Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, the son of Joseph and Harriet (Skipper) Tylor, was born on October 2, 1832, in Camberwell, London, England. His father, a prosperous Quaker industrialist who owned a brass foundry, sent Tylor to Grove House, a private school operated by the Society of Friends. Due to his nonconformist religion, Tylor was prohibited from attending Oxford or Cambridge. Thus, at the age of sixteen, he entered the family business. Six years later, diagnosed with consumption and advised to travel, he set sail for the United States. After spending a year in the southern United States, he visited Cuba. While on an omnibus during his trip, he heard the familiar Quaker use of "thou" and subsequently struck up a friendship with Henry Christy, an English banker and amateur ethnologist. Christy invited Tylor on a four-month trip to Mexico, an experience from which Tylor published his first book Anahuac: or, Mexico and the Mexicans. Ancient and Modern (1861).
Written in part from the perspective of an amateur anthropologist and in part as a travel log, Anahuac is Tylor's first attempt to develop his ideas on culture and the prehistoric origins of humanity. In his second book Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization (1865), Tylor made a much clearer attempt to develop a scientific approach to the study of human and cultural development. By studying the language, myths, rites, customs, and beliefs, Tylor concluded that the human mind functions in similar ways under similar conditions; therefore, he created a strong case for the unity of human nature. Either by independent invention or cultural diffusion, a universal pattern exists in all human development.
Tylor's landmark, two-volume work Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, which did much to earn for him the title as the founder of modern anthropology, was published in 1871. Operating from the perspective of cultural evolution, Tylor outlined three "grades," or stages, of cultural development: "savagery," which describes culture based on hunting and gathering; "barbarism," which describes cultures based on nomadic herding and primitive agriculture; and "civilization," which describes cultures based on writing and the construction of cities. Although he ascribed to the basic doctrine of evolution and the implicit "survival of the fittest" paradigm, Tylor was sensitive to the vast complexities involved in the development of societies. Believing that evolution was primarily progressive, he did allow for the possibility that a civilized society may regress to more primitive forms of behavior (for example, loss of virtues such as simplicity and independence).
Appearing four years after Matthew Arnold's elitist account of culture in Culture and Anarchy, Tylor's definition of culture in Primitive Culture stood in stark contrast. Directly contradicting Arnold, Tylor believed culture to be an all-encompassing experience that was made manifest in the stuff of everyday living, which belonged to all human existence. As he wrote in the opening of Primitive Culture, "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 acquired by man as a member of society." Although some of his work is ethnocentric, he rebuked the Victorian tradition of racism by suggesting that race should not be considered a factor in determining the development of the grade of a civilization.
Primitive Culture also proposed a strong critique of religion based on Tylor's development of the ideas of survivals and animism. According to Tylor, animism is primitive society's tendency to place supernatural powers on all things. As society progresses, rational thought overcomes these superstitions and they are ultimately shed by the civilization. Survivals are those things that outlast their proper stages and hang on to occur in a more advanced grade. Tylor considered religion to be a survival. In other words, religion was a superstitious belief held by primitive people that should have been sloughed off as civilization progressed, but somehow remains in civilized society. Although unnecessary to society, these survivals are of great interest to the anthropologist because they allow for the study of past cultural changes. In the tradition of the Victorian intellectual debate raging at the time between science and religion, Tylor was adamantly on the side of science. Much of the focus of Primitive Culture is the account of the decay of religion.
Although modern anthropologists have discarded Tylor's emphasis on evolution, many of his basic assumptions and categories continue to form the basic field of anthropology. In his groundbreaking use of statistical data in his analysis of societies, Tylor has been heralded for the advancement of social arithmetic. Although he never received a college degree, he was highly regarded in academic circles. He was appointed as curator of the University Museum and as a reader in anthropology at Oxford, in 1883 and 1884, respectively. In 1896 he became Oxford's first professor of anthropology, a position he held until his retirement in 1909. In 1912, five years before his death, he was knighted.
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