In "Franz Boas and the Humboldtian Tradition," Matti Bunzl provides
a sweeping survey of what he calls "historicist Counter-Enlightenment thinking"
to argue that American cultural anthropologists are more German than most of
them are willing to admit. Bunzl makes two distinct and important contributions
to the history of the human sciences: he adds an enormous level of detail to
what we know about the ethnographic, linguistic, and methodological work of
Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt and their disciples, stretching from the
1770s to the 1880s; and he uses a close study of Boas's early career in America
to offer a nuanced account of what happens when a "national style"
of doing science is transported into a foreign intellectual and institutional
environment. Bunzl’s assiduous delineation of the Humboldtian tradition,
with its links to Romanticism and historicism, sets the stage for one of his
central arguments, that Boas, steeped in this tradition, developed his culture
concept in response to debates between historicism and "natural law",
rather than, as in the standard story, in reaction to the emergence of Darwinism.
Where evolution did play a central role, Bunzl makes clear, was later, when
Boas emigrated to the United States and confronted an anthropological community
deeply committed to evolutionary positivism. There, Bunzl argues persuasively,
in response to this environment Boas elaborated and developed his historicist
notion of cultural anthropology, as he did studies of the cultural productions
and languages of a number of groups in order to substantiate his claim that
anthropology could not proceed by discovering universalist laws but rather must
focus on empirically grounded studies of individual cultural trajectories, with
the goal of understanding a given group in as much of its totality and specificity
as possible. Throughout his article, Bunzl practices what Boas preached. While
convincingly refuting the assumption that American cultural anthropology was
largely home-grown, he refuses to adhere to a simplistic “diffusionist”
model which would have everything that was new in the field come from the more-developed
German tradition. Rather, it is the interactions between old world and new,
Darwinism and historicism, and innovation and tradition building that lie at
the heart of Bunzl’s fine piece of scholarship.