page_title: American anthropology
section_title: Universal versus particular
hierarchical_section_title: American anthropology / Cultural anthropology / Universal versus particular
caption_attribution_description: العربية: صورة إدوارد كيرتيس Edward Curtis photo of a Kwakwaka'wakw potlatch. Čeština: Indiánská slavnost (Foto E. S. Curtis, kolem 1900). English: Edward Curtis photo of a Kwakwaka'wakw potlatch with dancers and singers. Kwakwaka'wakw people in a wedding ceremony, bride in centre. Photo taken by Edward Curtis, 1914. Film footage of this same event was used in Curtis' feature film In the Land of the Head Hunters Français&#160;: Photo d'un potlatch Kwakwaka'wakw, Edward Curtis. Hrvatski: Potlač Kwakwaka'wakw Indijanaca. 日本語: クワキウトル族のトーテムポール. クヮクヮカワク族のポトラッチ。. Latina: Homines Kwakwaka'wakw (olim Kwakiutl appellatis) apud potlatch, praestationem et rem culturae; photographum ab Eduardo Curtis factum. Русский: Свадебная церемония в племени квакиутл, невеста в центре. Фотограф Эдвард Кёртис, 1914. Kiswahili: Edward Curtis, picha ya sherehe ya Kwakwaka’wakw.
context_page_description: American anthropology has culture as its central and unifying concept. This most commonly refers to the universal human capacity to classify and encode human experiences symbolically, and to communicate symbolically encoded experiences socially. American anthropology is organized into four fields, each of which plays an important role in research on culture:
  biological anthropology
  linguistic anthropology
  cultural anthropology
  archaeology
  Research in these fields has influenced anthropologists working in other countries to different degrees.
context_section_description: The modern anthropological concept of culture has its origins in the 19th century with German anthropologist Adolf Bastian's theory of the "psychic unity of mankind," which, influenced by Herder and von Humboldt, challenged the identification of "culture" with the way of life of European elites, and British anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor's attempt to define culture as inclusively as possible.  Tylor in 1874 described culture in the following way: "Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."  Although Tylor was not aiming to propose a general theory of culture (he explained his understanding of culture in the course of a larger argument about the nature of religion), American anthropologists have generally presented their various definitions of culture as refinements of Tylor's.  Franz Boas's student Alfred Kroeber (1876–1970) identified culture with the "superorganic," that is, a domain with ordering principles and laws that could not be explained by or reduced to biology. In 1973, Gerald Weiss reviewed various definitions of culture and debates as to their parsimony and power, and proposed as the most scientifically useful definition that "culture" be defined "as our generic term for all human nongenetic, or metabiological, phenomena" (italics in the original).
  Franz Boas founded modern American anthropology with the establishment of the first graduate program in anthropology at Columbia University in 1896.  At the time the dominant model of culture was that of cultural evolution, which posited that human societies progressed through stages of savagery to barbarism to civilization; thus, societies that for example are based on horticulture and Iroquois kinship terminology are less evolved than societies based on agriculture and Eskimo kinship terminology.  One of Boas's greatest accomplishments was to demonstrate convincingly that this model is fundamentally flawed, empirically, methodologically, and theoretically. Moreover, he felt that our knowledge of different cultures was so incomplete, and often based on unsystematic or unscientific research, that it was impossible to develop any scientifically valid general model of human cultures. Instead, he established the principle of cultural relativism and trained students to conduct rigorous participant observation field research in different societies. Boas understood the capacity for culture to involve symbolic thought and social learning, and considered the evolution of a capacity for culture to coincide with the evolution of other, biological, features defining genus Homo.  Nevertheless, he argued that culture could not be reduced to biology or other expressions of symbolic thought, such as language. Boas and his students understood culture inclusively and resisted developing a general definition of culture. Indeed, they resisted identifying "culture" as a thing, instead using culture as an adjective rather than a noun. Boas argued that cultural "types" or "forms" are always in a state of flux. His student Alfred Kroeber argued that the "unlimited receptivity and assimilativeness of culture" made it practically impossible to think of cultures as discrete things.
  Boas's students dominated cultural anthropology through World War II, and continued to have great influence through the 1960s.  They were especially interested in two phenomena: the great variety of forms culture took around the world, and the many ways individuals were shaped by and acted creatively through their own cultures.  This led his students to focus on the history of cultural traits: how they spread from one society to another, and how their meanings changed over time—and the life histories of members of other societies.  Others, such as Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) and Margaret Mead (1901–1978), produced monographs or comparative studies analyzing the forms of creativity possible to individuals within specific cultural co
caption: Edward Curtis photo of a Kwakwaka'wakw potlatch, 1914
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