 Since the object of study of anthropologists is different from the object of study of physicists, he assumed that anthropologists would have to employ different methods and different criteria for evaluating their research.Thus, Boas used statistical studies to demonstrate the extent to which variation in data is context-dependent, and argued that the context-dependent nature of human variation rendered many abstractions and generalizations that had been passing as scientific understandings of humankind (especially theories of social evolution popular at the time) in fact unscientific.His understanding of ethnographic fieldwork began with the fact that the objects of ethnographic study (e.g.,  the Inuit of Baffin Island) were not just objects, but subjects, and his research called attention to their creativity and agency.