Edward Burnett Tylor, Religion and Culture

Sir Edward Tylor (1832-1917) was the first professor of social anthropology at Oxford and is author of the famous Primitive Culture, which he published in two volumes in 1871. His achievements are all the more remarkable as he received no higher education due to his Quaker background. His interest in anthropology began at the age of 23 when he was advised to travel to warmer climates on account of his tuberculosis. He spent time in Mexico, during which he became fascinated with indigenous cultures and met the archaeologist Henry Christy. I bought Primitive Culture in the Bayswater Road in the early 1980s, and used it as a source book for the first chapter of my book Survival.

It is interesting to note that in the course of the 35 years since I wrote it, there has been a sea change in the use of terminology, so that the term 'primitive' can no longer be used, and has mutated into indigenous. This leads into the most common criticisms of Tylor - which would also apply to Sir J.G. Frazer - namely his ethnocentrism and evolutionism. It was commonplace at the time to regard Western civilisation as intrinsically superior and at a higher evolutionary level – hence the liberal use of the words primitive, savage and barbarian. One of the most interesting things about his work, and which is revisited in this volume, is his definition of religion as a belief in spiritual beings (Tylor also had some experience of spiritualism, although he was less sympathetic than Alfred Russel Wallace). It is clear that his work is driven by theory, even if he did interesting ethnographic research, and this difference in theory divided him from his contemporary Andrew Lang. However, contemporary scholars in this volume still find the questions Tylor asked of interest, even if their approach is different. Incidentally, my father's uncle Sir Everard im Thurn, who was respectively Governor of Ceylon, then of Fiji and the South Pacific, was also a noted anthropologist, whose work was introduced by a later professor at Oxford, R.R. Marett. In those days, communications to and from London would have taken months to arrive, so he himself had plenty of time for research, and his wife for painting. A far cry from our incessant drive of activity these days.