text from different periods have survived, and comparison of them allows us to see the development of the views of the founder of the historical school. The field of ethnology is still understood by him in an extremely broad sense. It is synonymous with the modern content of anthropology. The future great anthropologist began his career with an understanding of culture that did not yet go beyond the boundaries of traditional humanistic ideas, using the term itself in the singular, like his evolutionist contemporaries. On the other hand, the work already contains many samples of Boas’s well-known particularism and relativism. The discussion about the paragraphs containing the history of marriage, later excluded from the text by Boas himself, shows that he accepted evolutionary schemes as a kind of background knowledge, which he later rethought. «The Aims of Ethnology» was included by him in his final collection of writings consciously to demonstrate his own theory in development, so the specific placement of accents in the text is quite understandable.