From the late eighteenth century into the 1850s anthropology remained a somewhat unalloyed and disparate set of anthropological studies, including, among other things, nascent research in physical and linguistic anthropology, the ethnology of sexuality, and juridical and economic ethnography. From the 1850s to 1890s, however, anthropology began to be professionalized—principally through the hegemony of evolutionary theory—and the field defined itself in increasingly unified disciplinary, yet more theoretically problematizing, terms.

The earlier stage of anthropology is generally described as developmentalist. This revolves around Enlightenment concepts of cultural and human progression that are fundamentally rigid in their application across all peoples. Thus universal concepts of human growth, both personal and corporate or societal, were applied to non-Western cultures without any flexibility whatsoever. What applies to one culture applies uniformly to another, and it is only the circumstance of each culture that dictates their relative degree of human progression. According to Honigmann, the anthropologist Adam Ferguson, for example, “looked for pattern, law, or direction operating behind the particular events of history” through a three-stage approach—savagery, barbarism, and civil society— which he also used to relate contemporary primitive society to early mankind, a theory otherwise known as comparative anthropology. Ferguson’s approach, needless to say, provides very little for individual or cultural difference, and can—and does—provide for an entirely circular argument about the relationship of man and culture. Condorcet, likewise, maintains that people are “inspired and restricted in discovery and invention by traits already present in culture.” Stocking talks of the developmentalist hegemony as de rigueur, “with similar themes, elaborated in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Antoine-YvesGoguet, Charles de Brosses, Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson, Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger, Cornelius de Pauw, Abbé Reynal, John Millar, Jean-Nicolas Demeunier, Adam Smith, William Robertson, and others—down through the culmination of the tradition in Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind in 1795.