Anthropology

Robert Ranulph Marett (1866-1943) was a British ethnologist. Exponent of the British evolutionary school, he mainly dealt with religious ethnology. In this field he modified the evolutionary scale of religion fixed by E. B. Tylor, which placed animism in the first place. He articulated the conception of (magical pre-animism) an impersonal force, identified with the Melanesian term of mana. The idea of the mana, more psychical than cultural product, was presented mainly in his work The...
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Robert Ranulph Marett (1866-1943) was a British ethnologist. Exponent of the British evolutionary school, he mainly dealt with religious ethnology. In this field he modified the evolutionary scale of religion fixed by E. B. Tylor, which placed animism in the first place. He articulated the conception of (magical pre-animism) an impersonal force, identified with the Melanesian term of mana. The idea of the mana, more psychical than cultural product, was presented mainly in his work The Threshold of Religion (1909) with which he tried to establish the context of presupposed ideas of the religion. R. R. Marett succeeded Tylor as reader in Anthropology at Oxford in 1910, and in 1914 established a Department of Social Anthropology. His works include: Anthropology (1911), Man in the Making: An Introduction to Anthropology (1927) and The Diffusion of Culture (1927).