ABSTRACT
Anthropologists in the nineteenth century were concerned to make sense of the odds and ends of customs drawn from accounts of peoples scattered over the world. They mostly looked at customs torn out of their context in social relations. Many modern field anthropologists have had to work without good historical records on the tribes they studied, and some had none at all. In a number of tribes they found that there was not even any history of the tribes, in our sense of 'history'. Anthropologists analyse a society as if it were in a state of equilibrium. They clearly do not mean by this that the structure of society is a set of rigid relations between fixed points, any more than Rutherford implied that the internal structure of the atom was rigid when he built a model of it out of billiard balls and wire.
