Introduction

This book is the first comprehensive study of Westermarckian sociology and social anthropology. Edward Westermarck, a world-famous scholar in his time, was Britain’s first Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and the founder of Finnish sociology. At the turn of the twentieth century, a school formed around Westermarck in Finland. Many of his followers became internationally renowned scholars, and the Westermarckian school dominated Finnish social sciences until the Second World War. The book examines the theoretical and methodological starting points and different manifestations of the Westermarckian tradition. In particular, the book deals with ‘origin’ as the core concept of the Westermarckian school. Westermarck and his disciples studied the origins of social phenomena. By origins, they meant the causes of social phenomena. In their view, social phenomena arise from a combination of biological, psychological, and social factors. Westermarck and his students were also pioneers of ethnographic fieldwork. In addition to Westermarck, the main characters of this book are aesthetics researcher Yrjö Hirn, anthropologist and scholar in comparative religion Rafael Karsten, sociologist and researcher of social inequality Gunnar Landtman, anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who was Westermarck’s closest student at LSE, and anthropologist Hilma Granqvist. Westermarck conducted extensive fieldwork in Morocco, Karsten in South America, Landtman in Papua New Guinea, and Granqvist in Palestine. The Westermarckian tradition forms an important but neglected part of classical sociology and twentieth-century European sociology and social anthropology.