Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

One of the predominant tenets of adopting the Boasian approach to social science was the development of an awareness of the degree to which one’s own cultural framework, derived from their upbringing and their exposure to their own society, affected their opinions. One of Boas’s major, enduring criticisms of the social scientists in his field was their inability to extract themselves from their own framework of values when assessing the cultures they studied. Boas termed this phenomenon “cultural relativity,” and it has endured as a description of how one’s own cultural background creates bias.

Boas acknowledged that researchers would naturally have initial reactions in the field to certain practices, especially those that differed greatly from their own, but he stressed the need for researchers to interrogate those reactions and put aside their own cultural biases to reach more objective conclusions. King discusses how certain social concepts, like a “second cousin,” for example, widely understood in Western society, may not even be understood in another society while the concept of family between a network or community of people who are not related by blood is uncommon in mainstream Western culture but common elsewhere.

Boas insisted that his researchers assign neither their values nor their labels to the subjects of their field work; they must allow the people of these cultures to express themselves.