From the 1950s onwards there were a number of attempts to move anthropology away from the formal, society-centred paradigms, especially structural-functionalism, towards more individual and action-centred ones. Among these are the transactionalism of Fredrik Barth, various interrelated approaches of the ‘Manchester School’, and ‘processual’ offshoots of structuralism, including much of the work of Edmund Leach (see chapters 8 and 9).

Earlier ideas on social and cultural processes include the sociological theories of Georg Simmel and Max Weber, some of A. L. Kroeber's perceptive comments on ‘culture patterns and processes’ (1963 [1948]) and Arnold van Gennep's (1960 [1909]) seminal study of ‘rites of passage’. The last was picked up especially by structural processualists such as Edmund Leach and Victor Turner. Relations between structures, processes, and historical events returned with a vengeance in the 1980s in debates such as that between Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere on the death of Captain Cook, and between Richard Lee and Edwin Wilmsen on the political economy of the Kalahari. Meanwhile, a Marxist revolution had succeeded in turning many away from functionalist and structuralist interests towards Marxism, a processual theory based on the social relations of production.

However, Marxism's status in anthropology is ambiguous: it contains aspects of several other theoretical positions. As a trajectory, evolutionist history was firmly in Karl Marx's own mind and in the minds of Marxists of later times.