Noga Arikha at Aeon Magazine:
Anthropology could be considered a kind of comparative psychology. The founder of modern American anthropology, Franz Boas (1858-1942) – whose biography I have recently written – declared as much, in his talk ‘Psychological Problems in Anthropology’ (1909):
We are also trying to determine the psychological laws which control the mind of man everywhere, and that may differ in various racial and social groups. In so far as our inquiries relate to the last-named subject, their problems are problems of psychology, though based upon anthropological material.
There was a unity to the human mind, what Boas’s mentor, Adolf Bastian, had called ‘the psychic unity of [hu]mankind’, according to which all peoples shared ‘Elementargedanken’, elemental ideas. Boas studied the immense diversity among human cultures as variations on these universal ‘psychological laws’, showing how cultures arose and developed within specific environmental and historical settings out of the evolved need humans have to coalesce within a group and imitate each other – Tarde influenced Boas. No cultural or national identity was static, nor reducible to mythically ‘pure’ origins.
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.