ABSTRACT

This chapter provides an overview of the birth of anthropology as a discipline. Shifts and distinctions that are seen as profoundly theoretical were made initially in terms of anthropology method. This commonality becomes even more evident by contrast to the conceptual break introduced by mid-century French structuralism, which mounted a full-scale attack against the organic analogy and proposed a radically different way of imagining the objects of anthropological study. The key to understanding both the anthropological evolutionism and its later critics is to note that despite its name, what is usually remembered today as 19th-century anthropological 'evolutionism' was not in any straightforward sense, an offshoot of the work of Charles Darwin. The chapter describes a specific case because it exhibits some of the key failings of 19th-century evolutionist theorising, yet nevertheless displays the sophistication of some of the best thinkers of the period.