Primitive Culture, Volume 1

Morgan's 1877 study of how family, property and government developed across human history, based on his research among the Iroquois. It shaped the early debates of anthropology and inspired Engels.

Lewis Henry Morgan

Widely regarded as the first anthropology textbook in English, published in 1881. Tylor covers human races, language, tools, arts, society and religion, with dozens of illustrations.

Edward B. Tylor

The 1899 ethnography of the Arrernte and neighboring peoples that Durkheim and Freud built on: totems, initiation ceremonies, sacred objects and myths of the ancestors.

Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen

Franz Boas's 1911 lectures dismantling the racial theories of his day, arguing that differences between peoples come from culture and history, not biology. A founding text of modern anthropology.

Franz Boas

Durkheim's classic study of totemism among Aboriginal Australians, and his argument that religion is at root the way a society worships itself. Essential for the anthropology of religion.

Émile Durkheim