Armchair anthropology refers to an early approach in social and cultural anthropology in which scholars studied human societies without conducting direct, prolonged fieldwork among the people they described. Instead of personally observing communities, these scholars relied mainly on reports, travelogues, missionary accounts, government records, colonial documents, and writings of explorers and administrators. The information collected from such secondary sources was compared and arranged to develop general theories about human cultural development. Armchair anthropology became prominent during the nineteenth century, particularly in Europe and North America. It developed in the context of European colonial expansion, which brought Europeans into contact with societies across Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. Anthropologists received a large amount of information about these societies through travellers, missionaries and colonial officials. Since professional anthropologists generally did not travel to the communities being studied, they worked from libraries and offices, earning the description “armchair anthropologists.” Important scholars associated with this tradition included Edward Burnett Tylor, James George Frazer and Lewis Henry Morgan. Tylor used information collected from different parts of the world to formulate theories concerning the evolution of