Cultural relativism is the principle that an inividual human's beliefs and activities should be understood in terms of his or her own culture. . This principle was established as axiomatic in anthropological research by Franz Boas in the first few decades of the 20th century and later popularized by students. Boas himself did not use the term as such, but the term became common among anthropologists after Boas' death in 1942. The first use of the term was in the journal American Anthropologist in 1948; the term itself represents how Boas' students summarized their own synthesis of many of the principles Boas taught.