The 19th century social anthropologists were greatly influenced by the findings of Darwin and his associates. The biological evolutionists established that the origin of man has passed through several stages from Homo sapiens to apes. Darwinism promoted Social Darwinism.
The anthropologists following the logic of Darwinism tried to establish the origin of social institutions. It would not be wrong to say that Social Darwinism prevailed throughout the 19th century and first quarter of the 20th century.
The definition of social anthropology given by Social Darwinists is a landmark in the development of this discipline. The foundations of present anthropology go back to Henry Maine’s Ancient Law (1861) and Lewis Henry Morgan’s books, including Ancient Society (1877). “Both of these authors developed theories of primitive society which were to wield influence far into the 20th century.
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Maine, who had worked in India, proposed a distinction between status and contract societies, a conceptual pair which is reminiscent of many later distinctions between ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ societies.
In status- based or traditional societies, Maine argued, kinship was usually crucial in determining one’s position in society; in contract-based societies, on the contrary, it would rather be the individual achievements of persons that provided them with their positions.”
The contribution by Morgan to early anthropology was, however, a beginning of the theory of social evolution. The theory says that anthropology studies the human society which has passed through the stages of savagery, barbarism and civilization. At the savagery stage human beings had an economy characterized by subsistence.
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Man earned his livelihood through hunting and food gathering. At the stage of barbarism agriculture and animal husbandry were the sources of living while those societies which reached the stage of civilization, developed literacy, technology, industry and the state.
The theory expounded by Morgan was one; there were other theories too; for instance, Westermark set out the theory of human marriage; Brifault propounded the theory of family.
What we intend to conclude here is that there was a team of evolutionists which established theories of culture, including religion and other fields of social anthropology.
These evolutionists included W.H.R. Rivers, Tylor, Frazer, William James, A.C. Haddon and Charles Seligman. All these early social anthropologists defined social anthropology as a science of social evolution.
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In other words, social anthropology studies the origin and evolution of social institutions such as society, religion, marriage, kinship and so on.