Patterns of culture

During the present century many new approaches to the problems of social anthropology have developed. The old method of constructing a history of human culture based on bits of evidence, torn out of their natural contacts, and collected from all times and all parts of the world, has lost much of its hold. It was followed by a period of painstaking attempts at reconstruction of historical connections based on studies of distribution of special features and supplemented by archæological evidence. Wider and wider areas were looked upon from this viewpoint. Attempts were made to establish firm connections between various cultural features and these were used to establish wider historical con nections. The possibility of independent development of analogous cultural features which is a postulate of a general history of culture has been denied or at least consigned to an inconsequential rôle. Both the evolutionary method and the analysis of independent local cultures were devoted to unravelling the sequences of cultural forms. While by means of the former it was hoped to build up.a unified picture of the history of culture and civilization, the adherents of the latter method, at least among its more conservative adherents, saw each culture as a single unit and as an individual historical problem.