ABSTRACT
The beginnings of anthropology and ethnology are many and various; thinkers such as Rousseau, Ferguson and Desmoulin, as well as Herder, Edwards, Pritchard, Virchow, Lyell and Darwin, are all associated with the discipline’s earliest development. And this is no arbitrary list of names. It was Herder who created the genre of Volkskunde, and from it Völkerkunde. Volkskunde (science of the nation (cf. p. 41)) looks only at the popular traditions and cultural practices of the Germanic peoples, their Kultur (a term he ‘introduced into modern discourse’ (Kuper, 1999: 31)), whereas Völkerkunde is a form of geographical ethnology. Pritchard, Edwards and Virchow were the founders of the first British, French and German ethnological societies respectively. Finally, in a work aimed at students, an introduction to what Kroeber has called ‘the prodigious decade’ (1861–1871) would be incomplete without a reminder of the role of Darwin, or indeed without some mention of Lyell and, in his wake, the establishment of geology as the precondition of evolutionist ideas.
