Edward Burnett Tylor

• 1. Introduction

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  Edward Burnett Tylor left school at age 16 with no degree, the son of a brass factory owner, raised in the Quaker faith, and seemingly headed for a life of commerce. Then tuberculosis intervened. On medical advice, he left England in 1855 and sailed to the Americas, and that journey changed the course of a discipline. What made a Victorian merchant's son into the founding figure of social anthropology? How did a chance encounter on a road in the Americas reshape how we think about culture, religion, and the human mind itself? And why did a man who believed in the universal progress of humanity end up defending the intelligence of hunter-gatherers against the prejudices of his own era? Those are the questions at the heart of Tylor's story.

• 2. The Road to Anthropology

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  Camberwell, London, in 1832 was where Tylor was born into a family of wealthy Quakers. His parents owned a brass factory. His elder brother Alfred would become a geologist. Tylor himself attended Grove House School in Tottenham, but the death of his parents and the obligations of his Quaker faith cut his education short. At 16 he left without a degree and prepared to manage the family business. That plan collapsed when he developed tuberculosis at age 23.

  The illness sent him abroad, and abroad transformed him. During his travels he met Henry Christy, a fellow Quaker and practicing ethnologist and archaeologist. Their friendship proved decisive. Christy stimulated Tylor's interest in anthropology and broadened his curiosity to include prehistoric studies. When Tylor joined Christy on a trip to Mexico in 1856, he began recording what he observed among the people he encountered. Those notes became his first publication, Anahuac: Or Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern, published in 1861 after his return to England.

• 3. Building the Discipline

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  Primitive Culture, published in 1871, is the work Tylor is most remembered for. It is a two-volume examination of human civilization. The first volume, titled The Origins of Culture, takes on ethnography, social evolution, linguistics, and myth. The second, Religion in Primitive Culture, turns to animism and the question of where religion begins. On the very first page, Tylor placed a definition of culture that became one of the most cited in the field: "Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."

  The book also introduced, in its first chapter, the outline of a new discipline he called "science of culture," later known as culturology. Tylor's methods were comparative and historical ethnography. He looked for uniform patterns across societies and interpreted them as evidence of universal laws of human thought and action. His 1865 work, Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization, laid groundwork for that approach. Primitive Culture built on it in a way that influenced a generation of younger scholars, among them J. G. Frazer, who became one of Tylor's disciples.

  In 1883 Tylor was appointed Keeper of the University Museum at Oxford. By 1884 he held the title of first Reader in Anthropology there, a post he kept until 1895. In 1896 Oxford appointed him its first Professor of Anthropology. He was also deeply involved in the early history of the Pitt Rivers Museum, built adjacent to the University Museum. He even served as anthropological consultant on the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

• 4. Culture, Universals, and the Mind

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  Tylor made an argument that was deeply unfashionable in Victorian Britain. He insisted that the human mind and its capacities are the same everywhere on earth, regardless of a society's stage of development. A hunter-gatherer community, in his view, possessed the same intelligence as an industrial one. The difference lay not in native ability but in education, which he defined as the cumulative knowledge and methodology that takes thousands of years to accumulate.

  His framework was a direct refutation of the theory of social degeneration, which held that some societies had declined from a higher state. Tylor rejected that. He saw culture and the human mind as progressive, and at the close of Primitive Culture he wrote: "The science of culture is essentially a reformers' science." He believed that studying the history and prehistory of humanity could serve as a basis for the reform of British society. In 1881 his work Anthropology opened with what became an almost constitutional statement for the new field: "History, so far as it reaches back, shows arts, sciences, and political institutions beginning in ruder states, and becoming in the course of ages, more intelligent, more systematic, more perfectly arranged or organized, to answer their purposes."

  He was candid that his view was a restatement of ideas first developed in the early 1860s. The theorist he credited most directly was John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury, the man who coined the terms Paleolithic and Neolithic. Lubbock was a prominent banker and British liberal Parliamentarian with a passion for archaeology. His initial concepts of prehistory appeared prominently in Tylor's lectures and later in the Pitt Rivers Museum.

• 5. Animism and the Origin of Religion

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  Tylor reintroduced the word animism into common use. He defined it as faith in the individual soul or anima of all things and natural manifestations. For him, animism was not a curiosity from the margins of human experience. It was the answer to a foundational question: which religion came first? His answer was animism, and he regarded it as the first phase in the development of all religions.

  His argument was that people had originally used religion to explain why things happen in the world. The divine gave warmth and light; spirits inhabited living things. Over time, Tylor argued, those explanations evolved. But he took a sharp view of what happened when they persisted into the modern era. He saw the continued belief in spirits among modern religious practitioners as evidence that such people remained at a primitive stage of understanding. He perceived modern belief in God as a "survival" of what he called primitive ignorance.

  Yet Tylor was not an advocate for atheism. He did not believe atheism was the logical end point of cultural and religious development. Instead he posited a highly minimalist form of monotheist deism as the natural destination of religious evolution. His framework described what he called "the gradual elimination of paganism" and a process of disenchantment, but not secularization. Religion, in his account, thinned out but did not disappear.

• 6. Survivals and Their Critics

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  Tylor coined the term "survivals" to describe something specific: processes, customs, and opinions carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which they had their original home. They persist, he said, as proofs and examples of an older condition of culture out of which a newer has evolved.

  The European practice of bloodletting was his illustration. Long after the medical theories that justified it had been abandoned, the practice continued. That gap between a custom's origin and its persistence was exactly what Tylor meant by a survival. The concept offered ethnographers a tool. By studying survivals, they could reconstruct earlier cultural characteristics and trace the evolution of culture backwards through time. Critics pushed back, arguing that Tylor identified the phenomenon but failed to explain adequately why survivals persist at all.

  Broader criticism of the evolutionary school touched on related problems. Some argued that apparent parallels between cultures were accidental rather than evidence of universal laws. Others noted that different causes might produce similar results without any shared evolutionary ancestry. There were charges that Tylor and his colleagues were arm-chair anthropologists, working with data too thin to support the abstractions they built. They were said to have overlooked cultural diffusion and cultural innovation. Two classifications proposed in 1993 by Upadhyay and Pandey divided the field into a Classical Evolutionary School and a Neo Evolutionary School. The Classical British school, centered at Oxford, listed Tylor alongside Robert Ranulph Marett, Henry James Sumner Maine, John Ferguson McLennan, and James George Frazer. Marett was the last of that group to die, in 1943.

• 7. Recognition and Legacy

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  In 1871 Tylor was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, the same year Primitive Culture appeared. The University of Oxford awarded him an honorary doctorate in Civil Laws in 1875. Honorary membership of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society followed in 1886. In 1907 he received the Huxley Memorial Medal. In 1912 he was knighted for his contributions to scholarship.

  That same year, 1907, a festschrift was formally presented to Tylor on his 75th birthday: Anthropological Essays Presented to Edward Burnett Tylor. It gathered essays from twenty anthropologists, a fifteen-page appreciation of Tylor's work written by Andrew Lang, and a comprehensive bibliography of his publications compiled by Barbara Freire-Marreco. Tylor died on the 2nd of January 1917. The bibliography Freire-Marreco assembled shows publications stretching from 1861 to 1905, a body of work that charted the growth of an entire field across more than four decades.