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The Rise of Anthropology in Britain, 1830–1898

The field of study that became British anthropology arose on the fringes of a scholarly world that
regarded other topics as far more important and interesting than the study of human social and cultural
diversity. It faced an academic establishment that seems to have been most reluctant to welcome it as a
bona fide discipline within the range of academic specialties worth pursuing in scholarly institutions.
Under such circumstances, an account of the British tradition of anthropology cannot be restricted to an
internal story of scholars wrestling each other over intellectual ideas, innovations, and orthodoxies: we
must also take account of the interests and prejudices that prevailed in the larger society, to which these
scholars had to accommodate, and of the particular organizations and resources in academic life that
were available to them as the means of pursuing their goals.

Of course, much of British academia suffered under similar constraints. The small number of
universities catered to the sons of the upper classes and were designed to provide them with a few years
of culture and education before sending them on into the practical world. To the extent that curricula in
the humanities looked beyond British topics, their focus was overwhelmingly on the Greco-Roman
tradition, as part of a conscious effort to make that tradition foundational to British thought and
civilization. Other scholarly specialties were pursued only as sidelines by the dons of these subjects or as
hobbies by persons of independent income.

Inevitably, Britain’s role in exploration, overseas trade, and colonial expansion during the nineteenth
century led to a growing scholarly and public curiosity and interest in more global knowledge.
Geography, zoology, and botany were in due course developed into the generalizing traditions of
academic scholarship of the naturalists, and they produced epochal intellectual achievements, such as the
theory of evolution. Similar developments did no take place in the humanities. Scholarship regarding the
societies, languages, and cultures of the peoples of the growing empire and beyond its boundaries was
pursued sparingly and in the particularizing mode of Orientalism, and outstanding studies such as E. W.
Lane’s An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836) and the honorable
Mountstuart Elphinstone’s An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul (1839/1972) failed to converge into a
generalizing perspective that could become anthropology. While there was a large public market for
serious travel literature, travel authors looked to history and geography for their wider perspective, and
the lives of “savages” did not receive much serious attention.

Instead, the field that was to become anthropology arose out of the concerns of compassionate activists
who were linked to a distinctive circle in British society: that of Nonconformists and especially Quaker
philanthropists. The following discussion of the emergence of British anthropology leans heavily on a
detailed and perceptive article by George W. Stocking Jr. On the origins of the Royal Anthropological
Institute (1971). For a rich and detailed account of the whole period, see Stocking 1987.

Political figures among the Nonconformist and Quaker activists led the campaign against the African
slave trade and the legality of the institution of slavery in the British colonies. When the abolition of
slavery was achieved in 1833, this same group took up the situation of native populations in South
Africa by spearheading the establishment of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aborigines and
subsequently forming the Aborigines Protection Society, with the motto ab uno sanguine—“of one
blood.” The goals of the society arose from the gross disparity its founders saw between Britons’
behavior at home and their behavior overseas, that is, between the devotion to civil freedom and moral
and intellectual improvement in England, and the “injuries we have inflicted, the oppression we have
exercised, the cruelties we have committed, the vices we have fostered, the desolation and utter ruin we
have caused” in colonial areas (Aborigines Protection Society 1837).
The Aborigines Protection Society provided the first forum for discussions and publications in which
“authentic information concerning the character, habits and wants of the uncivilized tribes” (Aborigines
Protection Society 1837, 4) was compiled and systematized, and thus the first point of growth for an
anthropological perspective. Though the members shared the humanitarian sentiments, tensions emerged
between those more strongly committed to evangelism as the self-evident course for the betterment of
aborigines, and those who would give greater priority to the task of studying the aboriginal populations.
This soon led to the separate establishment in 1844 of the Ethnological Society of London, with a full-
fledged scholarly program to “inquire into distinguishing characteristics, physical and moral, of the
varieties of Mankind which inhabit, or have inhabited, the Earth [and] ascertain the causes of such
characteristics.”

Though its membership was miniscule (it had declined to thirty-eight paying members by 1858); the
society became a very contentious arena. Its core constituency was led by Thomas Hodgkin (1798–1866)
and James Cowles Prichard (1786–1848), both Quakers who claimed as the premise for their moral and
philosophical position the unity of blood embracing all of humankind, and who favored as the
explanation for human diversity the effects of environmental differences. Others, both within and outside
of the society, focused more on the anatomical differences between racial groups, and, influenced by
some contemporary currents in French and German thought, they argued for the “diversitarian,” that is,
polygenistic, character of mankind and regarded racial differences as the cause of human cultural and
moral diversity.

This diversitarian position was favored by James Hunt (1833–1869), a mercurial speech therapist who
was made secretary of the society in 1860. Hunt pursued his racist views with energy and rancor, and in
1863 he broke out with his faction to found the separate Anthropological Society of London. Having
articulated their diversitarian position before the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, these
anthropologists shortly found themselves in opposition both to the humanitarian ethnologists and to the
new Darwinians, who conceived of a single origin for the human species. Within two years, Hunt
claimed more than five hundred members for his new anthropological society and had embarked on a
career in which he pursued his polemics; cultivated flamboyant and notorious public figures like Sir
Richard Burton, the scholar-explorer of African and Arabian fame and translator of sexually explicit
Oriental texts; and formed a dinner circle with his partisans under the name The Cannibal Club. Through
such antics, Hunt brought about an improbable alliance between the humanitarian ethnologists and the
Darwinians, but it was touch and go whether he or they would prevail until 1871, when the alliance was
victorious under the leadership of Thomas Huxley—and then only because of Huxley’s adroit maneuver
of co-opting the term anthropology and incorporating it into the name of the unified organization, now
called the Royal Anthropological Institute.

The significance of this contorted microhistory should not be underestimated. Through it the
humanitarian ideology of the founders of the antislavery movement and the Aborigines Protection
Society and the premise of the unity of humankind were made foundational to the emerging discipline of
anthropology; racist explanations of cultural differences had become compromised. Though not
sufficient to secure a total and definitive rejection of racist ideas, James Hunt’s excesses were long
remembered in the Royal Anthropological Institute.

The scholarly achievements of this early generation of ethnologists were insignificant, but their ideology
and perspective provided an enduring platform for British anthropology through their articulation by
Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917). Tylor, the son of a Quaker businessman, was of the same class and
ideology as the founders of the Ethnological Society of London. Because he had symptoms of
consumption when he was a young man,Tylor was given a modest life pension by his family and was
thus free to travel and study, joining the ranks of other enlightened amateurs and scholars. To improve
his health he traveled extensively for a while in Mexico, where he was impressed by the cultural richness
of native civilization. On his return to England he read widely and assimilated the many new impulses
circulating in English
intellectual life at the time, and he published an account of his Mexican travels. In 1862 he started to
attend the meetings of the Ethnological Society, which drew archaeologists as well as ethnographers.
Struck by the parallels between the tools of “savages” and the lithic industries that were being unearthed
in Europe, and influenced by the surrounding climate of social evolutionary thought predating Darwin,
members of the society speculated on the resemblance between contemporary “savages” and the lost
races of primitive humanity. From this emerged a vision of the potential and global importance of
systematic scholarship on “savages” that gave early anthropology as a discipline its defining topic.

With a small handful of likeminded scholars, Tylor proceeded to work out the issues and concepts for
the new discipline and gave them a coherent formulation in his influential Primitive Culture (1871). Of
greatest importance was his explicit premise of “the psychic unity of man”—a felicitously polysemous
transformation of the ethnologists’ abolitionist and humanitarian commitment to the equality and moral
value of all of humankind. It introduced into anthropology a relativism with which to temper Victorian
ethnocentrism.

In Tylor’s hands the premise of psychic unity was the key to a reconstruction of the reflections that may
have led primitive humans and contemporary “savage” people to develop the beliefs and insights they
embraced. In the formulation of Andrew Lang, Tylor’s junior and associate, the customs of other
peoples could be seen as the product of reason like our own, working with knowledge imperfectly
apprehended, and under stress of needs that it was the scholar’s task to discover. Tylor saw this
panhuman reasoning capacity as the motor that could generate the gradual change and overall progress
he observed in human history. Finally, the premise of psychic unity may have fixed in anthropological
thought the expectation of intellectual accessibility and resonance between anthropological scholars and
“savage” populations that
was later to come to fruition in the practices of participant fieldwork.

On this philosophical basis Tylor proceeded to specify the anthropologist’s object: culture. “Culture, or
civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge,
belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of
society” (Tylor 1871, 2:1). This definition provided the foundations for the work of the first generation
of British anthropologists.

Tylor sought to lay out a number of explicit methodological concerns. The first step in the study of
civilization, he stated, requires that one fragment culture into its details and then classify these into their
proper groups; this was an analytical procedure for comparative work. But what kind of elements should
the scholar divide the object into? The “proper groups” Tylor envisaged had to do with uses and implicit
functions. His was an apparently circular operation whereby the culture that was defined as an
assemblage of institutions and customs was again disassembled into elements like those that composed
the definition.

Only by establishing these groups, Tylor argued, is the scholar able to compare like with like and thus
identify variations in cultural forms. To make sense of this claim, one clearly needs to introduce a
premise that remains unstated: that the culture one analyzes in each particular case is a manifestation
found in a particular place; it represents what is acquired by man as a member of a local society. The
diffuse singular of culture and society in Tylor’s definition facilitated his synthetic and evolutionary
vision of human history, but it mystifies somewhat Tylor’s ethnological ambition, which hinged on
“adhesions” and “survivals” in particular local cultures. Thus Tylor’s next step was to invite the analyst
to search for adhesions in the properly classified materials— a discovery procedure to find empirical
linkages between distinct cultural features that go together in the sense of regularly forming a syndrome
in their local co-occurrences among peoples. But Tylor’s concept of culture lacks clarity on the issue of
the possible nature of linkage and integration among the different elements of culture, as on the question
of cultural or social entities and boundaries. Lacking such perspectives, Tylor and his contemporaries
felt unconstrained by any idea of structure and would compare cultural features or traits without
reference to their context.

Discovering adherences or linkages was a step of analysis for which Tylor used global data, most
famously in comparative tables showing the presence or absence of various institutions and customs
among 350 different peoples. Tylor saw the empirical linkages as evidence of either general laws of
human reason and association, or particular historical connections. These two alternative explanatory
frames have persisted in the guise of “independent invention” and “diffusion” in the distributional
studies of cultural anthropologists for almost one hundred years.

Finally, Tylor sought to bring order to the analysis of culture by means of his concept of “survivals,”
cultural features that were once useful and reasonable but have since persisted beyond their time through
human habit or inertia. Thus many customs and superstitions of European peasants could be understood
as evidence of past culture, just as the culture of surviving groups of supposedly less developed races
could provide evidence of the prehistoric culture of primitive people—evidence from which the
evolutionary stages of culture could be discovered.

Tylor’s main substantive interest was in the sources and evolution of religious beliefs. Having lost his
Quaker faith, he wished to demonstrate that religious belief did not arise from divine revelation, but was
the product of people’s own efforts to understand and explain the world. For this purpose comparative
materials from earlier stages of cultural evolution were of particular value. As Tylor wrote in a flippant
moment: “Theologians all to expose—/ ’Tis the mission of Primitive Man.” He developed the concept of
animism to describe the earliest and most basic form of religion, explaining that it arose from the “crude
but reasonable” primitive idea that other bodies were animated by a life analogous to one’s own, which
extended to lower animals, trees, and even material objects. Two further sources of reflection by
primitive man would be dreams and the sudden departure of life at death, spawning ideas of a ghost/soul.
A wide range of reported ethnographic evidence was interpreted in these terms, and a logical sequence
leading from the first inklings of animism to fully developed monotheistic religions was constructed.

Other scholars, working with similar speculative methods, pursued other paths. John F. McLennan
(1827–1881), a Scottish lawyer, focused on the evolution of marriage and also developed a theory of
how rituals arose from survivals. Thus, for example, the ceremonial enactment of bride capture as part of
the marriage ritual—as was reported from various parts of the world— reflected a former practice under
primitive conditions of indeed obtaining wives by capturing them. His Primitive Marriage (1865) laid
out a scheme of development from primitive promiscuity, through group marriage and polygamy, to
monogamy, and sought to construct by logic and functional reasoning a plausible stepwise course of
such a development. Others, such as Andrew Lang (1844–1912), a classical scholar who supported
himself by writing for the educated public, delved into interpretations of folklore and myth with similar
method and purpose. The most famous of them all was no doubt Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941),
a classical scholar who held a fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, and spent his life compiling and
abridging his thirteen-volume study of magic and religion named The Golden Bough. The work of this
period in British anthropology has a number of shared features. It is all based on written sources, not
direct field observation, conforming to the pattern set by the scholars of classics and history. Its
questions were all conceived as questions of origins and gradual development, of the reconstruction of
human history without or before the presence of documents.

Its explanations remained trivial, since they could very rarely be falsified or demonstrated by factual
data on the past and could therefore depend only on the inherent force of plausibility for their support.
Yet the glimpses into a distant past and the exotic distant places these explanations presented must have
held a strong appeal to many. Indeed, anthropological titans of the following generations, such as
Bronislaw Malinowski and Claude Levi-Strauss, have borne witness to how their reading of The Golden
Bough—perhaps the most vacuous work of them all, but frequently regarded as a model of graceful
writing— was a major inspiration to them when they first encountered it as students. The contributions
of Tylor’s generation of anthropologists were nonetheless of clear significance to the development of
anthropology as a discipline. First, these writers started documenting for the first time the staggering
diversity of customs and institutions practiced by groups of human beings living in the nineteenth
century—a body of facts with enormous potential and philosophical and moral implications that still
seem to me inexplicably unrealized or underexploited. Second, they started developing a descriptive
terminology for some parts of this diversity, with technical terms like animism, exogamy, matriliny,
totemism, taboo, and so on—representing a set of concepts that anthropologists have continued to use
and have critiqued and expanded ever since.

Evolutionist British anthropologists read widely and exchanged ideas with cognate German, American,
and French scholars. Their discussions and disagreements were remarkably acrimonious—perhaps
precisely because their explanatory ideas were so flimsy and so often led them to construct entirely
different accounts. Tylor’s leading position among them may have been won by his exceptional
reasonableness and decorum as much as it arose from the profundity of his scholarship. His Primitive
Culture, nonetheless, was judged of a quality to lead to his election as a fellow of the Royal Society and
in due course to a professorship at Oxford in 1896 and to knighthood in 1912. But well before that time,
sadly, an early senescence seems to have reduced both his vitality and his effective influence. Despite
his high reputation he never had significant relationships with students or junior colleagues. Throughout
the entire period, anthropology as a whole remained remarkably fragmented and disorganized
institutionally, with the meetings and journals of the Royal Anthropological Institute as the only
significant institutional forum for the practice of anthropology as a discipline.

Tylor and his cohort shared concepts, methodological concerns, and logical standards, but though they
were critical and searching in their scholarly mode, they seem to have felt only a vague disquiet over the
secondhand nature of the ethnographic data on which they relied. The only remedy they sought on that
count took the form of a Royal Anthropological Institute publication: Notes and Queries on
Anthropology, for the Use of Travellers and Residents in Uncivilized Lands, the first edition of which
appeared in 1874. Tylor was an influential member of the editorial committee, which hoped that by
making such a publication available to interested explorers, missionaries, and administrators in the
empire it might bring about improvement in the scientific quality of what they reported. Since the
publication of that first version Notes and Queries has been repeatedly revised and republished, and in
due course it has served apprentice anthropologists as a guide during fieldwork. But the generation of
Tylor remained entirely what later British anthropologists have disdainfully referred to as armchair
anthropologists.