Abstract

ANDREW LANG was a heretic, who thought he deserved to be an outcast from 'the church anthropological' of Tylor, Huxley, and their congeners.' But he was also a profound and, in senses which we shall examine, an original man, and a scholar of great capacity, energy, critical acuity, and vision,2 who was a rationalist about the rationalism of those whom he called his masters.3 Lang thought that literary criticism, of which he wrote much,4 consisted in the main of telling other people what he thought about the works which he was asked to review or about which he felt like writing.5 The pleasure of reading and of writing such reviews and articles and the profit to be derived from them was to be found in discovering what someone with whom one was in intellectual sympathy-or not, as the case may have been-thought about what one was reading, and by seeing how far that thought coincided with or should modify one's own views. It is only appropriate and fair that we should approach Lang's work in a similarly open-minded way, looking more for what can be got out of it than for reasons to justify us in not paying it the attention which any writer of his stature6 can expect from his readers. To assess what Lang has to say in this sense involves tracing his anthropological thought and locating, where we can, shifts which occurred in it between his first major social anthropological work, Custom and Myth,7 and his later works, which culminated in 'Totemism,' a large book which remained unpublished when Lang died in 1912, and which has still not been put into print.8 To put Lang's work back to where it orginated, we shall also take note of some of the theories and interpretations with which he took issue. We shall see that Lang was not alone in the kinds of criticisms he made of most of the views and opinions which were contemporary with his, nor in the alternative solutions which with indefatigable vigour he proposed. For the most part, though, those who supported Lang's approach to social facts, and especially to the new information which was emerging from Australia at around the turn of the century,9 are as long forgotten, or at least most usually disregarded, as Lang himself is now.? This essay, then, has three main aims: to reintroduce Andrew Lang to the anthropological scene; to assess his work; and to show that we can profit from what Lang had to say, for some of the questions being asked in social anthropology these days are questions in a tradition of which he was an important, but quite unjustly neglected, part.

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