Edward Burnett Tylor

Edward Burnett Tylor

Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (born October 2, 1832 – died January 2, 1917), was an English anthropologist, often regarded as the founder of cultural anthropology. He was famous for adapting Darwin's theory of evolution to the study of human societies.

Life

Edward Tylor was born in Camberwell, London, in a Quaker family of Joseph Tylor and Harriet Skipper. Alfred Tylor, the geologist, was his elder brother. His parents were members of the Society of Friends, at one of whose schools, at Grove House, Tottenham, Tylor was educated. At the age of 16 he was taken out of school to help in his father ‘s business.

In 1848 Tylor entered his father's company - J. Tylor and Sons, Brassfounders - on Newgate Street, London. After working for seven years behind the desk his health started to deteriorate. He was threatened with consumption and forced to abandon business. As a treatment for his lungs his doctor recommended traveling, and Tylor undertook his first journey.

During 1855 - 1856 Tylor traveled to the United States of America. During his 1856 trip to Cuba, he met a fellow Quaker Henry Christy (1810-1865), an amateur ethnologist, who became Tylor’s good friend. Tylor's association with Christy greatly stimulated his awakening interest in anthropology, and their visit to Mexico, with its rich prehistoric remains, led him to undertake a systematic study of the science.

After his return to England, in 1858, Tylor married Anna Fox, with whom he remained married until the end of his life. The couple did not have any children. They lived comfortably of Tylor’s family inheritance.

While on a visit to Cannes he wrote a record of his observations, entitled Anahuac; or, Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern, which was published in 1861. In 1865 appeared Researches into the Early History of Mankind, which made Tylor's reputation. This book was followed in 1871 by the more elaborate Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom. In 1881 Tylor published a smaller and more popular handbook on anthropology.

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 Reader in Anthropology in 1884. In 1888 he was appointed first Gifford lecturer at the University of Aberdeen. In 1896 he became Professor of Anthropology at Oxford, occupying the first such chair in the English-speaking world. He was knighted in 1912.

Tylor retired from teaching in 1909, and died in Wellington, Somerset, England, in 1917.

Work

Edward Tylor was an armchair scholar, with little interest to undertake a field study of any kind. He however always kept keen interested in field studies of others, and draw conclusions from their research. Unlike his fellow colleagues who studied culture in more narrow terms, often focusing only on sociology or religion, Tylor saw culture in much broader terms. He defined culture as,

“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.”

Tylor studied languages, art, rituals, customs, myths, and beliefs of people of different cultures and concluded that human mind functions quite similarly. He saw a universal pattern of development in every culture. Based on that he believed in the strong unity between people, as they progressed in their evolutionary development from primitive to civilized. He propagated the unilinear evolution, the cultures developing from the single primitive form of culture.

Tylor held an evolutionary view about the development of culture, particularly religion. He believed that animism was the earliest form of religious belief, and that religious thought progressed over time to more civilized forms of organized religion.

The culture in general, according to Tylor, follows the same pattern. In his masterwork Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom (1871) he argues for the Darwinian type of evolution of cultures, from “savage” to “civilized” ones. Three stages of the evolutionary development are:

"savagery," encompassing cultures based on hunting and gathering;

"barbarism," including cultures based on nomadic herding and agriculture; and

"civilization", that is, cultures based on writing and the urban life.

Although he believed in the progressive curve of human evolution, Tylor claimed that people in civilized cultures may regress to more primitive forms of behavior. He considered religious behavior to be an example of primitive behavior. Religion is connected with superstitious thinking, which is based on magical belief in supernatural powers. As such it has no place in the civilized world. However, despite the rational thinking that characterizes civilized world, religion still somehow survives. Taylor believed that this is possible due to faulty logic people make. He called this type of behavior a “survival”, for it survived in a more advanced environment. Tylor focused much of his work on studying religion, because he thought that through beliefs and rituals anthropologists can reconstruct early stages of human development. He says:

“It is a harsher, and at times even painful office of ethnography to expose the remains of crude old cultures which have passed into harmful superstition, and to mark these out for destruction. Yet this work, if less genial, is not less urgently needful for the good of mankind. Thus, active at once in aiding progress and in removing hindrance, the science of culture is essentially a reformer's science” (Primitive Culture, 1871).

Legacy

Tylor is often regarded as the actual founder of anthropology, which was in his time called “Mr. Tylor’s science”. He wrote the first article on anthropology as a science in the 9th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1878), and published the first textbook in anthropology Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization, in 1881. At the University of Oxford he became the first professor of anthropology in the English-speaking world.

Many of his theories, including the unilinear evolutionary development and the theory on religions, have been discarded by the modern anthropologists. His views were often regarded as rather ethnocentric. He however, remains known for his groundbreaking use of statistical data in his analysis of societies, and his pioneering work in establishing anthropology as an exact science.

Publications

• Tylor, Edward B. 1867. On the game of patolli in ancient Mexico, and its probably Asiatic origin. Bobbs-Merrill

• Tylor, Edward B. 1872. The philology of slang. Macmillan

• Tylor, Edward B. 1889. On a method of investigating the development of institutions: Applied to laws of marriage and descent. Harrison & Sons

• Tylor, Edward B. 1894. Stone age basis for oriental study. Government Printing Office

• Tylor, Edward B. 1902. Malay divining rods. Anthropological Institute

• Tylor, Edward B. 1921 (original work published in 1881). Anthropology: An introduction to the study of man and civilization. D. Appleton and Co.

• Tylor, Edward B. 1970 (original work published in 1861). Anahuac: or, Mexico and the Mexicans,: Ancient and modern. Bergman Publishers

• Tylor, Edward B. 1970. (original work published in 1873). Religion in primitive culture. Peter Smith Publisher. ISBN 0844609463

• Tylor, Edward B. 1976 (original work published in 1871). Primitive culture: Researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art, and custom. Gordon Press. ISBN 087968464X

• Tylor, Edward B. 2001 (original work published in 1865). Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization. Adamant Media Corporation. ISBN 1421268418

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Boyer, Pascal. 2002. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. Basic Books. ISBN 0465006965

• Capps, Walter H. 1995. Religious Studies: The Making of a Discipline. Augsburg Fortress Publishers. ISBN 0800625358

• Leopold, Joan. 1980. Culture in comparative and evolutionary perspective: E.B. Tylor and the making of primitive culture. Reimer. ISBN 3496001089

• Marett, R. R 1936. Tylor (Modern sociologists). New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.,

• Saler, Benson. 1997. E. B. Tylor and the Anthropology of Religion. Marburg Journal of Religion, 2(1)

• Stocking, George W., Jr. 1987. Victorian Anthropology. New York: The Free Press. ISBN 0029315506

External links

• Edward B. Tylor – Short biography.

• E.B. Tylor – Biography on BookRags website, part I.

• E.B. Tylor - Biography on BookRags website, part II.

• Edward B. Tylor – Biography of Tylor, originally published in 1917 in American Anthropologist, 19, 262-268.

• Tylor's concept of progressive development – Article on Tylor in Encyclopedia Britannica

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