Race, Language and Culture | Anna Seiferle-Valencia

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.' 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.