The Science of Religion in Britain, 1860-1915

Conclusion

Conclusion In 1962, the distinguished anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard delivered a series of lectures entitled ‘‘Theories of Primitive Religion’’ which included a historical survey and critical analysis of the contributions of British scholars during the period from about 1850 to the First World War. His concluding judgment was harsh: the theories themselves were as ‘‘dead as mutton,’’ and it was difficult to believe that such ‘‘inadequate, even ludicrous’’ ideas had ever commanded the attention that at one time they did. Perhaps they still retained some interest as ‘‘specimens of the thought of their time,’’ but for the contemporary working anthropologist, ‘‘it must suffice to say that there is little or nothing one can do with such theories.’’∞ The chasm that separated Evans-Pritchard from his Victorian predecessors is almost as immense as that which stood between those earlier scholars and the ‘‘quaint’’ and ‘‘exotic’’ people whose beliefs and rituals they studied. But the rupture was not new in 1962; the first fissures and breaks had begun to appear as early as the 1890s, and by 1915, they had multiplied and were spreading in every direction. On the one hand, social evolutionary doctrine and the method of survivals were coming under intolerable strain as students questioned both the explanatory adequacy of the Tylorian model and the philosophical assumptions embedded in it. At the same time, the work of Continental sociologists such Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, and Max Weber presented British scholars with concrete alternatives to the beleaguered intellectualist tradition with its reliance on an increasingly outmoded associationist psychology. Finally, Evans-Pritchard himself suggested a reason why the theories he discussed no longer carried conviction: ‘‘Religion has ceased 244 | Conclusion to occupy men’s minds in the way it did at the end of the last, and at the beginning of this century. Anthropological writers then felt that they were living at a momentous crisis in the history of thought, and that they had their part to play in it.’’≤ After World War I, those who had been troubled by a sense of religious crisis were more likely to feel themselves caught up in a general crisis of European civilization. Together, these trends radically altered what had been the Victorian science of religion, rendering it incoherent and almost unintelligible to the anthropological mind in the later twentieth century. The career of the Oxford anthropologist Robert Ranulph Marett (1866–1943) spans the period of transition and aptly illustrates a number of these transforming developments. Marett, who once described himself as ‘‘a flying buttress rather than a pillar of the Anglican Establishment,’’ was, nevertheless, much closer to that establishment than any of the other major figures in this study.≥ Born and brought up on the Island of Jersey, Marett studied philosophy at Balliol and the University of Berlin and served at Oxford, first as a philosophy tutor, later as a Reader in anthropology, and finally as rector of Exeter College. Marett, like Tylor, devoted much of his time and energy to strengthening the academic position of his discipline; he played a key role in the creation of the special diploma course in anthropology at Oxford in 1905 and also in the establishment of the Oxford Anthropological Society. He also participated enthusiastically in learned associations including the Folklore Society, which he headed as president from 1914 to 1918. Marett’s interest in anthropology was first aroused when he read works by Tylor and Lang as research for a prize essay entitled ‘‘The Ethics of Savage Races,’’ written in 1893. As early as 1897 he was reviewing books on sociology and anthropology for the Oxford Magazine, but his first original contribution to the field was the address ‘‘Pre-Animistic Religion,’’ delivered at the British Association meeting in Dover in 1899. This paper, printed in Folk-Lore in 1900 and republished in The Threshold of Religion in 1909, attracted the attention of anthropologists not only in Britain, but on the Continent as well, and the obscure young philosopher was catapulted to instant renown as the leader of a ‘‘pre-animistic school’’ bent on discrediting Tylor’s theory of animism. Marett later recalled having been more startled than anyone by this turn of events: ‘‘I scarcely recognize myself in the rôle imputed to me,’’ he confessed.∂ Indeed, while his essay contains a very incisive and telling critique of the theory of animism, it was hardly a bolt from the blue, since Lang and Robertson Smith had already undermined some key elements of the model...