ABSTRACT
The anthropological collections of the Pitt River Museum at Oxford feature a kantele, a Finnish folk instrument procured by Edward Westermarck for the museum in 1893. Edward Burnett Tylor, then already a recognised authority on social anthropology, had helped Westermarck publish and gain visibility for his early work on human marriage, and during his visit to Oxford in 1893 Westermarck met with him as a matter of course. Tylor was an important champion of the early paradigm of Victorian social anthropology known as the comparative method. At the heart of the comparative method lay the idea that the cultural evolution of humankind could be followed by tracing the development of specific cultural traits or ideas. Westermarck's discussion of 'homosexual love' follows the organising principle of The Pitt River Museum glass cases. From his work elsewhere, it appears that Westermarck was not completely foreign to arguments of the kind that Peter Winch would later use against Vilfredo Pareto.
