Like any developing scholar, Boas’s opinions evolved over the course of his career, but his most consistently held position was that cultures were integrated wholes produced by specific historical processes rather than reflections of universal evolutionary stages. In his earliest works Boas wrote passages that could have been penned by Edward Tylor: “The frequent occurrence of similar phenomena in cultural areas that have no historical contact . . . shows that the human mind develops everywhere according to the same laws” (1966a:637). By the late 1890s, however, Boas had developed his critique of evolutionary frameworks and the comparative method. Boas argued that the comparative approaches of Morgan and Tylor were undercut by three flaws: (1) the assumption of unilineal evolution, (2) the notion of modern societies as evolutionary survivals, and (3) the classification of societies based on weak data and inappropriate criteria. These flaws were the targets of the Boasian attack.
Boas dismissed the evolutionary frameworks of Morgan, Tylor, and others as untested and untestable. In his “The Methods of Ethnology,” Boas summarizes the evolutionary position, which presupposes that the course of historical changes in the cultural life of mankind follows definite laws which are applicable everywhere, and which bring it about that cultural development, in its main lines, is the same among all races and all peoples. As soon as we admit that the hypothesis of a uniform evolution has to be proved before it can be accepted the whole structure loses its foundation. (1920:311–312, emphasis added)
Boas undercut the entire basis of nineteenth-century cultural evolution. We might agree with Tylor and Morgan that certain technological processes have an inherent evolutionary order— fire must precede pottery making, flintlocks were invented before automatic rifles—but there is no ethnographic evidence
indicating that matrilineal kin systems preceded patrilineal kin systems or that religions based on animism developed before polytheistic religions. Boas argued that this unilineal ordering is a simple assumption; there is no proven historical relationship nor any way to prove such a relationship. Therefore, evolutionary frameworks were unproven assumptions imposed on the data, not theories derived from ethnographic data.
Further, Boas argued, the unilineal classification of different societies assumed that different societies with similar cultural patterns (e.g., they used Hawaiian kinship classifications [see p. 23] or the bow and arrow) were at similar evolutionary levels.
On the contrary, he believed that very similar cultural practices may arise from different causes. Anthropology’s primary task, according to Boas, was to provide “a penetrating analysis of a unique culture describing its form, the dynamic reactions of the individual to the culture and of the culture to the individual” (1966c:310–311).
Boas did not assume (as some of his students did) that general laws of human behavior did not exist, but
rather that those laws could be derived only from an understanding of specific historical processes. We agree that certain laws exist which govern the growth of human culture, and it is our endeavor to discover these laws. The object of our investigation is to find the processes by which certain stages of culture have developed. The customs and beliefs themselves are not the ultimate objects of research. We desire to learn the reasons why such customs and beliefs exist—in other words, we wish to discover the history of their development. . . . A detailed study of customs in their bearings to the total culture of the tribe practicing them, and in connection with an investigation of their geographical distribution among neighboring tribes, affords us almost always a means of determining with considerable accuracy the historical causes that led to the formation of the customs in question and to the psychological processes that were at work in their development. The results of inquiries may be three-fold. They may reveal the environ mental conditions which have created or modified elements; they may clear up psychological factors which are at work in shaping culture; or they may bring before our eyes the effects that historical connections have had upon the growth of the culture. (Boas 1896:905)
Thus Boas suggests that lawlike generalizations can be based on adaptational, psychological, or historical factors, but only if documented by well-established ethnographic cases: The comparative method and the historical method, if I may use these terms, have been struggling for supremacy for a long time, but we may hope that each will soon find its appropriate place and function. The historical method has reached a sounder basis by abandoning the misleading principle of assuming connection wherever similarities of culture are found.
The comparative method, notwithstanding all that has been said and written in its praise, has been remarkably barren of definite results, and I believe it will not become fruitful until we renounce the vain endeavor to construct a uniform systematic history of the evolution of culture, and until we begin to make our comparisons on the broader and sounder basis which I venture to outline. Up to this time we have too much reveled in more or less ingenious vagaries. The solid work is still all before us. (1896:908)