ONCE AGAIN ON THE FORMATIVE STAGE OF ANTHROPOLOGY: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE NOTION OF HISTORY

Abstract

Concerned with the formative period in anthropology, this article seeks to examine the its history characterised by a level of complexity that often exceeds our commonly held assumptions and underpinned by two distincit conceptions of time and social and historical development. As research shows, authors of this period have constructed their theoretical orientation on the basis of the connections they established between the genealogical model of historical development, inspired by comparative philology, and the evolutionary model drawn from the Scotish Enlightenment. The development of the linear evolutionism in the second half of the nineteenth century cannot thus simply be interpreted as a direct continuation of the Enlightenment thought. There is a problem of an evident discontinuity created, as many analysts note, by an early ethnological thought of the first half of the nineteenth century, whose genealogical model of historical development was significantly diffeerent, and it was only the transformation of the notion of history that had occurred in that period that created the possibility for adopting Victorian theories of developmental stages.