The subject matter of Social Anthropology, human societies, with special reference to primitive societies, has been a field of philosophic speculation from the earliest times. It has only very recently become a field of scientific inquiry; so recently that Sir Edward Tylor is sometimes spoken of as ‘the father of anthropology’. Tylor defined the scope of his inquiry in his classical work, Primitive Culture (1871) as culture or civilization taken in its widest ethnographic sense, a definition which excludes what the rest of Europe calls anthropology and what in England is sometimes called physical anthropology: the study of racial characteristics, genetics, and so forth. But it covers what is generally called today in England social anthropology, or the sociology of primitive peoples. Tylor was himself the first occupant of a university post in the subject, from 1883 at Oxford.

Social anthropology is therefore still a very young discipline, hardly yet accepted as one of themselves by the august natural sciences. It has, however, taken the first step towards qualifying as a science by becoming inductive. The earlier social anthropologists were what are sometimes called ‘arm-chair’ anthropologists. When they wrote about primitive peoples they relied for the material from which they constructed their theories not on their own observations but on the reports of missionaries, administrative officers, and travellers. Sir James Frazer’s monumental The Golden Bough is one of the best examples of this kind of work—polished, erudite, comprehensive, and occasionally profound. Such writings suffered, in the eyes of men of science, from a serious defect.