Abstract
IT is well to be reminded by such an acute critic as Dr. Schleiter that anthropology, one of the youngest of the sciences, is still in search of the one scientific method of analysing and co-ordinating the enormous mass of material which has been, and is still being, collected. The object of this book is to review the methods in use at present and to point out certain difficulties which each involves.Though in his preface the author tells us that, he has in some degree modified his iconoclastic attitude towards the comparative method, his criticism still remains sufficiently drastic. Thus he remarks that “in his immensely voluminous works” Sir James Frazer has embodied “several mutually irreconcilable types of research.” Again, the method of intensive study of a limited group of cultural facts—the Australian culture, for instance—“bristles with fallacies and insupportable pre-suppositions.” In dealing with Mana, Dr. Marett “appears to have expressed bewildering varieties of opinion on this subject.” Sir E.Tylor postulates “a single coherent and systematic view of the world, or what he repeatedly refers to as a ‘philosophy of nature.’ ” But “all ethnological evidence tends to show that no such universal systematisation of experiences has ever taken place.” In short, “ethnographical literature, as a whole, presents to us little more than groups of classifications carried out from mutually irreconcilable points of view—the advocates of the separate principles being gathered into schools which profoundly distrust each other's results.”
Religion and Culture: A Critical Survey of Methods of Approach to Religious Phenomena.
By Dr. Frederick Schleiter. Pp. x + 206. (New York: Columbia University Press; London: Humphrey Milford, 1919.) Price 8s. 6d. net.
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Religion and Culture: A Critical Survey of Methods of Approach to Religious Phenomena . Nature 105, 451 (1920). https://doi.org/10.1038/105451a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/105451a0