In the early days of a discipline whose origins were inspired by the taxonomic impulse of the natural sciences, anthropology attempted to understand different human societies in relation to Western civilization within an evolutionary framework. Anthropologists thus described and organized their empirical observations in categorical bundles. Nevertheless, the data always exceeded the categories that anthropologists devised, which prompted the researchers to come up with new categories or, alternatively, disregard, silence, or miscategorize what did not fit.