The descriptivists

3 importants descriptivists are:

- Franz Boas

Franz Boas was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology" and "the Father of Modern Anthropology.

Although Boas published descriptive studies of Native American languages, and wrote on theoretical difficulties in classifying languages, he left it to colleagues and students such as Edward Sapir to research the relationship between culture and language.

He shifted attention to the perception of different sounds.

Although Boas was making a very specific contribution to the methods of descriptive linguistics, his ultimate point is far reaching: observer bias need not be personal, it can be cultural. In other words, the perceptual categories of Western researchers may systematically cause a Westerner to misperceive or to fail to perceive entirely a meaningful element in another culture. As in his critique of Otis Mason's museum displays, Boas demonstrated that what appeared to be evidence of cultural evolution was really the consequence of unscientific methods, and a reflection of Westerners' beliefs about their own cultural superiority. This point provides the methodological foundation for Boas's cultural relativism: elements of a culture are meaningful in that culture's terms, even if they may be meaningless (or take on a radically different meaning) in another culture.