ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the early challenges to Edward Westermarck's method. Westermarck saw himself as faithfully continuing the evolutionist tradition of his Victorian immediate predecessors. During the first decades of the twentieth century, however, that tradition was increasingly being questioned. Challenges came mainly from three quarters: the advocates of the geographically limited monograph as the format for anthropological research; functionalism; and psychoanalysis. Westermarck's answer to the first challenge was to go along with it and contribute substantially to it, while still retaining the ideal of the comparative synthesis as the long-term goal. Westermarck's responses to the two other challenges were characterised by polemic and rejection. During Westermarck's early career, social anthropology had not yet been clearly demarcated from the neighbouring disciplines of philosophy and psychology. The first influential criticism of Westermarck's comparative method was voiced by Durkheim in his review of The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas in 1907.
