Ernest Gellner as anthropologist

Ernest Gellner was at once a positivist philosopher, influenced by Karl Popper, and an ethnographer and social anthropologist in the tradition of Bronisław Malinowski. He approached philosophies as an ethnographer, and his anthropological models were imbued with philosophical assumptions. He was a lifelong critic of the relativist tradition in philosophy and cultural anthropology, and an opponent of what he considered pseudo sciences (Marxism and psychoanalysis). He is perhaps best known for his theory of history, which emphasised the social and political consequences of the development of science and technology. Precipitating the breakdown of organic communities, this fostered nationalism or a puritan (individualist) religion.