Trailblazers of Social Anthropology: Early Influences and Contributions

Long before sociology and anthropology became established academic disciplines, a handful of thinkers were already asking some of the most fundamental questions about human society: How do families form? Why do different cultures share strikingly similar rituals? What does the word “culture” even mean? The answers came – slowly, painstakingly – from a group of 19th-century scholars whose fieldwork, comparisons, and theories laid the very foundation of social anthropology. Their methods were imperfect, their assumptions sometimes flawed, but their contributions were undeniably transformative.

What is social anthropology and why does it matter? 🔗

Social anthropology is the systematic study of human societies – their structures, customs, beliefs, kinship systems, and cultural practices. Unlike earlier speculative philosophy about human nature, social anthropology sought to ground its claims in real evidence drawn from across the world. The pioneers discussed here were among the first to do exactly that, treating human social life as a subject worthy of scientific investigation. Their work shaped the theories and methodologies that still inform the field today.

Lewis Henry Morgan: the father of kinship studies 🔗

Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) is widely regarded as a founding figure of American anthropology. An attorney by training, Morgan’s deep interest in Native American cultures – particularly the Iroquois Confederacy of western New York – drew him away from the courtroom and into the field. With the help of Seneca scholar Ely S. Parker, he gained rare access to Haudenosaunee traditions, governance structures, and family systems. His first major work, The League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851), is considered one of the earliest objective ethnographies of a Native American group.

Kinship as a window into society 🔗

Morgan’s most enduring contribution was his systematic study of kinship terminology. After noticing that the Seneca way of designating relatives differed markedly from Anglo-American convention, Morgan conjectured that similar systems elsewhere might reveal patterns about the origins of human social organization. He embarked on a sweeping comparative study, eventually collecting data on kinship terminology across over 100 societies, which he published as Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871). This work introduced the crucial distinction between classificatory and descriptive kinship terminologies – showing that different cultures organize and name family relationships in fundamentally different ways.

The descriptive system, familiar to most Western cultures, uses specific terms for each family relationship. In English, we distinguish between “father,” “uncle,” “grandfather,” and “cousin” – each term describes a precise genealogical relationship. In contrast, classificatory systems, found in many non-Western societies, use the same term for multiple relatives – grouping together what English speakers would call distinct relations. This discovery fundamentally challenged the assumption that Western kinship categories were natural or universal.

Ancient Society and cultural evolution 🔗

Morgan’s kinship study led him to develop his theory of cultural evolution, set forth in Ancient Society (1877), where he proposed that all human societies progress through three stages: savagery, barbarism, and civilization. His major thesis was that human society evolved by changing its means of subsistence, with changes in food production serving as a major force of systemic change in human social groups as they moved from hunting and gathering to planting, and then to urban society. While this unilinear model has since been discredited for being ethnocentric and overly simplistic, his core insight – that kinship systems reflect broader patterns of social organization – remains foundational. Morgan’s emphasis on material factors in cultural evolution attracted the attention of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and his work went on to influence thinkers well beyond anthropology.

John Ferguson McLennan: marriage, exogamy, and the study of survivals 🔗

John Ferguson McLennan (1827-1881) was a Scottish lawyer and ethnologist whose ideas on cultural evolution, kinship, and the origins of religion had a lasting impact on anthropological research. Like Morgan, McLennan came to anthropology from the legal profession, bringing with him a sharp analytical mind and a passion for historical reconstruction.

Primitive Marriage and the origins of exogamy 🔗

McLennan’s landmark work, Primitive Marriage (1865), investigated the origins of marriage customs by looking at what he called “survivals” – vestigial customs in modern ritual that he believed preserved traces of earlier social practices. In this book, McLennan introduced the terms exogamy – marriage outside the group, as in bride capture between warring tribes – and endogamy – marriage within a specific group, leading to monogamy and determination of kinship through males rather than females. These two concepts became cornerstones of the anthropological study of marriage and have remained in use ever since.

McLennan ingeniously inferred the existence of exogamy from vestiges of customs that seemed to indicate the earlier practice of marriage by capture. He formed a hypothesis that in the earliest times it had been a general usage for men to obtain their wives from another group, and that marriage with a woman of their own group gradually came to be considered improper because it was unusual. He further theorized that the scarcity of women – resulting from the practice of female infanticide in early societies – drove men to seek partners from outside their own group, giving rise to exogamy as a social norm.

Totemism and the comparative method 🔗

In his study The Worship of Animals and Plants (1869-70), McLennan suggested a connection between social structures and primitive religions, and he coined the word “totemism” for the social function of primitive religion. This term proved enormously useful to later sociologists and anthropologists, including Émile Durkheim, who built extensively on the concept in his own work on religion and social solidarity. McLennan also championed the comparative method – studying customs and institutions across many cultures to identify common patterns and evolutionary sequences – which became a defining feature of 19th-century anthropological inquiry. His methodological innovation involved treating “survivals” – vestigial customs in modern law and ritual – as keys to reconstructing prehistoric social organization.

Adolf Bastian: psychic unity and the science of culture 🔗

Adolf Bastian (1826-1905) was a German polymath – trained in law, biology, and medicine – who became one of the most prolific ethnographers of the 19th century. He is best remembered today for a single powerful idea that transformed how anthropologists think about the human mind and cultural difference.

Elementary ideas and folk ideas 🔗

After decades of travel across Asia, Africa, and the Americas, Bastian observed something striking: similar themes appeared in the myths and ceremonial customs of peoples separated by thousands of miles. His answer was that all humans share the same basic ideas, universal to all people. He called these basic ideas Elementargedanken (elementary ideas), which are universal, transcultural, and transhistorical. Due to the effects of the environment, however, those elementary ideas undergo certain changes, and cultural variations emerge – resulting in what he called Völkergedanken (folk ideas).

In arguing for a “psychic unity of mankind,” Bastian proposed that the mental acts of all people everywhere on the planet are the products of physiological mechanisms characteristic of the human species. Every human mind inherits a complement of species-specific elementary ideas, and hence the minds of all people, regardless of their race or culture, operate in the same way. This was a remarkably progressive claim for the 19th century, directly challenging racial hierarchies that were widespread in European thought at the time.

Bastian’s institutional legacy 🔗

In 1873, Bastian was one of the founders and first director of the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, whose collection of ethnographic artifacts became one of the largest in the world. Among those who worked with him at the museum was a young Franz Boas, who later founded the American school of ethnology. Bastian’s concept of elementary ideas also influenced Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious, and informed the comparative mythological work of Joseph Campbell. With his ideas of multilinear cultural development, Bastian was the forerunner of the great anthropological traditions of Franz Boas, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, and Bronislaw Malinowski.

Sir Edward Burnett Tylor: defining culture for the modern world 🔗

Of all the early pioneers, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) is perhaps the most directly influential on the way we understand culture today. An English anthropologist who became the first Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oxford, Tylor brought systematic rigor to the study of cultural evolution and gave the field one of its most enduring definitions.

The definition of culture 🔗

In his landmark work Primitive Culture (1871), Tylor offered one of the earliest and clearest definitions of culture: “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.” This definition was revolutionary in two important ways. First, it treated culture as something learned and shared rather than biologically inherited. Second, it encompassed all human societies – not just Western or “civilized” ones – as legitimate subjects of study. Unlike his contemporaries, Tylor did not link biological evolution to cultural evolution, asserting that all human minds are the same irrespective of a society’s state of evolution.

Animism and the evolution of religion 🔗

Tylor reintroduced the term animism – faith in the individual soul or anima of all things and natural manifestations – into common use. According to his theory, animism emerged when early humans attempted to explain two puzzling phenomena: the difference between living and dead bodies, and the nature of experiences during dreams and trances. He argued that this belief in spirits was the earliest and most fundamental form of religious life, and that religion evolved from animism through polytheism toward monotheism as societies became more complex. While this linear model of religious evolution has been widely criticized by later scholars, it sparked decades of productive debate about the origins of belief.

The concept of survivals 🔗

One of Tylor’s most methodologically important ideas was the concept of cultural survivals. His concept of “survivals” describes archaic beliefs or practices – like superstitions – that persist in modern societies as relics of earlier stages, offering clues to cultural history. Children’s games, nursery rhymes, and folk tales often preserved elements of ancient beliefs and practices; religious ceremonies might retain symbolic elements from pre-Christian traditions, while popular superstitions could reflect earlier animistic worldviews. By identifying these cultural remnants, Tylor argued, anthropologists could effectively reconstruct the evolutionary history of human societies even without direct historical records.

Tylor’s work was critical to the recognition of anthropology as a distinct branch of science in 1884, when the British Association for the Advancement of Science admitted it as a major section of the society rather than a subset of biology. In 1896 he became Professor of Anthropology at Oxford, the first academic chair in the new discipline.

Shared themes: what these pioneers gave us 🔗

Looking across the work of Morgan, McLennan, Bastian, and Tylor, several common threads stand out. All four were committed to treating human society as an object of scientific inquiry, moving away from pure speculation toward evidence gathered from real cultures. They all worked within an evolutionary framework, believing that societies moved through stages of development – a view that later generations would rightly critique and revise. Yet their intellectual ambitions, their comparative methods, and their drive to find universal patterns in human life gave social anthropology both its foundational questions and its first serious answers.

Morgan gave anthropology the systematic study of kinship; McLennan gave it the vocabulary of marriage rules and the analytical tool of survivals; Bastian gave it the principle of psychic unity and the urgency of ethnographic collection; Tylor gave it a working definition of culture and a framework for studying religious belief. Together, they transformed what had been scattered observations about “exotic” peoples into a discipline with genuine theoretical depth. The field they helped build has since evolved far beyond their 19th-century assumptions – but it began here, with their curiosity and their questions.

What do you think? Do you find it significant that several of these founding anthropologists – Morgan, McLennan, Bastian – came from legal backgrounds rather than academic ones? And given that Tylor’s definition of culture as a “complex whole” was written over 150 years ago, how well do you think it still holds up for understanding culture in the 21st century?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lewis-Henry-Morgan
2. https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Ferguson-McLennan
3. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Adolf-Bastian
4. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-Burnett-Tylor