Description:
<jats:p>A core idea in all of Edward Westermarck's studies is the strong connection between nature and culture. As attempts to survive environmental threats, moral ideas contain similarities in a very wide range of historical situations. Westermarck connected nature and culture in the three major fields of his scholarship: in his studies of the human marriage and family, in his Moroccan field-work dealing with rituals and moral beliefs, and in his studies of the origin of moral ideas and emotions. There have been remarkable vicissitudes in his scholarly fame. In the early 20th century he was a leading international sociologist. His large treatises on the history of human marriage and the origin of the moral ideas were translated to many languages and his ideas were intensively discussed. Already in the 1920s Westermarck's scholarship based on evolutionism and Darwinism tended to become neglected, and during the subsequent decades it was largely ignored by both sociologists and anthropologists. During the two last decades of the 20th century, however, tendencies towards a renaissance of the ideas of Edward Westermarck are clearly observable.</jats:p>