culture history

Cultural anthropology was also diversifying its concepts and its areas of research without losing its unity. Franz Boas, a German-born American, for example, was one of the first to scorn the evolutionist’s search for selected facts to grace abstract evolutionary theories; he…

…have emphasized the idea of culture history, in which the entire history of mankind is seen as a system of coherent and articulated phases and strata, with certain cultural phenomena appearing at specific levels of culture. Leo Frobenius, the originator of the theory that later became known as the Kulturkreislehre,…

…to the development of “culture histories” and dominated American anthropology for the first half of the 20th century. The culture history movement so influenced anthropology that grand theories of “Man” became far less common than in the past.