Comparative ethnography
vThis literature has been largely forgotten; few
students of prehistory make use of it. How has this occurred?
vWhen the new breed of social anthropologists
developed, principally under the influence of Malinowski at the London School
of Economics, one of their principal concerns was to discount previous types
of scholarship. They took an easy target, the Egyptological speculations of
Elliott Smith and William Perry, labelled these ‘diffusionism’ and
took these were frivolous speculations and most likely false.
vNo effort was made to actually disprove the
findings of earlier scholars; they were simply declared irrelevant to the
business at hand.
vIt is hard not to see a link with the colonial
enterprise in this sea-change; the goal had changed from making sense of
exotica sent back by missionaries to developing practical understanding of
‘native peoples’ in order that they be governed more effectively.