Anthroplogy is the area of Lang's work for which he perhaps most wished to be remembered, and certainly his work was taken seriously by fellow anthropologists and by others interested in anthropology in the period. Sigmund Freud cites Lang's work with approval many times in Totem and Taboo (first published in a single volume as Totem und Tabu, Leipzig and Vienna: Heller, 1913), for example. Lang wrote on most of the central interests of late nineteenth-century anthropology – kinship structures and exogamy, totemism, magic and religion – but it was his interventions into the debate about the origin of religion that was most influential at the time and of most interest now. These debates disappeared from anthropological interest in the early twentieth century, when anthropologists turned firmly towards the importance of fieldwork and towards the synchronic investigation of discrete cultures, but Lang's interventions are significant still for the way that they illuminate the complex relations within and consequences of late nineteenth-century thinking on ‘race’, belief, cultural change and the evolution of cultural practices.

‘Anthropology and Ancient Literature’ is a letter written by Lang in response to an earlier letter from T. W. Rhys Davids to The Academy, itself responding to letter in the previous issue (565 (3 March 1883), p. 152) by the anthropologist and folklorist Edward Clodd. Davids is clearly a supporter of the philologist Friedrich Max Müller's position against anthropology, and the letters of both Clodd and Lang are written in support of the comparative anthropology begun by E. B. Tylor's important work, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Pholosophy, Religion, Languages, Art and Customs, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1871). Lang makes the case for comparative anthropology often in his work – for example in Custom and Myth (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1884), in Myth, Ritual and Religon, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1887; second edition 1899), and The Making of Religion (London: Longman's, Green and Co., 1898; second edition 1900) – arguing again and again that the evidence upon which it is based is more credible than that of philology. In this letter, Lang gives a cogent synopsis of his position, and shows clearly too his continued assertion that all human culture recognisable as such is complex and cannot be called ‘primitive’.