It is now commonplace to claim that Boas and Malinowski were founding Essay

It is now commonplace to claim that Boas and Malinowski were founding fathers of anthropology in the US and Britain respectively. Choosing one or the other exam - Essay ExampleThis recognition has a frame of corollaries, including one that invites us to venture about ethnographic texts -- and anthropology as a discipline -- in the terms we have traditionally employ in periodizing literary history. Many of us now speak of a puritanic as debate to a modernist anthropology.This essay represents an attempt to complicate the basic assumptions of this interdiscipline on a number of grounds, and from a number of different perspectives. First, I would like to trouble the border we often imagine existing mingled with Victorian and modernist anthropology, a gesture which I hope will have its implications for the literary border as well. I am implicated in this project not so much because I see periodisations as inherently misguided, but rather the opposite because I think such distincti ons are only as good as the specific historical instances that both support and contend them. Second, I would like to challenge the largely textual basis of the grounds on which we may be tempted to delineate this border, and suggest that, having complete the textual nature of ethnography, we may wish to turn our attention to other social and institutional similarities between ethnographic work and the artistic and literary practices of a given period. I am especially interested here in the changing conditions of intellectual labor in the epochal moment of the turn of the 20th century.To address these issues I will take as my subject the early career of Franz Boas, who for various reasons has get by to be regarded as the father of American anthropology (by which is really meant professional anthropology, a point to which I shall recidivate at some length). Born in 1858 to a free-thinking Jewish family in Minden, Westphalia, and dying in 1942 after a lengthy career as the preemi nent anthropologist in the United States, Boas could be tell not only to have traversed centuries and continents, but to have charted a path from the German