Social and cultural anthropology emerged in the nineteenth century as part of a broader intellectual effort to understand human diversity in the context of European colonial expansion. Early thinkers such as E. B. Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan sought to explain differences among societies through evolutionary frameworks. They proposed that all human societies pass through similar stages of development, from “savagery” to “civilization,” placing Western societies at the apex. Although these unilinear evolutionary models were later criticized for ethnocentrism and speculative reasoning, they laid the groundwork for systematic comparative study of cultures. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anthropology shifted toward more empirical and field-based approaches. Franz Boas in the United States challenged evolutionary assumptions and introduced the principle of cultural relativism, arguing that