~Franz Boas~

I choose for my presentation a famous anthropologist, who practically founded our discipline as we know it today.

Franz Boas was a north american with jew and german roots, who is considered as the Father of Cultural Anthropology,  since he founded the north american school. He studied in german universities as Heidelberg, Bonn and Kiel in where he was influenced by german romanticism theory. 

Also, he's behind the fact that the discipline is divided into three study areas: Social Anthropology, Bio-Anthropology and Archaeology. From this idea emerge the cause why I wanna talk about him:  since in anthropology there's different schools who create different ways to produce knowledge based on different theories (for example, British Anthropology School is founded under the functional paradigm with the works by  Bronislaw Malinowski), and each country, through their study centers , teach the career under the paradigm they appoint. In our case, University of Chile follows the North American  way of teaching the discipline.

In other facet, he created a great impact in the world wide Academy of social scientist with his theory about Cultural Relativism. With his propose, he was against oldest paradigms who watched native societies as people who where in a previous state of evolution, like uncivilized humans. On the contrary, he expressed that all Cultures are equally important and they must be studied in their particular context.

Following this, in my presentation I'll talk about three major themes:

1. Few aspects about his career.
2. Theory of Cultural Relativism.
3. The north american anthropology school.

Franz Boas and George Hunt grabbing a blanket in order to take a better photograph.

I hope you'll enjoy my presentation~

Greetings~