Rockefeller Archive Center

Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports are created by recipients of research travel stipends and by many others who have conducted research at the RAC. The reports demonstrate the breadth of the RAC's archival holdings, particularly in the study of philanthropy and its effects. Read more about the history of philanthropy at resource.rockarch.org. Also, see the RAC Bibliography of Scholarship, a comprehensive online database of publications citing RAC archival collections.

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British anthropology and the idea of the 'primitive society' , c. 1920-1970

January 1, 2016

My PhD thesis is a study of British social anthropology. It is told through shifting concepts of the 'primitive society' between the 1920s and the 1970s. Broadly speaking, academic anthropologists in Britain ceased to see 'primitives' as evolutionarily backward and increasingly began to relativize concepts of culture and society. Despite this general shift in social scientific discourse, anthropologists' ideas about the 'primitive' were often conceptually incoherent. Was a "primitive society", James Ferguson asks, "Pre-industrial? Pre-literate? Pre-modern? Pre-westernized? Pre-complex-organization?" Social anthropologists in the British tradition were supposed to be post-evolutionist but their discussions of the relative 'primitivity' of their subjects point to the latent assumptions of development nested within their functionalism. These tensions between relativism and evolutionism are explored in the five main chapters of my thesis.

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