The analysis of the behavior of social groups — the forms of their adaptation, the optimization and economy of resources in the process of socialization, mutual support, competition, the structure of collective identity, the assortment of social values, the awareness of status and ability to change it, and situational analysis — all these classical sociological terms were introduced by Thomas into scientific circulation through the study of the ethnos.
Just as Sumner formulated very important sociological laws, applicable in the examination of all societies, including complex and modern ones, while rejecting the ethnic phenomena of archaic societies, so too did Znaniecki and Thomas derive a crucial set of sociological instruments, which became the basis of modern Sociology, from the observation of the ethnic group, which became for them the paradigm of all other social groups. For Ethnosociology this is far from accidental, since the ethnos is the simplest form of society, the koineme, which is the paradigm and basic component of more complex societies.
Franz Boas: The Founder of Cultural Anthropology (& His Students/Followers/Successors)
We should consider as the beginning of a full-fledged ethnosociological tradition in the US, the founding of a theoretical school by the outstanding ethnographer, philosopher, and anthropologist, Franz Boas (1858–1942), who emigrated from Germany to the US. There it received the name “Cultural Anthropology,” but the German ethnosociologists Thurnwald and Mühlmann unambiguously identified it with Ethnosociology, owing to the shared major theme, methods, principles, starting attitudes, and prioritized approaches to the interpretation of society, the ethnos, culture, and the human.
Boas’ worldview took shape under the influence of the German geographic, ethnological, and psychological school (Ratzel, Bastian, Wundt, etc.) and he maintained a love for Germany and fidelity to its culture even in the US (for which he was sometimes blamed). Boas achieved a real revolution in American Anthropology, wherein, prior to his arrival, evolutionary and Social Darwinist approaches dominated, and racial theories, which explained sociological particularities by innate, inherited markers and racial belonging, were popular, and an inflexible conviction in the absolute superiority of modern Western (European and American) society, its technology and values over the rest of the world, reigned. Boas built his scientific program on the denial of all three forms of racism:
• Evolutionary or progressivist, built on the thesis that complex societies are better than simple ones;
• Biological, which explains cultural differences by biological, racial specifics;
• Eurocentric, as a kind of European and American ethnocentrism.
Boas advanced a radically new teaching about societies, which maintained the following:145
• The relativity and reversibility of social processes; in their transformations under the influence of social, natural, or geographical factors, societies could become both more complex and simpler;
• The historicity of any type of society, whether complex or simple, since behind the apparent constancy of archaic narods is concealed an inner dynamic, sometimes less than the historicity of more differentiated social systems;
• The necessity of studying archaic societies only in field conditions, living with them, carefully gathering data as they present themselves before the researcher, not trying to systematize them a priori, learning the language and living into their worldview and their “life world”;
• Cultural Pluralism, i.e., the absence of any basis whatsoever for the hierarchical comparison of cultures and societies: they are all different, but each of them carries its own criteria within itself and must be accepted as it is, even if some of the customs shock the observer;
• A refusal to observe archaic ethnoses as an object (with the eyes of the European or American subject) and the demand to participate in them as in a subject (empathy, Einfühlung);
• The discovery of the dependence of physical and even racial characteristics on the surrounding environment, natural and social;
• Setting high priority on the linguistic factor as the generalizing formula of culture.146
These principles lay at the basis of Cultural Anthropology, which replaced evolutionism, racial theories, and theories of kinship, which earlier ruled American studies of the ethnos and archaic (“primitive”) tribes completely.147 They were all also shared completely by European ethnosociologists and lay at the basis of ethnosociology as such.
Boas himself followed these rules rigorously, spending much time among the tribes he studied (especially the Eskimo, Inuit, and the Kwakiutl), studying their languages and culture, and penetrating into their life world.148 , 149
Boas supported each of the asserted theses of Cultural Anthropology with serious empirical studies, in the domain of Physical Anthropology (studying the volume and forms of the skulls of infants born to the families of European immigrants in the US before and after a ten-year period of their mothers’ dwelling in new circumstances), Linguistics (to him belongs the conjecture that the researcher perceives the sounds of foreign speech based on the phonetic structure of his own language), Archaeology, etc.
Boas’ ideas were picked up and developed by the resplendent constellation of his students, among whom are gathered almost all the stars of American Ethnology, Anthropology, Linguistics and Psychology.
Alfred Kroeber: The Cultural Pattern and the Superorganic
One of Boas’ first disciples was the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber (1876–1960), the founder of the anthropological school at Berkeley. Kroeber focused his attention on the study of the Native tribes of North America, particularly in California.150
Kroeber developed Boas’ ideas, applying them to a practical sphere of field studies (empathy, language study, thorough collection of details and initially indecipherable signs, objects and customs, etc.). At the same time, he also actively worked on the theoretical questions of cultural anthropology. He became the founder of “Cultural Ecology,” an approach that studied the social context of human interactions with the surrounding natural environment as a unified complex, without specifying what in this unified system is primary and what secondary, which the argument and which the function.
Kroeber continued Boas’ line in the study of Historical Anthropology, tracing, on the basis of mythological and cultural material, the structure of transformations (migrations, reforms, and other social changes) in “primitive” societies as a direct analogue of the historical process of more complex societies.151
Kroeber introduced the concept of a “cultural pattern,” i.e., a determinate model or an archetype, which comprises the algorithm of society’s constant specific characteristics (rites, rituals, processes, ceremonies, situations, etc.), regularly and synchronously replicable in diverse circumstances.
Having focused his principal attention on culture as a “superorganic” phenomenon, Kroeber advanced a holistic model of society, in which the material and spiritual (or rather, social) elements are found together in an inseparable bond.152 , 153
All of these themes clearly point to the “holistic” tradition of German humanist science, brought to the US by Boas.
Robert Lowie: Historical Particularism
The well-known ethnologist Robert Lowie (1883–1957) was another close disciple of Boas’ and a cofounder of the anthropological school at Berkeley. Lowie was the first of Boas’ graduate students, who defended his dissertation before him.
Lowie specialized in theories of kinship among archaic ethnoses and developed, as did Kroeber, the practice of historical anthropology. In the sphere of historical anthropology, he formulated the concept of “historical particularism,” i.e., of the peculiarity and uniqueness of the historical experience of each ethnos, including those that were earlier considered as altogether without a history and constantly reproductive of one and the same “pattern.”154
Lower, like Kroeber, conducted field studies among Native Americans (predominantly those of the Crow and plains tribes), but the societies of So
uth America and Europe also drew his attention.155 , 156 In particular, he devoted a separate study to the Germans, being one of the first to apply the methods of the anthropological and ethnosociological approach (practiced earlier primarily for the study of preliterate societies) to the highly developed narods of Europe, with a highly differentiated and abundantly documented historical culture.157
Lowie’s significance for Ethnosociology is due to the fact that he focused his attention on transitions from pure archaic societies to cultured societies and to complex societies with a developed religious and political culture. At the same time, he showed both the transformations and continuity of the ethnic element in highly differentiated social ensembles. The scientific and methodological apparatus developed by Lowie allows one to employ ethnosociological principles theoretically to all types of society.158
Ruth Benedict: The Personification of a Cultural Pattern
Ruth Benedict (1887–1948), Franz Boas’ student, also elaborated the principles of the study of complex cultures by anthropological methods, like Lowie, while continuing to develop and approve of the ethnosociological approach. This found expression in her most famous work, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, written in 1946, immediately after the end of the Second World War and devoted to the ethnosociology of Japanese society.159
In her work, Benedict shows how convincing and unexpected in its findings the approach of “cultural pluralism” could be when applied to practical matters. Thus, after the defeat of Japan Americans feared greatly that the strict and extremely rigid social and cultural structure of Japanese society would become a constant problem for the American occupiers, whose system of values was built not only differently, but in an almost entirely contrary manner. Nevertheless, Benedict shows that Japanese culture and Japanese society appear so strict only from the side, if considered as objects. In them is a complex model of attitudes and patterns, which allowed the Japanese to adapt to the American presence and to flow into Western social standards, reinterpreted in a specifically Japanese way, and even to attain serious successes in the game, according to Western rules. In 1946, such an analysis seemed entirely unrealistic, but a few decades later it came entirely to pass in real life and became a historical fact, which increased the prestige of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnosociology.
Benedict also developed a number of theoretical approaches, the best known of which is “Psychological Anthropology.” According to Benedict, in each culture one can discover an entirely determinate psychological type, ethnosocial character.160 This type is standard and acts as the carrier of cultural patterns and their products. The transmission of these patterns occurs through a personified standard.
Abram Kardiner: Basic Personality
Another representative of Boas’ school, the sociologist and psychologist Abram Kardiner (1891–1981), turned the concept of a “basic personality” into a law. He called the carrier of a cultural pattern a “basic personality,” i.e., a sociological type which lies at the basis of the socium and forms its “base.”161
Kardiner, like Benedict, places before himself the question of the correlation of the collective and the individual in culture and society. And the answer to this question was “basic personality,” which, on one hand, carries in itself and relays to others the impersonal cultural pattern, and, on the other hand, individualizes it in its “history.” Thus, two dimensions, the structural (impersonal, immutable, basic) and the individual (historical, personal) can be interpreted simultaneously through the concept of “cultural personality.”
The sociological concept of the division of social institutions into primary and secondary is also attributed to Kardiner.
Kardiner combined sociology and anthropology with active engagements as a psychoanalyst and drew broadly on Freudianism for the resolution of sociological and ethnosociological problems. Kardiner is considered one of the key figures of contemporary psychology.
Ralph Linton: Status and Role
In New York during the 1930s, Ruth Benedict and Abram Kardiner formed the “culture and personality” circle, in the work of which other followers of Boas regularly participated, in particular, the famous sociologist Ralph Linton (1893–1953), who began his career as an archaeologist and ethnographer, engaged in fields studies in the US, Polynesia, and Madagascar.162
Linton first expounded on the division, which became a mainstay of Sociology, between the concepts of “status” and “role.”163 Social status, as Linton showed, consists of a whole array of roles, each of which the bearer of status can fulfill with a different degree of perfection. The correlation of status and role is tied with the general problem, shared by the school of Boas as a whole, and by the circle of “culture and personality,” of the proportion between the impersonal (structure) and the personal (historical) in society.
Thus, again we find at the basis of the fundamental concepts and the concepts of modern, classic Sociology the ethnos, Ethnology, and Cultural Anthropology (Ethnosociology).
Cora Du Bois: The Structure of Modal Personality
One participant of the “cultural and personality” circle was another famous representative of contemporary Anthropology, Sociology, and Ethnography, Cora Du Bois (1903–1991), also a student of Boas. In the spirit of the classical approach of this orientation, Du Bois engaged in ethnographic field studies in Northern California and on the Northeast Pacific coast of America, having released a documented study of the sociological and cultural significance of the “ghost dance” among the Wintu tribe.164
Later, under the influence of Kardiner, Du Bois actively began to use psychological and psychoanalytical practices, tests, questionnaires, dream analyses, etc., in her ethnographic and ethnosociological research. Her work in Indonesia was based on this method.165
In the theoretical domain, she proposed a nuanced version of Kardiner’s “basic personality,” which she defined as the “structure of modal personality.” This concept was created to make the boundaries of that constant type, within which individual variations in ethnic and social structures are realized, more precise.
Edward Sapir: The Hypothesis of Linguistic Untranslatability
Yet another student of that circle and Boas was the renowned linguist Edward Sapir (1884–1939), who, in the context of the study of the relationship of culture and “basic personality,” developed as a priority another orientation outlined by Boas, “cultural pluralism,” which is embodied in the multitude of human languages.
Sapir identified the culture and language of a society and from all sides approached the axiom of Structural Linguistics (Saussure, Jakobson, Trubetzkoy, etc.), according to which the meaning of utterances is determined not so much by the correlation of sign and signified (the extensional, a concrete object or phenomenon of the extra-linguistic sphere) as by the inner connection of the sign with other signs in the general structure of the language and the linguistic context.166 Sapir followed Boas in this, who indicated the fact that the anthropologist’s perception of a phoneme of a foreign language passes through the filter of the structure of their own linguistic belongingness. If even the phoneme as the minimal fragment of the auditory expression of language and a material sign is isolated by linguistic perception on the basis of a linguistic pattern peculiar to each language of group of languages, then what is there to say about the perception of the semantic categories that depend entirely on an even deeper and subtler cultural field and context?
This can be traced through the now famous comparison of the names of colors in different languages. In some languages, there are several terms used to describe one shade or another, while others use the same word to describe that which other ethnoses consider unquestionably and obviously different.
Meaning depends on context and on the structure of a language. For this reason, meaning is not common to all humanity, but an ethnically, culturally, socially, and linguistically predetermined phenomenon, belonging only to a concrete semantic and linguistic context.167
Sapir formu
late this fact as the “untranslatability” of languages. This assertion received the name “the principal of linguistic relativity” or the “Sapir-Whorf Law” (Benjamin Whorf [1897–1941] was an American linguist and Sapir’s collaborator).
From the principle of linguistic relativity issues the impossibility of thinking outside of language. Thought cannot develop without meaning, and meaning is contained in language.
Thus, the pluralism of cultures is corroborated by the pluralism of languages, although the diversity of languages does not allow one to arrange them hierarchically, since to do this one would have to recognize a languages or group of languages more perfect than others, but to do this would be to interpret the “other” through one’s “own” lens, i.e., to execute an “ethnocentric act.”
We can trace an interesting chain: the concept of a non-hierarchized diversity of cultures (holism) was already previously asserted by Herder and shared by German romantics. Romanticism influenced Organicism, the anthropogeographic approach (Ratzel), and German Ethnology and Ethnopsychology (Lazarus, Wundt). Boas, educated in Germany under the direct impact of these influences, brought this orientation to the US and created a school there, which shaped the look of American, and in many respects, worldwide Anthropology, Ethnology, Sociology, Culturology, and Linguistics over the course of the 20th century. Boas’ student Edward Sapir locked onto Herder’s intuition, expressing it in his principle of untranslatability as a strictly scientific, linguistic, and sociological law.
Clyde Kluckhohn: The Method of Value Orientations
Rather close in method and theme to the circle of “culture and personality” was another prominent sociologist, colleague of Talcott Parsons and the founder of the Harvard Department of Social Relations Clyde Kluckhohn (1905–1960).
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