Historicism is an anthropological and cultural perspective that dates from the mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century. Diffusionism and historical particularism are two different types of historicism. This method is most commonly associated with Franz Boas and his numerous pupils, but it was established much earlier by diffusionists who sought to provide alternatives to the social evolutionists’ theories of cultural development.

According to evolutionists, humans have a set of features and patterns of thought that transcend individual cultures and, hence individual civilizations’ cultural development will reflect this commonality through a comparable series of developmental phases.

Historicism, on the other hand, valued careful and contextualised data interpretation as well as a relativistic point of view, rejecting the social evolutionists’ universalistic, hierarchical, and over-generalized interpretations. The historicist perspective was more concerned with tracing the historical history of distinct cultures than with constructing a comprehensive evolutionary narrative of culture’s progress.

What is Historical Particularism

Historical particularism is an anthropological school of thought connected with Franz Boas and his students (including A.L. Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead) who focused on a people’s integrated and distinctive way of life in their study of culture. Cultural evolution, Kulturkreis, and geographical or environmental determinism, for example, all aimed to discover a set of general rules for the social sciences that were akin to those found in the physical sciences (such as the laws of thermodynamics or gravity).

Boas’ work emphasised the study of distinct cultures, each with its history. He believed that the primary task of an anthropologist was to define the unique traits of culture to reconstruct the historical events that led to its current structure. The assumption that resolving hypotheses about evolutionary development and the influence of one culture on another should come second to the meticulous and exhaustive study of specific societies was implicit in this approach. Boas argued that the historical approach, which is based on the description of specific cultural traits and aspects, should take the place of evolutionists’ comparative technique, which uses data to rank cultures in an artificial hierarchy of achievement.

For the first half of the twentieth century, the particularist method dominated American anthropology due to Boas’ influence. Neoevolutionism and several other theories superseded it from World War II until the 1970s. However, the particularist approach, if not the term itself, resurfaced in the 1980s when researchers began to acknowledge that even in the age of globalisation, distinct historical processes divide persons.

Limitations of Historical Particulars

Historicism arose from a discontent with unlineal socio-cultural evolution ideas.

• Their views on the evolution of human societies were based on works from the late eighteenth century that stated humanity progressed to civilization through a sequence of steadily developing lineal stages leading to the perfection, or near perfection, of civilised society
• These thinkers claimed that each step was accompanied by an increase in mental ability and capability. Each stage of growth was preceded by a boost in mental capacity. This kind of thinking portrayed primitive man as having a primitive level of mental functioning, similar to instinct
• It was discovered that a civilization was in a condition of savagery or barbarism because its people had not yet developed the mental functions required to form and sustain a civilised society
• The underlying assumption that Western European society and its maximum attainable level of development was the final product of this sequence, was a key flaw with these unlineal theories of cultural development
• This presented a serious challenge for historicists, particularly Boas, who believed that one could not grasp and interpret cultural change, and hence recreate the history of a society unless those conducting the investigation performed observations from the perspective of those being studied
• As a result, according to Boas, the investigator must analyse all available evidence for society, including data gathered firsthand by a skilled researcher. Boas’ belief in the significance of extensive fieldwork was handed down to his students (and in turn, theirs), as seen by their diverse works and approaches
• Boas and his contemporaries disputed evolutionists’ universal models and cultural development theories, as well as the techniques and conclusions of British and German diffusionists. The Boasians felt that there were so many diverse stimuli acting on the evolution of a culture, that the only way to understand its historical trajectory was to first examine the specifics of that culture to identify the sources of stimuli
• Only when a plethora of synchronic studies has been stitched together to produce a pattern of development can theories of cultural development be constructed. Theories generated from this form of historically based research were more accurate and thorough than prior models of evolutionism and diffusionist historicism, but they failed to discover cross-cultural patterns

Later Contribution of Boas

Boas actively encouraged fieldwork, based on his notion that cultural theories should be built from concrete ethnographic data. He pioneered participant observation as a fundamental ethnographic fieldwork research tool. Boas gathered a large amount of first-hand cultural data from Native American tribes across the United States using this method. He believed, based on extensive anthropological research, that a society can only be understood within its cultural environment, particularly its historical process. Boas did not reject the existence of general laws governing human conduct, but he argued that those principles could be discovered by studying a particular community. Boas became sceptical about the idea of establishing cultural rules as time went on, seeing that cultural processes are complex.

Conclusion

Early in the twentieth century, Franz Boas and his disciples created historical particularism. This perspective asserts that each society has its historical development that must be understood in light of its distinctive cultural and environmental setting, particularly its historical process. Boas had a huge impact on the development of anthropology, in addition to introducing the idea of Historical Particularism. Boas argued for an end to ethnocentrism in anthropology by saying that societies cannot be evaluated according to their degree of savagery, barbarism, or politeness. Anthropologists began to do ethnological fieldwork to obtain solid data as a result of his influence, and have adopted his view that culture must be understood in its context as a core approach to cultural analysis.