Evolutionism

It is generally held that Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) triggered the nineteenth-century evolutionism in anthropology—the earliest school of thought in the discipline. Charles Darwin (1809–1882) proposed that all organisms had evolved from simple to complex forms through the process of Natural Selection and Struggle for Existence. Darwin was a naturalist, geologist, and biologist. He proposed his theory in the life sciences. We have noted earlier that by the mid-nineteenth century, exhaustive amount of literature belonging to the so-called ‘savage’ peoples and their ‘exotic’ cultures were already in store in Europe. All such literatures were produced by the travellers, explorers, missionaries, and colonial administrators during the age of exploration-cum-colonisation. The material and non-material cultures of the indigenous peoples of the newly discovered lands were poles-apart in all respects from the European culture, whereas the European culture or civilisation was then at the highest level of technological advancement, that of the savages was at the lowest level. In spite of such contrasts, there were similarities as well. The so-called ‘savages’, who mostly lived in bands and practised hunting and gathering technologies, also had the institutions of family, marriage, kinship, religion, etc. They also had their political organisations to settle disputes among themselves; they also had an economic organisation in commensurate with their ecology and technology.