Tylor, Edward Burnett (1832–1917)

Edward Burnett Tylor, often considered the founder of cultural anthropology as a field of study, made enormous contributions to the development of the discipline as it has come to be known. He was a contemporary of other important contributors to the field, such as Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, Sir James Frazer, and Lewis Henry Morgan, among others. It was in Tylor's definitive work, Primitive Culture (1871), where his greatest contribution would be made to anthropology, in particular through advancing the idea of sociocultural evolution, a process of change in human societies that occurs over time.

Tylor was born in Camberwell, London, England, on October 2, 1832. His parents, Joseph Tylor and Harriet Skipper, were Quakers. Being brought up in a household dominated by the Society of Friends, along with being educated at a local Quaker school in Tottenham, was no doubt influential on his life and later works, where his focus was on religion and its evolution, one of the key features of Primitive Culture

Tylor worked a while in his father's business, a brass foundry. Around the age of 20, however, he showed signs of tuberculosis and was forced into an early retirement. It was during this time that he was granted a chance to embark on an overseas trip to the United States, which he toured extensively in 1855 and 1856.

In Cuba, he met the famed British ethnographer and archaeologist Henry Christy, also a Quaker. The two embarked on a journey to Mexico, which resulted in the production in 1861 of Tylor's first published work, Anahuac, a memoir of the trip containing relevant anthropological notes on the people he had encountered.

Tylor returned to England and married, then published his Researches Into the Early History of Mankind in 1865. This publication would prove the foundation for his grand opus, Primitive Culture: Researches Into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom in 1871. Following this work was the also-popular Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization in 1881. [Page 1386]Tylor was awarded many titles throughout his career. Beginning in 1871, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society, received a Doctor of Civil Laws degree from Oxford in 1875, Reader in Anthropology (1884), and then became first Professor of Anthropology at Oxford in 1896, the first academic post in the field of anthropology. In recognition of his achievements, Tylor was knighted in 1912, only 5 years before his death.

Tylor's contributions to the field of ethnology and cultural anthropology are monumental. He is well known for his ideas of sociocultural evolution and work with animism (a “primitive” religion whose beliefs include spiritual beings, as well as attributing life in terms of a soul to inanimate objects in nature, e.g., rocks and water). Tylor claimed that religion followed a unilinear track of evolution from simple animism, through polytheism, to complex monotheism. A contemporary of Charles Darwin, Tylor was influenced heavily by Darwin's works. In fact, the two maintained a close correspondence, with Tylor offering the opportunity for one of Darwin's sons to help him with <>

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