ABSTRACT
Some anthropologists, like other folk, have tried to lengthen their pedigree and they have traced the origin of the subject far back through the centuries— indeed, as far as Herodotus. The anthropologists of the second half of the nineteenth century studied a mixed bag of subjects: skull-shapes, types of hair, folktales, the material objects of the so-called simple peoples which were beginning to be assembled in Western museums, wedding customs, magical practices, as-yet unwritten languages, and so forth and so forth. Anthropologists were then largely interested in so-called primitive societies and their customs because they saw these as representing earlier stages of civilization, antedating historical knowledge of early European society, from which there had been steady progress up to the high peak of Victorian civilization. Modern social anthropologists approach the task of explaining this wide extension of kinship relationships in a different manner. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
