Sir Edward Burnett Tylor

Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (born Oct. 2, 1832, London—died Jan. 2, 1917, Wellington, Somerset, Eng.) was an English anthropologist regarded as the founder of cultural anthropology. His most important work, Primitive Culture (1871), influenced in part by Darwin’s theory of biological evolution, developed the theory of an evolutionary, progressive relationship from primitive to modern cultures. Tylor was knighted in 1912. He is best known today for providing, in this book, one of the earliest and clearest definitions of culture, one that is widely accepted and used by contemporary anthropologists. Culture, he said, 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.

Early life and travels

Tylor was the son of a prosperous Quaker brass founder. He attended a Quaker school until he was 16, when, barred by his faith from entering a university, he became a clerk in the family business. In 1855, at the age of 23, symptoms of tuberculosis led him to travel to America in search of health. He made his way in 1856 to Cuba, where, in Havana, he entered into conversation with a fellow Quaker who turned out to be the archaeologist and ethnologist Henry Christy. Christy was on his way to Mexico to study remnants of the ancient Toltec culture in the Valley of Mexico. The two became friends, and Christy persuaded Tylor to accompany him on his expedition.

Travelling in arduous and sometimes dangerous circumstances, they searched for the Toltec remains, Tylor under Christy’s experienced direction gaining practical knowledge of archaeological and anthropological fieldwork. The expedition lasted for six months, and after its conclusion Tylor, now firmly set on the course of his life’s work, returned to England. In 1858 he married and spent some time travelling in Europe before publishing the experiences of his Mexican expedition in his first book, Anahuac; or, Mexico and the Mexicans Ancient and Modern (1861). Although mainly a well-conceived travelogue, Anahuac contains elements that characterize Tylor’s later work when he had become a full–fledged anthropologist: a firm grasp on factual data, a sense of cultural differences, and a curious combination of empirical methods with occasional hints of the superiority of a 19th-century Englishman in judging other cultures.

Tylor’s concept of progressive development

After Anahuac, Tylor published three major works. Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization (1865), which immediately established his reputation as a leading anthropologist, elaborated the thesis that cultures past and present, civilized and primitive, must be studied as parts of a single history of human thought. “The past,” he wrote, “is continually needed to explain the present, and the whole to explain the part.” Tylor’s fame, however, is based chiefly upon the publication of Primitive Culture. In it he again traced a progressive development from a savage to a civilized state and pictured primitive man as an early philosopher applying his reason to explain events in the human and natural world that were beyond his control, even though his scientific ignorance produced erroneous explanations. Tylor identified, for example, the earliest form of religious belief as “animism,” a belief in spiritual beings, arrived at, he assumed, by primitive attempts to explain the difference between the living body and the corpse and the separation of soul and body in dreams.

Primitive Culture also elaborated upon a theme that became a central concept in his work: the relation of primitive cultures to modern populations.

By long experience of the course of human society, the principle of development in culture has become so ingrained in our philosophy that ethnologists, of whatever school, hardly doubt but that, whether by progress or degradation, savagery and civilization are connected as lower and higher stages of one formation.

Thus, “culture” should be studied not only in the artistic and spiritual achievements of civilizations but in man’s technological and moral accomplishments made at all stages of his development. Tylor noted how customs and beliefs from a distant, primitive past seemed to have lived on into the modern world, and he became well-known for his examination of such “survivals,” a concept that he introduced. His evolutionary view of human development was endorsed by most of his colleagues and, of course, by Charles Darwin, who had established biological evolution as the key to the emergence of the human species.

Get Unlimited Access

Try Britannica Premium for free and discover more.

Subscribe

Legacy

In the late 19th-century political and theological controversy over the question whether all the races of mankind belonged physically and mentally to a single species, Tylor was a powerful advocate of the physical and psychological unity of all mankind. On this question, as in all anthropological disputes, he based his position on respect for empirical evidence, which he hoped would bring the standards and procedures of the natural sciences to the study of humanity.

His last book, Anthropology, an Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization (1881), is an excellent summary of what was, late in the 19th century, known and thought in that field. Like all Tylor’s work, it conveys a vast quantity of information in a lucid and energetic style.

Tylor was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1871 and given a doctorate of civil law at the University of Oxford in 1875. Eight years later he returned to Oxford to give lectures and stayed there as keeper of the university’s museum, becoming reader in anthropology in 1884 and the first professor of anthropology in 1896. He was also elected the first Gifford lecturer at Aberdeen University in 1888. He retired from active life in 1909 and died in 1917.