Question

_______________________ believed that ethnography and culture could be approached scientifically.

Answer 1

Franz Boas advocated for a scientific approach to studying ethnography and culture, emphasizing fieldwork and the unique historical trajectories of cultures.

Step-by-step explanation:

Anthropologists like Franz Boas believed that ethnography and culture could be approached scientifically. Boas, a late 19th and early 20th-century figure, profoundly disagreed with the ethnocentric and racist theories prevalent in the social sciences of his day which proposed unilineal cultural evolution. Instead, Boas emphasized the importance of conducting fieldwork and understanding each culture's unique historical trajectory, thereby shaping the discipline to consider cultures evolving through interaction and diffusion rather than in isolation towards a singular idea of civilization. Other significant figures like Edward Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan proposed developmental stages of culture but did not necessarily approach their study scientifically or with the rigour that later anthropologists like Boas applied to their work.