Tylor, Edward Burnett 1832-1917

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TYLOR, Edward Burnett 1832-1917

PERSONAL: Born October 2, 1832, in London, England; died, January 2, 1917, in Wellington, Somerset, England; son of a London brass foundry owner; mar ried Anna Fox. Education: Studied at Grove House, a private school run by the Quakers.

CAREER: Oxford University Museum, curator, beginning 1883; Oxford University, reader of anthropology, 1884-95; first professor of anthropology, beginning 1896.

MEMBER: British Association, anthropology division (president, 1884).

AWARDS, HONORS: Balliol College, selected as honorary fellow, 1903; knighted, 1912.

WRITINGS:

Anahuac; or, Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient andModern, Longman, Green (London, England), 1861.

Researches into the Early History of Mankind and theDevelopment of Civilization, J. Murray (London, England), 1865, revised edition, Estes & Lauriat (Boston, MA), 1878.

Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development ofMythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, two volumes, J. Murray (London, England), 1871, Estes & Lauriat (Boston, MA), 1874.

Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization, Appleton (New York, NY), 1881.

Totem-post from the Haida Village of Masset, Harrison & Sons (London, England), 1898.

Letters from Edward B. Tylor and Alfred Russel Wallace to Edward Westermarck, edited by K. Rob V. Wikman, Åbo Akademi (Turku, Finland), 1940.

Contributor of articles to scholarly journals, including Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Mind, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society of Washington, and Smithsonian Institution Annual Report.

SIDELIGHTS: Known as one of the founders of modern anthropology, Edward Burnett Tylor wrote works that form part of the "war between science and religion" that took place during the Victorian age in Europe. Tylor's works demonstrate his use of scientific methods to investigate aspects of various cultures, such as anthropology, folklore, and religion. In his most famous study, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, he objects to racism and stresses the humanity of all people, while acknowledging various levels of cultural development.

He spent his later years teaching and organizing his research. Among his followers is James Frazer, author of the influential study of mythology The Golden Bough.

The son of a prosperous Quaker family, Tylor was educated at a Quaker school and went to work in his father's London brass foundry at age sixteen. While in his early twenties, Tylor was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent abroad, spending some time in the southern United States and visiting Cuba. In Havana he fortuitously met banker and amateur ethnologist Henry Christy, with whom he toured Mexico. This voyage sparked Tylor's interest in anthropology and provided the material for his first book, Anahuac; or, Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern, which is part travelogue and part amateur anthropological study.

In his next work, Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization, Tylor tries to answer the question, "When similar arts, customs, beliefs, or legends are found in several distant regions, among peoples not known to be of the same stock, how is this similarly to be accounted for?" Tylor observes that human responses in different parts of the world among different peoples, such as use of basic tools, mythologies, relationships among family members, and marriage customs, have often been similar at a like level of cultural development. Thus Tylor presents evidence that human nature is the same throughout the world.

Again Tylor argues for the unity of mankind in his 1871 publication, Primitive Culture. In Tylor's view, history, geography, and race have little impact on human nature. This hypothesis was in direct contrast to works by other writers of the era. Yet it was Tylor's definition of culture that survived: "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 Tylor was a scientific rationalist who believed that social evolution was in the main progressive, he also remarked on survivals ("fragments of a dead lower culture embedded in a living higher one") and the possibility of regression to earlier stages of societal evolution. One such example of survivals are superstitions, which Tylor collected in his Primitive Culture.

Although his Quaker beliefs prohibited Tylor from studying at Oxford, he later joined the faculty at that institution. There he continued to be influential in developing the science of anthropology. Within the British Association he founded an anthropology division and held the post of curator at the University Museum. For nearly a half-century Tylor's Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization was "one of the best general introductions to the subject in the English language," according to the writer of the book's introduction.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 57: Victorian Prose Writers after 1867, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1987.

The Dictionary of National Biography: 1912-1921, Oxford University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1927.

Kardiner, Abram, and Edward Preble, They StudiedMan, Mentor (New York, NY), 1963.

Leopold, Joan, Culture in Comparative and Evolutionary Perspective: E. B. Tylor and the Making of "Primitive Culture," Reimer (Berlin, Germany), 1980.

Marett, Robert R., Tylor, Wiley (New York, NY), 1936.

Stocking, George W., Race, Culture, and Evolution:Essays in the History of Anthropology, Free Press (New York, NY), 1968.

T. K. Penniman, A Hundred Years of Anthropology, Duckworth (London, England), 1965.