Against Civilization: The Anthropological Critique of Modernity

Perhaps the greatest blind spot of Western civilization has been its persistent inability to see other civilizations from their own point of view; to put ourselves in their shoes, as it were. The colonial record, in particular, is one of viewing the Other as inferior, and in need of Westernization—a perspective that has brought death, and untold misery, to millions. Franz Boas, known as the “father of American anthropology,” believed that anthropological research might be able to correct this distorted perspective, and that, in his words, we might learn “to tolerate to a greater extent other forms of civilization than our own.” During his professorship at Columbia (1899-1942), Boas mentored Alfred Kroeber, Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Zora Neale Hurston, Stanley Diamond, and Robert Lowie, among others—scholars who became leaders in the field, some of them famous beyond the field (books by Benedict and Mead sold in the millions). Boas named his approach “cultural relativism,” the principle that an individual's beliefs, values, and practices should be understood within the context of his or her own culture, rather than being judged by the standards of our own. At the hands of his students, so-called “primitive” cultures began to appear quite sophisticated; in many ways, superior to our own. In this book, we examine the work of those anthropologists who mounted a critique of Western ethnocentrism, opening the possibility of a better way of life, one that we have willfully chosen to ignore. Morris Berman is a poet, novelist, essayist, social critic, and cultural historian. He has written twenty-eight books and nearly 200 articles, and has taught at a number of universities in Europe, North America, Chile, and Mexico. He won the Governor’s Writers Award for Washington State in 1990, and was the first recipient of the annual Rollo May Center Grant for Humanistic Studies in 1992. In 2000, The Twilight of American Culture was named a “Notable Book” by the New York Times Book Review, and in 2013 he received the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity from the Media Ecology Association. Dr. Berman lives in Mexico. View Less