In his famous essay ‘On the limits of “presentism” and “historicism” in the historiography of the behavioural sciences’ (1965), the historian George Stocking identified two types of scholar who write about the history of anthropology: presentists and historicists. The problem with presentists, according to Stocking, was that they sought to ‘understand the past for the sake of the present’, and make historical concerns relevant and even useful for contemporary ones. Presentism therefore led to Whiggish interpretations of anthropology's past. Timothy Larsen's new book, The Slain God, can best be described as a presentist history of anthropology. As I will discuss in due course, Larsen judges the importance of historical anthropological works by their comparable value to the discipline today. The main focus of Larsen's book is on the relationship between a small group of British anthropologists and their Christian faith. It is divided into five chapters, each looking at a specific figure (or two, in the case of Chapter 5). The figures covered in the book include Edward Burnett Tylor, James George Frazer, Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, Mary Douglas, and Victor and Edith Turner.

The introduction is essentially a personal anecdote of how Larsen became interested in the relationship between British anthropology and Christianity. There is no clear thesis statement or attempt to situate the book within the larger historiographical picture. Why does this book matter? How does it build upon and move beyond previous studies of anthropology's past? Larsen argues that he chose his six figures because each of them had written about religion in their anthropological work. He does not provide an adequate justification for why Tylor, Frazer, Evans-Pritchard, Douglas and the Turners are good examples for his investigation, nor does he give sufficient context on their role in the disciplinary development of British anthropology. As a result, readers are left wondering whether these six figures are the best choices for his study, or if there are other anthropologists who might be better suited for it. Moreover, why focus solely on British anthropology? Religion has been a key feature in other anthropological traditions. What makes the British context different to, say, the American or French?

In Chapter 1 Larsen examines the life and work of Tylor. The main argument is that Tylor's uneasy relationship with his own Quaker faith influenced his anthropological theories – especially regarding his writings on the evolution of religion. However, there is an underlying tone of presentism in the chapter. Take, for instance, Larsen's discussion on Tylor's first book, Anahuac (1861). In the 1850s Tylor travelled to North America to clear his lungs after developing tuberculosis working in his family's foundry. While in Havana, Cuba, he met the ethnologist Henry Christy, who invited Tylor to join him on a four-month horseback journey through Mexico. This trip has been widely regarded as a key juncture in Tylor's career. During the Mexican expedition Christy began teaching Tylor about some of the central tenets of monogenetic ethnology, a theoretical perspective that would mark all of Tylor's later research. Though it was written in the style of a travel narrative, Anahuac was an important ethnographic resource for ethnologists during the 1860s, providing them with novel information on the historical and contemporary state of indigenous Mexicans. However, because the book is fairly unknown today, Larsen believes it has little analytical value for modern anthropology, arguing that it has ‘justly been ignored’ (p. 16).

Chapter 2 is on Frazer and his alleged inner struggle writing about the evolution of religion through a secular framework. According to Larsen, a key problem that Frazer toiled with was hiding his secular views from his devoutly religious parents. He therefore had to promote his ideas incrementally, and only after his parents' death could he truly be open about his lack of faith. The evidence to support this portrayal of Frazer is rather thin. Linking Frazer's inner struggle with his loss of faith to the concept of cognitive dissonance, which has been an important theme in the secondary literature on the relationship between science and religion since the late 1970s, could have strengthened the argument. Two good examples in the historiography are by James Moore in his book The Post-Darwinian Controversies (1979) and by Geoffrey Cantor in his essay ‘What shall we do with the “Conflict Thesis”’ (2010).

The chapter on Evans-Pritchard promotes a clash narrative between science and religion. For Larsen, Evans-Pritchard's conversion to Catholicism later in life forced him to go on the offensive in the face of staunch criticism from his anthropological peers, who saw his religious beliefs as an impediment to good social-scientific research. Although the contextual analysis in this chapter is much stronger than that in the preceding ones, it still would have been strengthened by situating the story of Evans-Pritchard within the larger secondary literature on clash narratives in science and religion. There are some important missed opportunities in this chapter. For instance, there has long been an animosity between anthropologists and missionaries – a conflict that came to a head in the mid-nineteenth century. Evans-Pritchard, however, championed the value of missionaries for ethnographic research. It would have been useful for Larsen to position this aspect of Evans-Pritchard's research programme within the larger disciplinary history of anthropology.

In the following chapter, on Douglas, the analysis is almost entirely based on her own writings, with little use of the secondary literature. Consequently the discussion seems more like Larsen's personal views on Douglas's work than a historical study of it. The chapter on the Turners is a little more balanced but again needs to be better situated in the larger historiographical picture. Overall, Larsen's book had the potential to be an important resource for historians interested in the relationship between science and religion, and the history of anthropology. However, because of its limited use of the secondary literature and its ever-visible presentism, the book falls well short of meeting that potential.