Explore "The Mind of Primitive Man" by Franz Boas on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
IT now remains to formulate more clearly the difference between the forms of thought of primitive man and those of civilized man, regardless of their racial descent.
Even a superficial observation demonstrates that groups of man belonging to distinct social strata do not behave in the same manner. The Russian peasant does not re-act to his sense-experiences in the same way as does the native Australian; and entirely different from theirs are the re-actions of the educated Chinaman and of the educated American. In all these cases the form of re-action may depend to a slight extent upon hereditary individual and racial ability, but it will to a much greater extent be determined by the habitual re-actions of the society to which the individual in question belongs.