PARTICULARISM

also called Historical Particularism, school of anthropological thought associated with the work of Franz Boas and his students (among them Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and A.L. Kroeber), whose studies of culture emphasized the integrated way of life distinctive of a people. As a philosophy, particularism differed from evolutionism, diffusionism, and geographical determinism, all of which had their adherents at the time in their approach to the question of the existence of general laws of culture. Boas' own work emphasized studies of individual cultures, each based on its unique history. The anthropologist's primary assignment, in Boas' view, was to describe the particular characteristics of a given culture, with a view toward reconstructing the historical events that led to its present structure. Implicit in this approach was the notion that hypotheses regarding evolutionary development and the influence of one culture on another should be secondary to the careful and exhaustive study of particular societies. Boas urged that the historical method, based on the description of particular culture traits and elements, supplant the comparative method of the evolutionists, who used their data to rank cultures in an artificial hierarchy of achievement. He rejected the assumption of a single standard of rationality to which all cultures could be compared. Under Boas' influence, the particularist approach dominated American anthropology for the first third of the 20th century.