ABSTRACT
Similar to many of the social sciences, the roots of anthropology rest in the changing economic and social conditions of the nineteenth century. A combination of an industrialising and changing society, and European expansion led to the development of anthropology as an academic subject. European colonial expansion created the means for wider contact between societies, offering anthropologists the opportunity to work in colonial areas, to undertake studies of social organisation, customs and religions (McLeish, 1993). Anthropologists were therefore offered a view of the workings of preindustrial societies that contrasted with the complexity of modern industrial western societies. Early anthropologists, such as Edward Tylor, were interested in tracing everything from writing systems to the marriage practices of cultures outside Europe. However, although the origins of anthropology lay in the desire to record ways of life in small-scale technologically simple societies, it would be a mistake to assume that these societies were unchanging or always even truly isolated before their contact with the West.
