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The first anthropological theory was an outgrowth of a biological analogy. It is generally known as the evolutionary school. The supposition was that culture, like phyla, developed from the simple to the complex and that the task of the anthropologist consisted in arranging social data in such sequences. The assumption was made that western European society was the apex of this historical sequence just as man was the highest creation of biological evolution.
Today certain students of society have grave doubts about the validity of evolutionary thought as applied to social data. The reasons need not concern us at this juncture. Anthropology, however, is faced with the problems of a new analogy. The psychoanalysts, in dealing with cultural data, profess to see in social institutions parallels to the developmental sequences they have established for the individual. Freud in “Civilization and its Discontents “1 states this explicitly when he says, “… We … have recognized the evolution of culture as a special process, comparable to the normal growth of an individual to maturity …” Customs, rituals, myths, etc., seem to have content similar to that found in the psychology of children and the insane. That such similarities exist cannot be denied. Our essential problem lies in understanding and explaining them.
The first suggestion made in connection with these similarities was: “Do primitive people represent earlier phases of psycho-cultural adjustment?” Persons qualified in both analytic and ethnologic disciplines must answer this question by specifically pointed field work. The writer would approach the question with several cautions in mind. First, primitive people cannot be regarded as an entity. Their cultural configurations and solutions are enormously varied. Each major group must be investigated independently. To say that primitives are this or that, as though they were a homogeneous whole, is an erroneous simplification. Secondly, it is in the highest degree a disto