One of the theories Tylor is known for is the origin of religion. He was also considered the "philosopher of universal evolution" because he applied the principles of evolution to all aspects of the universe. Using these concepts, Spencer played a key historical role in the development of the structural-functional method.
After deriving these principles, Spencer demonstrated their applicability to all phenomena of the universe. During this period he trained a large number of students and developed one of the best departments and museums of anthropology in the world. In his treatise on the methods of sociology, The Rules of the Sociological Method (1895), Durkheim said that the characteristic subject of sociology should be the study of social facts.
In fact, he said that after he had finished writing down most of the Trobriand data, he would turn his attention to the study of the processes of evolution and diffusion. They were called The Family and Social Life of the Nambikwara Indians and The Elementary Structures of Kinship respectively. The implications of both exchanges in terms of group formation are different.
One of Redfield's interests lay in defining as clearly as possible the distinguishing features of the discipline of anthropology.
C. Roy (1871-1942)
A dynamic approach led him to compare four communities in one region (Yucatan), which were: a tribal community, a peasant village, a city and the city of Mérida. The concept of the "folk-urban continuum" was a result of this research, which encouraged him to look beyond communities and regions to the world as a whole. Anthropology: Unity and Diversity' emphasized that anthropology is at the point of separation between historical and scientific research.
Moreover, the tribes were ignorant of the laws and legal procedures that they could have used to serve and protect their interests. The legal specialists had no knowledge of the customs and practices of the tribes in accordance with which they divided their property, settled their disputes, elected their leaders and formed their institutions. Roy was one of the founding members of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society, its first Honorary General Secretary and a member of its Council from 1915 to the end of his life.
He also donated his personal collection of material artefacts from tribal societies to the Anthropological and Prehistoric Gallery of the Patna Museum. In the same year, he was also elected an Honorary Fellow of the Folklore Society of London. In addition to cultural anthropology, which was Roy's first commitment, he also contributed to physical anthropology, prehistory, and folklore.
Roy's conclusion was that the Asura were of the same age as that of the people of the Indus Valley. Although Roy's monographs dealt with tribes, he did not omit the study of complex civilization through Indological literature. For Roy, anthropology was not a study of 'peculiarities', as was the case in many circles.
He noted that the study of folk thought – as expressed in customs, rites, beliefs, stories and arts and crafts – was not 'mere pastime'. It should be pursued for the light it throws on 'the early intellectual evolution of human societies or what may properly be called the prehistory of the human mind.' He quoted James Frazer as saying that the study of folklore has yielded the 'fossils of the mind', which represent an 'early stage in the progress of thought from its low beginnings.'' Like the other intellectuals of his time, Roy was also inclined to evolutionism. In one of his articles he wrote: 'The cardinal lessons of anthropology can be very usefully applied to certain crying problems of our national life. The study of men of different races and creeds, of each other's customs and manners, may help to promote mutual friendship, and to bind ever closer the bonds of unity between them, and thus ultimately help to remove much of the common hostility which the tide of Indian national life at the present day.” Roy saw the role of anthropology as promoting national integration.
N. Srinivas (1916-1999)
He earned another doctorate in 1947, this time in social anthropology from Oxford University, reworking the empirical data he had collected for his first doctorate on the Coorgs from the perspective of the structural-functional approach of A.R. This work has also shown the importance of the concepts of solidarity, diffusion and different levels of Hinduism. Srinivas was aware of the fact that Sanskritization was not the only process of upward mobility in India; there were also other processes.
He defined dominant castes in terms of five characteristics: (1) numerical predominance; (2) control over economic resources; (3) control over political power; (4) high ritual status; and (5) the first to benefit from the Western education system. In 1963, Srinivas delivered the Tagore Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, in which, along with Sanskritization, he also discussed the role of the processes of Westernization and secularization in Indian society. Majumdar was the president of the Anthropology and Archeology Section of the Indian Science Congress session held in Lahore in 1939.
The same year, the decennial census was held in the country, and the government invited Majumdar to conduct an anthropometric and serological survey of the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh). He wrote full-length ethnographic accounts of the Ho (Bihar) and the Khasas (Uttar Pradesh). Majumdar is also known for a survey of the industrial city of Kanpur (1960), which was in fact the first urban study by an Indian anthropologist.
In other words, he was one of the few anthropologists of his generation who really subscribed to the definition of anthropology as the study of people in time and space. Her book titled Yugant, based on the epic Mahabharat, received the Best Book Award in Marathi from the Sahitya Academy. This study was of great importance at the time because many of the arguments about racism depended on such studies.
In her study of variation among populations, she supported the approach that each endogamous group should be treated as a unit, because of marriage the genetic structure of the group is preserved overtime. Since one of the main principles defining a caste is endogamy, it can be taken up for social and biological studies. She did not favor the term "subcaste" because it was confusing and ill-defined, and proposed a necessary biogenetic relationship to the larger unit that might not be true.
C. Dube (1922-1996)
It was one of three landmark books published on rural India in 1955: the other two being M.N. His book India's Changing Villages was published in 1958, which analyzed the impact of the Community Development Program on village communities. They knew about the judicial and administrative institutions that were imposed on them with the advent of colonial rule.
Dube was one of the architects of this approach and will always be remembered for it. He learned the native language of the Juangs from one of their elders, and conducted the rest of the field investigation in the vernacular. With the influence of the Aryan civilization, tribal communities increasingly became part of the wider world.
The aspects of the processes that later became known as Hinduization and Sanskritization were explored in Bose's popular article entitled 'The Hindu Method of Tribal Absorption'. Here he showed that marginal communities (such as tribes) could become part of the wider society (i.e. the multi-caste Hindu society) by taking up professions and providing regular services to other castes. What he meant was that when analyzing society we should not lose sight of the facts of technology and economics.
He sought their cause in the unequal distribution of economic benefits between communities of the same and different states. This advice had a profound impact on Bose; it was anthropological, an example of a fieldwork-oriented approach. He was elected President of the Tenth International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) and of the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (ICAES).
In his study of the Sauria-Paharia tribe (also known as the Maler) of Rajmahal Hill (Chotanagpur, Jharkhanda), Vidyarthi gave this concept, where 'nature' is. Many people were sharply critical of Elwin's The Muria and Their Ghotul (1947) because it was a closely observed account of the bi-sex dormitory (called ghotul) of the Murias of Bastar. He located the cause of their exploitation and oppression in the unwanted access of 'outsiders to their territory'.
He suggested temporary isolation so that tribal people are freed from the yoke of exploitation and in the meantime some culturally appropriate strategies could be devised for their upliftment. The latter gathered more public support due to the need to bring different sections together for the success of the national movement.
