CLASSIFICATION In SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Much that has been said by other speakers is applicable also to Social Anthropology. This subject emerged as a distinctive academic discipline in the period 1860–65 and was the direct result of an attempt to apply the concepts of Darwinian evolution to social phenomena. The basic axioms of the subject are thus closely analogous to those of nineteenth‐century botany and zoology. Words like ‘tribe’, ‘people’, ‘society’, ‘culture’ have been confused with the more biological concept ‘race’ and have commonly been used as if they had the qualities of Linnaean ‘species’; i.e. they are assumed to denote entities which are fully discrete and self‐perpetuating, each with its own distinct evolutionary history. There is also a tacit assumption that any such entity, when recorded by the anthropologist, is in a stable condition. Given these assumptions it becomes meaningful to attempt a systematic taxonomy of entities based in some regular principle of monothetic division. Such a taxonomy will of necessity be of a pyramidal segmentary type, such as the following: