Knight, C; Lewis, JD; (2016) Toward a Theory of Everything. In: Power, C and Finnegan, M and Callan, H, (eds.) Human Origins: Contributions from Social Anthropology. Berghahn: New York / Oxford.

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Abstract

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, when popular Darwinism and evolutionism were still much in vogue, armchair anthropologists invented a rich variety of theories, the assumption being that one would be needed to explain the origins of religion, another the origins of law, another the origins of language and so forth. It was not until the 1930s that the rise of functionalism put an end to all this. Fieldworkers inspired by Bronislaw Malinowski insisted that in any given community, the system of cosmological beliefs, mode of subsistence, linguistic strategies and so forth all intertwine to form a functional whole, making it impossible to imagine how one component could exist for a moment without all the others.1 The implication was clear: to explain the origins of, say, language, your theory would have to account simultaneously for all the other things which presuppose language and underpin its use. The point is as valid today as it ever was. Taken in isolation, there can be no such thing as a theory of the origins of language. There can be no such thing as a theory of the origins of morality, law, totemism, exogamy, kinship or anything else. To explain any one thing, we need to explain everything. For most of the past century, social anthropologists have responded by avoiding biological and evolutionary questions altogether, content with a situation in which biological and social anthropologists are not on speaking terms.

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