Work · Sociology & Social Theory
The Mind of Primitive Man
Book based on lectures in Boston and Mexico City in 1910–11, revised in 1938: Boas finds no evidence that any human group is innately inferior in mind; differences of culture follow from history and contact, and even bodily form changes with environment.
Introduction
Boas published “The Mind of Primitive Man” in 1911, based on lectures at the Lowell Institute in Boston and at the National University of Mexico in 1910–11. The book takes up a question that many scientists of the time answered in the affirmative: whether some peoples are by nature less capable of civilisation than others. Boas reviewed anatomical, psychological and ethnographic evidence and concluded that it does not support a hierarchy of mental ability between human groups; what a people achieves depends on its history and on its contacts with others. He drew on his study for the United States Immigration Commission, which reported that the head form of immigrants’ children differed from that of their parents. A revised edition appeared in 1938.
Connections
Builds on
- The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology1896 · Franz Boas
More works by Franz Boas
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