The history of anthropology has great relevance for current debates within the discipline, offering a foundation from which the professionalisation of anthropology can evolve. The authors explore key issues in the history of social and cultural anthropological approaches in Germany, Great Britain, France, The Netherlands, Sweden, Poland, Slovenia and Romania, as well as the influence of Spanish anthropologists in Mexico to provide a comprehensive overview of European anthropological traditions.

The history of anthropology has great relevance for current debates within the discipline, offering a foundation from which the professionalisation of anthropology can evolve. The authors explore key issues in the history of social and cultural anthropological approaches in Germany, Great Britain, France, The Netherlands, Sweden, Poland, Slovenia and Romania, as well as the influence of Spanish anthropologists in Mexico to provide a comprehensive overview of European anthropological traditions.

The history of anthropology has been written from multiple viewpoints, often from perspectives of gender, nationality, theory, or politics. Before Boas delves deeper into issues concerning anthropology's academic origins to present a groundbreaking study that reveals how ethnology and ethnography originated during the eighteenth rather than the nineteenth century, developing parallel to anthropology, or the "natural history of man."

Han F. Vermeulen explores primary and secondary sources from Russia, Germany, Austria, the United States, the Netherlands, Hungary, the Czech Republic,...