What kinds of questions did anthropologists hope to answer with their comparative method? They wanted to trace the development of institutions, such as replacement of the practice of tracing descent from the mother by the supposedly superior practice of tracing descent from the father. Consider what was arguably the single most important article published by E.B. Tylor, whose appointment as Reader in Anthropology at Oxford in 1884 (the first such position in Britain)^[30] represented a decisive shift toward the professionalization of the subject. Published in 1888, Tylor’s article, “On a Method of Investigating the Development of Institutions, Applied to Laws of Marriage and Descent”, used information gathered about societies all over the world, to which societies Tylor assigned grades on a unilinear scale of evolution, analyzing data with a method he called adhesions” (which we would call “correlations”). Tylor thought he could thus determine how transitions from one stage of evolution to another were effected; his most notable finding was that the practice of couvade — in which the father of a child apparently suffers birth pangs during the course of its birth, and is sympathetically attended — denoted progress toward creation of family structures in which fathers assumed their appropriate responsibilities.^[31]

Anthropologists also wanted to determine what relationship obtained between the biological and social development of the human species. Consider the resolution of the problem first raised in 1858 by William Gladstone, the future prime minister: How should one interpret the recurrent use of such descriptions as “wine-dark sea” in Homer? Perhaps it was legitimate to analogize ancient Greeks to contemporary primitives — to assume that all populations negotiated an identical course of biological as well as social development, and that the ancient Greeks’ perceptual sensibilities had not yet matured to the degree observed among modern peoples. Perhaps ancient Greeks really could not distinguish between the colours of the sea and of wine, a conjecture supposedly confirmed by babies’ apparent initial preference for red over blue (remember that the development of babies’ sensibilities supposedly recapitulated the maturation pattern of the entire human species). This argument was not discredited until W.H.R. Rivers put it to empirical test during the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, which was organized by the man who would occupy Cambridge University’s first position in sociocultural anthropology, A.C. Haddon.^[32] The Torres Straits expedition was the first venture to take British scientists into the field to do their own anthropological research, and it afforded Rivers the opportunity to observe that the islanders had no difficulty seeing blue — although it was not their favourite colour.^[33]

Or, anthropologists wanted to use empirical evidence to chart the emergence of superior morality and spirituality — and to compel recognition of “survivals” of earlier, irrational and immoral times — “survivals” which could then be deliberately eliminated. Theirs was anthropology as the “reformer’s science”, as E.B. Tylor often spoke of it. And self-understanding and consequent self-conscious reform was J.G. Frazer’s objective when he disseminated his interpretation of Baldwin Spencer and F.J. Gillen’s 1899 classic Native Tribes of Central Australia — Australia’s pioneering contribution to the development of anthropological field-research method — even though, as it happened, he disagreed with Tylor in his interpretation of Spencer and Gillen’s findings. Understanding Arrernte ignorance of the facts of procreation and their totem ceremonies to be analogous to Christian belief in the virgin birth of Jesus and the ceremony of the Eucharist, Frazer believed that he had exposed survivals of truly primitive habits, persisting in what was a supposedly rational age.^[34] I will shortly return to consideration of the international anthropological controversy that Frazer’s views provoked.

Clearly, the unilinear evolutionist model that relied on the comparative method was not really historical but historicist — or, at least, historicist in the pejorative sense. Cross-cultural research was used by anthropologists to document the assumption that differences between societies were matters of degree rather than of kind; that some societies had simply advanced further along the teleological trajectory of human progress than others. Why was this research mode abandoned? It would be easy to say that anthropologists dismissed their model and method rationally because these were proven defective. Reasoned judgement was not irrelevant to intellectual change, but we should briefly pause in our consideration of anthropology’s paradigm shift to ask, “Compared to what?”

Consider the case of economists, political scientists and sociologists who have attempted to formulate guidelines for modernizing non-western societies. Among these, the recapitulation hypothesis remained respectable for roughly half a century longer than it did for anthropologists. In fact, one could say that anthropology differentiated itself from other social science disciplines by being first on the mark to reject this hypothesis — and that “modernization” theory ceased to be respectable as much in consequence of ridicule animated by political concerns as anything else.^[35] Or consider the contemporary primatologists whose projects represent a residue of the objective that anthropologists abandoned when they jettisoned the recapitulation hypothesis — scientists who imagine that they can reconstruct the behaviour of earliest humankind on the basis of their observations, divided though they may be by certain disputes. Which particular primate species constitutes the best prototype of humans’ ancestors? What sorts of observations are reliable — in the laboratory or in the field? If the observer is in the field, should she make the ground her vantage point or can she see natural behaviour while being an intrusive presence perched in a Land Rover? Where is the demarcation boundary between humans and other primates if the latter can be taught to communicate in some form of language? Likewise, what does it mean to be human if primates have been tool-users and have even developed culture?^[36] The historian of nineteenth-century anthropology feels weary as she watches intellectual history repeating itself among primatologists.