General Pitt-Rivers and the Evolutionist Anthropologists

Abstract

The twentieth-century discipline of social anthropology, with its reliance on fieldwork methodology, grew out of the work of nineteenth-century evolutionist anthropology as expounded by John Lubbock, J. F. McLennan, E. B. Tylor, and others. In this article I show how General Pitt-Rivers ignored the ideas of these writers and how his own approach thus became irrelevant to the development of social anthropology as a discipline in the United Kingdom.