The German American anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942), pioneered a school of thought popularly known as cultural history and suggested to study human evolution from bio-cultural perspective. He motivated his students to work and study human behavior of people in their natural habitats by focusing on the material artefacts, implements and cultural processes. He opined that cultural differences across groups are not innate but are learnt through social interactions. People inhabit different ecological zones and adapt naturally to these situations biologically and develop a worldview accordingly. They view the world through the collective wisdom of the group which makes them reproduce and survive successfully in those settings. One of his popular theories is ‘cultural relativism’ which tries to understand different cultures without a value judgement of hierarchical evolution of societies. He was of the firm opinion that there are no advanced or backward cultures but only that they developed through different environments with their own survival strategies. Boas rejected the nineteenth century theory of scientific racism which suggested superiority of some races over the other. The world has experienced the extreme level of racial discrimination in the form of apartheid. His works on skeletal anatomy found that cranial shape and size were highly variable not only among the people of a group but also between different groups and were influenced by environmental and nutritional factors. Later on, Phillip V. Tobias of South Africa, conclusively exploded the myth of racial superiority by publishing voluminous data on cranial size and brain volume of people of African origin and the Whites.
Boas had a galaxy of his students who carried forward his thought; notable among them were Margaret Mead, A.L. Kroeber, Ruth Benedict and Edward Sapir. They not only conducted the field work to understand and document the cultural practices of primitive tribes but founded distinguished departments of anthropology in various universities also. In order to understand a specific culture the anthropologist must shed his own culture and become a part of that culture to involve himself in the daily routine and activities of that culture. This way a proper understanding of the meaning of rituals and ceremonies can be obtained which are woven around their life events. If now we live in a society relatively free of racial discrimination and hierarchical superiority when compared to the situation during the nineteenth century, we owe our gratitude to these anthropologists.