Edward Westermarck

At the close of the 19th century, social anthropology was a new subject looking for its identity. Edward Westermarck (1862‒1939) was one of its pioneers. This book is an account of how Westermarck created his intellectual and academic networks at three universities ‒ at the University of Helsinki, the London School of Economics and Åbo Akademi University. The authors make use of Westermarck's extensive unpublished correspondence, relating it to the cultural and social ambience of the time. In the first decades of the 20th century, philosophy was going through a crisis and new disciplines emerged from it including psychology, sociology and social anthropology. Many of the questions at issue had wide political and cultural ramifications.