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  • 7 - THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF RELIGION: BRITISH AND FRENCH SCHOOLS

  • Edited by Ninian Smart, John Clayton, Patrick Sherry, Steven T. Katz
  • Book:
    Nineteenth-Century Religious Thought in the West
    Published online:
    26 January 2010
    Print publication:
    03 October 1985, pp 215-262

  • Summary

    Nineteenth-century anthropological attitudes

    Naturally enough what nineteenth-century writers on anthropological topics thought and wrote about religion grew out of the arguments of their eighteenth-century predecessors but something of the more general anthropological background needs first to be explained.

    Anthropologists study the diversity of man considered both as animal species and as products of civilisation (culture). Since human beings everywhere show a marked proclivity for finding reasons to think themselves superior to ‘those bastards over the hill who do not even know how to talk properly’, it could be held that anthropology of a certain prejudiced sort is as old as humanity itself but, as a field of serious scholarly inquiry, it only became clearly recognisable during the latter part of the eighteenth century.