Edward Burnett Tylor - Ideology and "Primitive Culture"

Ideology and "Primitive Culture"

Tylor’s ideology is best described in his most famous work, the two-volume Primitive Culture. The first volume, The Origins of Culture, deals with various aspects of ethnography including social evolution, linguistics, and myth. The second volume, titled Religion in Primitive Culture, deals mainly with his interpretation of animism. Fundamental to understanding Tylor’s ideology, is acknowledging that he is considered an ‘undertaker of religion’. Tylor displays negative feelings towards religion, and especially Christianity.

On the first page of Primitive Culture, Tylor provides an all-inclusive definition which is one of his most widely recognized contributions to anthropology and the study of religion : “Culture, or civilization, taken in its broad, ethnographic sense, 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.”

Unlike many of his predecessors and contemporaries, Tylor asserts that the human mind and its capabilities are the same globally, despite a particular society’s stage in social evolution. This means that a hunter-gatherer society would possess the same amount of intelligence as an advanced industrial society. The difference, Tylor asserts, is education, which he considers the cumulative knowledge and methodology that takes thousands of years to acquire. Tylor often likens primitive cultures to “children”, and sees culture and the mind of humans as progressive. His work was a refutation of the theory of social degeneration, which was popular at the time. At the end of Primitive Culture, Tylor writes, “The science of culture is essentially a reformers' science.”

Another term ascribed to Tylor was his theory of “survivals.” Tylor asserted that when a society evolves, certain customs are retained that are unnecessary in the new society, like outworn and useless “baggage”. His definition of survivals are “processes, customs, and opinions, and so forth, which have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which they had their original home, and they thus remain as proofs and examples of an older condition of culture out of which a newer has been evolved.” This can include outdated practices, such as the European practice of bloodletting, which lasted long after the medical theories on which it was based had faded from use and been replaced by more modern techniques. Despite much criticism about his survivals (critics argued that he identified the term but provided an insufficient reason as to why survivals continue), his coining of the term is still acknowledged.