ABSTRACT
In the end, the critiques of Boas and Malinowski were not decisive because they could not displace the terms of reference that had been established within the anthropological tradition. There was also the accident that both Boas and Malinowski died during World War Two. In Britain, Radcliffe-Brown, Fortes and Evans-Pritchard resuscitated the ideas of Maine and Durkheim, and even of Fustel and Robertson Smith, although they purged their theories of evolutionist residues. Lévi-Strauss reanimated some features of Morgan’s kinship theory. In the USA, Leslie White, Julian Steward and G. P. Murdock revived other aspects of his programme, and they found support in the coming generation. There was a ‘band’ type of society, a ‘peasant’ type, and so on, in each of which a particular kind of technology generated appropriate forms of social and political relationship. The features that the new generation of American evolutionists emphasised were again rather traditional; kin-groups were contrasted with territorial groups, the mode of descent was regarded as crucial, and (in the more Marxist examples) particular attention was paid to the emergence of social stratification. Murdock, no Marxist, revived Tylor’s methods and Morgan’s preoccupations. These American scholars effectively continued the old tradition of American anthropology, blocking out the Boasian intervention. In effect, they deployed the prototype of primitive society as a model with which to analyse particular ethnographic cases.
