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GEORGE W STOCKING, JR., After Tylor. British Social Anthropology, 1888-1951. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995, xx + 570 p.
Wisconsin's decision to issue this book in paperback places it within reach of a broader audience of students and professionals. After Tylor is the product of 25 years' study and reflection by George Stocking, who almost single-handedly created and legitimized the historiography of anthropological science. Some thirty years ago, Stocking's Race, Culture and Evolution re-interpreted Tylor and rehabilitated Boas. In a canonical essay in that volume, anthropologists were cautioned about the dangers of "presentism" in assessing their past. In his masterly volume, Victorian Anthropology (1987), Stocking used the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 as a mise-en-scene for the self-confident, industrialized England that would in just a few years witness the birth of "the reformer's science."
This book begins with an intriguing essay on Tylor's famous 1888 paper, "On a Method of Investigating the Development of Institutions," which employed statistical techniques for the first time in social anthropology in order to explore, inter alia, correlations between descent rules, residence rules and avoidance practices. The paper, hardly typical of Tylor's work, recast common assumptions about the temporal priority of matriliny in a new, more "scientific" mold.
In some ways it foreshadowed later developments:...