Question

Please read the following passage.

In the late nineteenth century, ethnographic museum exhibits in the United States and Europe were overwhelmingly organized according to a "typological" paradigm. Rooted in the dominant anthropological theory of unilineal cultural evolution—which posited that all human societies progress through identical stages of development from savagery to civilization—typological displays grouped artifacts by their function or form, regardless of their origin. A museum visitor would thus see an exhibit of musical instruments or basketry from disparate cultures placed side by side. This arrangement was not merely aesthetic; it was inherently pedagogical, designed to illustrate the purported universal trajectory of human technological and cognitive advancement, effectively stripping individual artifacts of their specific historical and cultural contexts.

The foremost challenge to this organizational philosophy was articulated by anthropologist Franz Boas in the late 1880s. Boas vehemently rejected the unilineal model, arguing that similarities between artifacts from different cultures did not necessarily indicate a shared stage of evolutionary development, but could instead result from distinct historical trajectories or environmental adaptations. Consequently, Boas argued that the typological method of curation was fundamentally misleading. He proposed a "historical" or "geographical" approach, insisting that artifacts must be exhibited exclusively alongside other items from the same culture. Only through this contextualization, Boas contended, could a museum accurately reflect the unique history and internal logic of a specific society.

Boas’s methodological critique, however, met with formidable institutional resistance, most notably from Otis T. Mason, a prominent curator at the Smithsonian Institution. Mason defended the typological approach by appealing to the concept of independent invention. He maintained that the human mind functions similarly across different environments; therefore, similar environmental challenges would inevitably produce similar technological solutions. For Mason, organizing artifacts by culture obscured the overarching narrative of human ingenuity and the biological unity of the species. Thus, he viewed the typological display not as an erasure of context, but as the illumination of a deeper, universal law of human development.

Ultimately, the debate between Boas and Mason extended far beyond museum curation, striking at the very epistemological foundations of anthropology. By the early twentieth century, as extensive ethnographic fieldwork became the discipline's standard, the Boasian emphasis on cultural particularism gained ascendancy. The shift toward geographical displays in museums both mirrored and catalyzed this broader theoretical transformation. Artifacts were no longer viewed as mere data points on a predetermined evolutionary timeline, but as complex expressions of unique cultural histories, a perspective that decisively established cultural relativism as the guiding principle of modern anthropology.

Based on the passage, arrange the following statements to accurately reflect the sequential, paragraph-by-paragraph progression of the author's logical structure.