History and Ethnology (Classic Reprint)

Download or read book History and Ethnology (Classic Reprint) written by W. H. R. Rivers and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from History and Ethnology IT is the aim of this essay to show the importance of ethnology, and especially of recent develop ments of that science, to history. During the last ten years there has been in progress, rudely hindered but not stopped by the war, a movement which has brought the two disciplines into much closer relationship than would have been possible under the conditions which guided the study of ethnology twenty or thirty years ago. At this more remote period anthropology - I use the term anthropology advisedly - was wholly under the dominance of a crude evolutionary standpoint. The aim of the anthropologist was to work out a scheme of human progress according to which language, social organisation, religion, and material arts had developed through the action of certain principles or laws. It was assumed that the manifold peoples of the earth represented stages in this process of evolution, and it was supposed that by the comparative study of the culture of these different peoples it would be possible to formulate the laws by which the process of evolu tion had been directed and governed. It was. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.