Blackwell Reference Online

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Cultural anthropology is the study of the diversity of human thought and activity, placing particular emphasis on describing and theorizing the variety of sociocultural contexts within which people make sense of their worlds, as being central to understanding what it is to be human. Cultural anthropology as a recognized subdiscipline emerged in the United States toward the end of the nineteenth century, under the guidance of Franz Boas, who is widely regarded as the founder of modern American anthropology. Boas's work as a collector and curator for ethnological museum displays led him to challenge prevailing views of cultural evolution and the idea that similar cultural traits or artifacts found in different contexts necessarily demonstrated similarities of use or meaning. Instead, he argued for the importance of understanding such phenomena within their particular cultural context. For Boas and most American cultural anthropologists who followed him, such as his student Ruth Benedict or the prominent anthropologist Margaret Mead, this was more than just a theoretically important argument. The understanding of different patterns of behavior as being meaningful within their own specific cultural context was a weapon to be used in an ongoing political struggle against intolerance or assumptions of Western cultural superiority. For Benedict (1946) , cultures were merely different ... log in or subscribe to read full text