The First Finnish Sociologist: A Reappraisal of Edward Westermarck's Work

Abstract

Like Spencer's and Parsons', Edward Westermarck's once very high repu tation rapidly declined at the end of the 1920's when may anthropologists and sociologists dismissed him as 'one of those 19th century evolutionists'. But, as Ronald Fletcher has recently shown, this epithet was largely unjus tified. and based partly on careless and biased reading of his works. Wes termarck was an evolutionist, but in contrast to most of his fellows he was actually much more interested in the fundamental problems of social struc ture than in evolution His major works form attempts to find a general explanation to human morality, social norms and institutionalized behaviour in general, and thus the roots of all social behaviour. His theory constitutes an alternative to Durkheim's In his endeavours to create such a theory. he relied mainly on the comparative method then in vogue. Though he himself was one of the pioneers in anthropological field work and thus witnessed norms, sanctions and moral ideas in operation, he never attempted to study their functions, and remained critical of Durkheim's, Radcliffe-Brown's and Malinowski's functionalism In the author's opinion it was rather his failure to see the need for a functional approach than his evolutionism which caused his researches to be regarded with contempt.