Editing Historicism (section)

===Anthropological<!--'Anthropological historicism' - maybe this deserves its own article since it is distinct from the philosophical notion of historicism?-->===
In the context of [[anthropology]] and other sciences which study the past, historicism has a different meaning. [[Historical particularism|Historical Particularism]] is associated with the work of [[Franz Boas]].<ref name=":0" /> His theory used the [[Diffusion (anthropology)|diffusionist]] concept that there were a few "cradles of civilization" which grew outwards, and merged it with the idea that societies would adapt to their circumstances. The school of historicism grew in response to [[Classical social evolutionism|unilinear theories]] that social development represented adaptive fitness, and therefore existed on a continuum. While these theories were espoused by [[Charles Darwin]] and many of his students, their application as applied in [[social Darwinism]] and general evolution characterized in the theories of [[Herbert Spencer]] and [[Leslie White]], historicism was neither anti-selection, nor anti-evolution, as Darwin never attempted nor offered an explanation for cultural evolution. However, it attacked the notion that there was one normative spectrum of development, instead emphasizing how local conditions would create adaptations to the local environment. [[Julian Steward]] refuted the viability of globally and universally applicable adaptive standards proposing that culture was honed adaptively in response to the idiosyncrasies of the local environment, the [[cultural ecology]], by specific evolution. What was adaptive for one region might not be so for another. This conclusion has likewise been adopted by modern forms of biological evolutionary theory.

The primary method of historicism was empirical, namely that there were so many requisite inputs into a society or event, that only by emphasizing the data available could a theory of the source be determined. In this opinion, grand theories are unprovable, and instead intensive field work would determine the most likely explanation and history of a culture, and hence it is named "historicism".

This opinion would produce a wide range of definition of what, exactly, constituted culture and history, but in each case the only means of explaining it was in terms of the historical particulars of the culture itself.