| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Sir Edward Burnett Tylor |
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| Biography: Sir Edward Burnett Tylor |
The English anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) was concerned with theories of cultural evolution and diffusion, and he advanced influential theories regarding the origins of magic and religion.
Edward B. Tylor was born in London into a prosperous Quaker family. He was privately educated and because of ill health was excused from entering the family business. In 1855 he traveled to Latin America and there met a fellow English Quaker and amateur antiquarian, Henry Christy; they toured Mexico in search of ancient artifacts. On his return to England, Tylor married Anna Fox in 1858 and settled into a comfortable private existence supported by his independent means.
In 1861 Tylor published Anahuac, in which he speculated on Mexico's ancient past. He joined the Royal Anthropological Society and independently studied primitive societies, publishing Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization (1865) and his most famous study, Primitive Culture (1871). The latter had an instant impact on social theorists, and Tylor was elected a fellow of the Royal Society the same year. A condensed account of his theories appeared in Anthropology (1881).
In 1883 Tylor became keeper of the University Museum at Oxford, where he later lectured on anthropological subjects, and in 1896 the first chair of anthropology in the English-speaking world was created for him at Oxford, a post he held until his retirement in 1909. The latter half of his career saw few publications and little modification of his initial positions. Perhaps his most notable achievement for us today is his brief essay "On a Method of Investigating the Development of Institutions, " which appeared in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1888), the first serious attempt to use statistical information to substantiate and generate social anthropological theories.
Tylor was an armchair anthropologist, uninterested in carrying out actual fieldwork with primitive peoples but keen on following the investigations of others. For him progress was linked with rationalism, and anthropology was to teach and correct contemporary aberrations of mankind by exposing the irrational survivals from the past adhering to modern social behavior. Tylor is generally credited with being the most influential expositor of the concept of animism (the idea that primitive men endow all things with vital supernatural powers) and the concept of survivals (that irrational, superannuated practices and beliefs continue past their period of usefulness). He was committed to historical reconstruction of the past by examining primitive societies which were thought to resemble prehistoric ones, but this was mainly to enable him to understand the nature of progress and to expunge nonrational, primitive elements from modern life; it was not to demonstrate the rich variety of human cultures.
Tylor's early career showed an emphasis on progressive evolution, but this was later modified to give attention to the diffusion of cultural traits from society to society. He saw the development of magic and religion as due to faulty logic based on psychological errors, not as an outcome of the nature of society itself. But his interpretations did credit primitive men with a logic, however faulty, and in this he represents an analytical advance over many of his contemporaries. He brilliantly demonstrated, for example, how persons of intelligence and reason may well accept magic and find no contradictions between such beliefs and other spheres of experience.
Further Reading
The chief source for details of Tylor's life is Robert R. Marett, Tylor (1936), and the best critical accounts of his work and influence are in Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (1965), and John W. Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (1966).
| English Folklore: Edward Burnet Tylor |
His interest in ethnology, which developed while travelling in Cuba and Mexico, led to his three influential books, Researches into the Early History of Mankind (1865); Primitive Culture (1871); and Anthropology, an Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilisation (1881), which established him as an original and important thinker and earned him the title ‘Father of Anthropology’. He was appointed Keeper of the University Museum at Oxford in 1883, Reader in Anthropology 1884, and served as the first ever Professor of Anthropology 1896-1909. Tylor was knighted in 1912.
Tylor was also hailed as the ‘Father of Folklore’, as his theories were eagerly adopted by all the early British folklorists— Clodd, Gomme, Lang, Hartland, and many others. In his application of Darwin's evolutionary theories to human cultures he constructed the theory of survivals (the idea that modern folklore is a survival from a previous stage of civilization and can thus be used to reconstruct that stage), which became the cornerstone of folklore thinking for generations. He was also one of the first to use what became the ‘comparative method’, drawing on material from all over the world in his attempts to correlate customs, and he identified ‘animism’ as the universal primitive belief in the existence of spiritual beings which he claimed provided the basis for all religions, and so a means of comparing them. The new discipline of anthropology, while grateful for Tylor's organizational as well as theoretical work, soon moved on from his theories, but the folklorists did not. They continued to couch their investigations in terms of survivals well into the 20th century. Nevertheless, as Dorson clearly shows, Tylor's folklore followers were extremely selective in their readings of his books, as there is much that they should have disagreed with. Andrew Lang, for example, who was probably the most effusive in his thanks to Tylor, chose to ignore the latter's obvious debt to Max Müller and the solar mythologists whom Lang himself had lambasted a few years before. Even on the knotty question of whether outwardly similar myths could be explained by transmission or by independent creation, Lang favoured coincident and multiple invention, whereas Tylor leaned more towards the borrowing of myths between peoples.
Bibliography
The full bibliography list is available here.
| Archaeology Dictionary: Edward Burnett Tylor |
English banker and businessman who became interested in anthropology as a result of a casual contact with Henry Christy. He became reader in anthropology at the University of Oxford in 1884 and Professor in 1896. His special area of study was ancient Mexico.
[Obit.: American Anthropologist, 19 (1917), 262–8]
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Sir Edward Burnett Tylor |
Bibliography
See study by R. R. Marett (1936).
| Wikipedia: Edward Burnett Tylor |
| Edward Burnett Tylor | |
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 Edward Burnett Tylor
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| Born | 2 October 1832 Camberwell, London |
| Died | 2 January 1917 (aged 84) |
| Nationality | English |
| Fields | anthropology |
| Known for | cultural evolutionism |
Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (2 October 1832 – 2 January 1917), was an English anthropologist.
Tylor is considered representative of cultural evolutionism. In his works Primitive culture and Anthropology, he defined the context of scientific study of anthropology, based on the evolutionary theories of Charles Lyell. He believed that there was a functional basis for the development of society and religion, which he determined was universal. E. B. Tylor is considered by many a founding figure of the science of social anthropology, and his scholarly works are seen as important and lasting contributions to the discipline of Anthropology that was beginning to take shape in the 19th century[1]. He believed that research into the history and prehistory of man could be used as a basis for the reform of British society.[2]
He reintroduced the term animism (the faith in the individual soul or anima of all things, and natural manifestations) into common use.[3] He considered animism as the first phase of development of religions.
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E. B. Tylor was born in 1832, in Camberwell, London. He was the son of Joseph Tylor and Harriet Skipper, part of a family of financially well-off Quakers, owners of a London brass factory.
He was educated at Grove House School, Tottenham, but due to the death of Tylor's parents during his early adulthood and his restrictive Quaker background, he never gained a university degree.[4] After his parents’ death, he readied himself to help manage the family business, but this plan was abruptly set aside by symptoms consistent with the onset of tuberculosis. Following advice to spend time in warmer climes, Tylor left England in 1855, traveling to Central America. The experience proved to be an important and formative one, sparking in Tylor a lifelong interest in studying unfamiliar cultures.
During his travels Tylor also met Henry Christy, a fellow Quaker, ethnologist and archaeologist. Tylor's association with Christy greatly stimulated his awakening interest in anthropology, and helped broaden his inquiries to include prehistoric studies[5].
Tylor’s first publication was a result of his 1856 trip to Mexico with Christy. The notes Tylor took on the beliefs and practices of the people he encountered, allowed him to publish Anahuac: Or Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern (1861) upon his return to England. While never traveling again Tylor continued to study the customs and beliefs of tribal communities, both existing and prehistoric (based on archaeological finds) and published his second work, Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization, in 1865. Following this came his most influential work, Primitive Culture (1871). Despite continuing to work and write all the way up to the beginnings of World War I, Primitive Culture remained the pinnacle of Tylor's career, important not only for its thorough study of human civilization and contributions to the emergent field of anthropology, but for its undeniable influence on a handful of young scholars, such as J. G. Frazer, who were to become Tylor's disciples and contribute greatly to the scientific study of anthropology in later years.
In 1871 Tylor was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1875 received the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Laws from the University of Oxford. He was appointed Keeper of the University Museum at Oxford in 1883, and, as well as serving as a lecturer, held the title of the first “Reader in Anthropology” from 1884-1895. In 1896 he became the first Professor of Anthropology at Oxford and he was knighted in 1912.
Tylor’s ideology is best described in his most famous work, the two-volume Primitive Culture. The first volume, The Origins of Culture, deals with various aspects of ethnography including social evolution, linguistics, and myth. The second volume, titled Religion in Primitive Culture, deals mainly with his interpretation of animism.
On the first page of Primitive Culture, Tylor provides an all-inclusive definition which is one of his most widely recognized contributions to anthropology: “Culture, or civilization, taken in its broad, 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.”[6]
Unlike many of his predecessors and contemporaries, Tylor asserted that the human mind and its capabilities are the same globally, irrespective of a particular society’s stage in social evolution.[7] This essentially means that a hunter-gatherer society would possess the same amount of intelligence as an advanced industrial society. The difference, Tylor asserts, is education, that knowledge and methodology that takes thousands of years to acquire. This is why Tylor often likens primitive cultures to “children”, and why he constantly sees culture and the mind of humans as progressive. Part of the reason he wrote it was to refute the theory of degeneration that was popular at the time. [8] At the end of Primitive Culture, Tylor asserts that “The science of culture is essentially a reformers' science.”[9]
Another term ascribed to Tylor was his theory of “survivals.” Tylor asserted that when a society evolves, certain customs are retained that are unnecessary in the new society, like outworn and useless “baggage”.[10] His definition of survivals are “processes, customs, and opinions, and so forth, which have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which they had their original home, and they thus remain as proofs and examples of an older condition of culture out of which a newer has been evolved.”[11] This can include outdated practices, such as the phenomenon of European bloodletting, which lasted long after the medical practices on which it was based had faded from use and been replaced by more modern techniques.[12] Despite much criticism about his survivals (critics argued that he identified the term but provided an insufficient reason as to why survivals actually survive), his originality in coining the term is still acknowledged.
Joan Leopold, 1980. Culture in Comparative and Evolutionary Perspective: E. B. Tylor and the Making of Primitive Culture. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag (in English)
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