1. The proto-phase: travel writing and the "other" (Herodotus to Ibn Khaldun to the missionaries) — data without method.
2. The armchair phase (c. 1860–1900): the Victorian evolutionists — Tylor (religion's origin in animism; culture's classic definition — Sociology Unit 2.2's quote), Morgan (the unilinear ladder: savagery → barbarism → civilization; kinship's terminology — Engels' source), Frazer (The Golden Bough) — grand schemes built on others' reports: the "armchair" nickname earned.
3. The fieldwork revolution (c. 1900–40):Franz Boas — the historic particularist who demolished racial evolutionism (culture learned, not bred — the four-field American tradition's founder; cultural relativism's patron); Bronislaw Malinowski — the Trobriand exile (WWI's accident) birthing participant observation and functionalism; A.R. Radcliffe-Brown — structural-functionalism (social structure as organism — Unit 2.3 of this course); MargaretMead — Samoa and the culture-personality school (gender roles as cultural — Unit 6.4's founding text).
4. The modern phases:Lévi-Strauss's structuralism (kinship and myth's deep logics); the interpretive turn (Geertz — culture as text — Unit 2.4); the postmodern crisis (Unit 2.5 — representation, reflexivity, "writing culture"); and today's plural, applied, decolonising discipline.