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FRANZ BOAS AND THE HUMBOLDTIAN TRADITION From Volksgeist and Nationalcharakter to an Anthropological Concept ofCulture MATTI BUNZL In 1887, the year Franz Boas settled permanently in the United States, he published an article on "The Study of Geography." More than fifty years later, he included the essay, along with "The Aims of Ethnology," written in 1888, in the collection Race, Language and Culture, because the two pieces indicated "the general attitude underlying my later work" (1940:vi). In "The Study of Geography," Boas contrasted two scientific methodologies: the physical and the historical. For the former "the aim of science [was] to deduce laws from phenomena," and the "single phenomenon itself" was insignificant, but merely served as "an exemplification of a law," as a means "to find new laws or to corroborate old ones." In contrast, the historical method had as its goal "the investigation ofphenomena themselves," and was "unwilling to consider them as subject to stringent laws." The two methods had their origin in "two different desires of the human mind." Arising from "its aesthetic wants," the physical method sought to arrange the myriad of phenomena of the world "systematically ," so as to "put the confused impressions in order." The historical method, in contrast, grew out of an "affective" impulse; "the mere occurrence of an event" triggered the desire to study its "true history" (1887a: 640-44). Underlying this dichotomy was the traditional German separation between the NaturwissenschaJten and the GeisteswissenschaJten, or, in the words of Boas' contemporary Hermann Paul, the eminent historical linguist, the distinction Matti Bunzl is a graduate student in the departments ofanthropology and history at the University of Chicago. He is currently undertaking dissertation research on issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality in Late Imperial Vienna, focussing in particular on the members of the literary circle lung Wien. 17 18 MATTI BUNZL between the Gesetzeswissenschaften (the law-giving sciences) and the Geschichtswissenschaften (the historical sciences). The former, such as physics and experimental psychology, sought to find the exact laws governing the natural and human realm; the latter recognized the limitations of positive knowledge and focussed on individual phenomena as historical products (Paul 1880: l). That this is what Boas had in mind is evident in his examples: the French sociologist Auguste Comte and the British historian of civilization H. T. Buckle for the physical method, and the German explorer and natural historian Alexander von Humboldt for the historical or-after Humboldt's masterpiece Kosmos-"cosmographical" method. While Buckle called our "attention to the laws governing the history of mankind," he failed to "describe men and their actions as arising from their own character and the events influencing their lives." Similarly, Comte's "system of sciences" subordinated individual phenomena to the laws deduced from them. Cosmography, on the other hand, considered "every phenomenon as worthy of being studied for its own sake"; "its mere existence" entitled it to a "full share of our attention" (1887a :642). Illustrating the cosmographical method, Boas quoted Goethe, who had "expressed this idea with admirable clearness: 'It seems to me that every phenomenon , every fact, itself is the really interesting object ... a single action or event is interesting, not because it is explainable, but because it is true'" (644). For Boas, it was impossible to privilege one method over the other: every scientist had to choose according to "which is dearer to him-his personal feeling towards the phenomena surrounding him, or his inclination for abstractions ; whether he prefers to recognize the individual}ty in the totality, or the totality in the individuality" (645). But if the affective and aesthetic impulse were both present throughout Boas' career, the search for general laws was always constrained by the cosmographer's desire to describe and understand individual phenomena. While he never completely abandoned the search for the laws of human behavior, he gradually became less confident of ever finding them, and the corpus of his work largely comprised detailed descriptions of particulars rather than attempts at generalization (d. Stocking 1968: 154-55; Kluckhohn & Prufer 1959: 24-25). It is a commonplace that Boasian anthropology was to a certain degree the product of his intellectual socialization in Germany. Yet "The Study of Geography " only begins to reveal the debt of Boas' thinking to German thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We know that Boas read and appreciated Herder and Kant, had an affinity for Goethe and Schiller, and approached Humboldt's "admirable works" with "great awe" (1887a :639, 1904:24; Cole 1983:29...

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