This paper presents a new reading of Franz Boas's philosophy of science and his approach to the understanding of culture and behavior. It points out that his approach had important parallels with the worldview of the major figures associated with pragmatism and suggests that a similar perspective can be useful today.
This study presents a reconstruction of the origins and major movements of the Galla and Somali of Northeast Africa which departs from most of the previous literature on the subject. The traditional view has been that the Galla occupied most of the Horn of Africa until the Somali, beginning about the tenth century, swept south and south-west from the shores of the Gulf of Aden driving the Galla before them. The pressure of the Somali has also been considered the major impetus to the Galla invasions of Ethiopia in the sixteenth century. It is the thesis of this paper that both the Galla and the Somali originated in southern Ethiopia, that the Somali expanded to the east and north much earlier than the Galla, and that the Galla lived only in southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya until their migrations began about 1530.
The reputation of Franz Boas as a scientist declined in the decades after his death in 1942, but his reputation as a champion of human rights and an opponent of racism remained intact. More recently, however, some writers have questioned the sincerity, the results, and the political implications of his anthropology and his work against racism and ethnocentrism. Others have been critical of his relations with colleagues and students such as Ella Deloria and Zora Neale Hurston. In this essay I discuss some of these claims and present a more positive view. Franz Boas was passionately and consistently concerned about human rights and individual liberty, freedom of inquiry and speech, equality of opportunity, and the defeat of prejudice and chauvinism. He struggled for a lifetime to advance a science that would serve humanity, and he was as much of a humanitarian in private as he was in public. [Boas, political struggles, human relations]
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