ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the increasingly dominant AngloAmerican anthropology was challenged by a distinctive German ethnological tradition. The Anglo-American school was ‘evolutionist’. All societies passed through the same stages, driven by an internal dynamic of change. The Germans preferred particularist histories of ethnic groups. Changes came through contacts between peoples as they rubbed up against each other, borrowing ideas and reacting against them. These two anthropologies first confronted each other not in Europe but in the United States, where Franz Boas and his students challenged the theories of Lewis Henry Morgan.
