490 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION II. 



Section H.— ANTHROPOLOGY. 

 President of the Section. — W. H. R. Rivers, M.P., F.R.S. 



THURSDAY, AUGUST 31. 



The President delivered the following Address :— 



The Ethnological Analysis of Culture. 



During the last few years great additions have been made to our store of the 

 facts of anthropology — we have learnt much about different peoples scattered 

 over the earth and we understand better how they act and think. At the same 

 time we have, I hope, made a very decided advance in our knowledge of the 

 methods by means of which these facts are to be collected, so that they may 

 rank in clearness and trustworthiness with the facts of other sciences. When, 

 however, we turn to the theoretical side of our subject, it is difficult to see any 

 corresponding advance. The main problems of the history of human society are 

 little if at all nearer their solution, and there are even matters which a few 

 years ago were regarded as settled which are to-day as uncertain as ever. The 

 reason for this is not far to seek ; it is that we have no general agreement about 

 the fundamental principles upon which the theoretical work of our science is 

 to be conducted. 



In surveying the different schools of thought which guide theoretical work on 

 human culture, a very striking fact at once presents itself. In other and more ad- 

 vanced sciences the guiding principles of the workers of different nations are the 

 same. The zoologists or botanists of France, Germany, America, our own and 

 other countries are on common ground. They have in general the same prin- 

 ciples and the same methods, and the work of all falls into a common scheme. 

 Unfortunately this is not so in anthropology. At the present time there is so 

 great a degree of divergence between the methods of work of the leading schools 

 of different countries that any common scheme is impossible, and the members 

 of one school wholly distrust the work of others whose conclusions they believe 

 to be founded on a radically unsound basis. 



I propose to consider in this Address one of the most striking of these diver- 

 gences, but, before doing so, I will put as briefly as possible what seem to me to 

 be the chief characters of the leading schools of different countries. To begin 

 with that dominant among ourselves. The theoretical anthropology of this 

 country is inspired primarily by the idea of evolution founded on a psychology 

 common to mankind as a whole, and further, a psychology differing in no way 

 from that of civilised man. The efforts of British anthropologists are devoted to 

 tracing out the evolution of custom and institution. Where similarities are 

 found in different parts of the world it is assumed, almost as an axiom, that 

 they are due to independent origin and development, and this in its turn is 



