Edward Tylor

Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) was a British anthropologist who gave the discipline its first systematic scientific framework. Born into a Quaker manufacturing family in London, he never attended a university — ill health sent him to the Americas in his twenties — yet he became Oxford’s first professor of anthropology and was eventually knighted for his work. His two-volume Primitive Culture (1871) proposed that all of humanity’s religious and intellectual history could be studied as a natural science, governed by cause and effect, and that the beliefs of modern educated people could be traced directly to the beliefs of ancient and contemporary peoples living in simpler conditions. His definition of culture and his theory of animism shaped every major anthropologist who followed him, including James Frazer, Franz Boas, and, through Frazer, Sigmund Freud.

Background

Tylor’s starting assumption was that human history is part of natural history. “To many educated minds,” he wrote, “there seems something presumptuous and repulsive in the view that the history of mankind is part and parcel of the history of nature, that our thoughts, wills, and actions accord with laws as definite as those which govern the motion of waves, the combination of acids and bases, and the growth of plants and animals.” (Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871)

His working definition of culture was correspondingly broad: “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.”(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) By including belief and custom alongside technology and law, Tylor made the intellectual and spiritual life of every society, however simple, a legitimate object of scientific inquiry. He was explicit about the scope of the inquiry he was embarking on: more than half of Primitive Culture would be devoted to a mass of evidence “from all regions of the world, displaying the nature and meaning” of Animism — the doctrine of souls and other spiritual beings — as the foundational element of religious philosophy from savage to civilized cultures.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) He also made it comparable to the intellectual and spiritual life of every other society — a move that was both the power and the controversy of his method.

His primary tool was what he called the comparative method: treating cultural practices like biological species, mapping their geographic distribution, and tracing their transmission from region to region.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) When two independent observers in distant parts of the world described an identical practice, Tylor argued, coincidence and fraud became implausible explanations. Uniform effects required uniform causes.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) The argument drew directly on the naturalist’s logic, and Tylor used it to build a case from thousands of individual reports.

Animism: The Minimum Definition of Religion

The largest problem Tylor set himself in Primitive Culture was religion. He wanted a definition broad enough to apply across all human societies and precise enough to be tested against evidence. His solution was the minimum definition: “the belief in Spiritual Beings.”(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) He called this animism, from the Latin anima (soul, breath, life), and argued that it was “the groundwork of the Philosophy of Religion, from that of savages up to that of civilized men” — present in its most direct form among peoples living in the simplest conditions, persisting in modified form throughout the most sophisticated religious traditions.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871)

The minimum definition was deliberate. Tylor noticed that previous attempts to define religion had used features — belief in a supreme deity, a moral code, organized ritual — that excluded many societies anthropologists had studied. His definition included them all. Any society that believed in any spiritual beings, of any kind, qualified as religious. This was not a low bar set to patronize simpler cultures; it was an attempt to identify the shared intellectual core of religious thought before it acquired the specific features any one tradition had layered onto it.

The argument for why this core took the form it did rested on two questions that Tylor believed any observant primitive human would ask. The first was the biological question: what is the difference between a living body and a dead one? The second was the psychological question: what are those human shapes that appear in dreams and visions? His answer was that early humans, reasoning from available evidence, concluded that each person contained a separable entity — something like a shadow or a vapour, able to depart from the body in sleep and depart permanently at death. He called this the ghost-soul: “a thin unsubstantial human image, in its nature a sort of vapour, film, or shadow; the cause of life and thought in the individual it animates; independently possessing the personal consciousness and volition of its corporeal owner.”(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871)

This was not a fantasy or an error on primitive humanity’s part. It was, Tylor insisted, a reasonable inference from real experience — the experience of dreaming, of fainting, of watching people die. What distinguished it from science was not the quality of the reasoning but the data the reasoners had available to them.

The Doctrine of Souls

Tylor supported the ghost-soul theory with two kinds of evidence. The first was linguistic. He showed that words for “soul” in language families across the world derive from words for shadow or breath — suggesting that speakers had formed the soul concept by analogy with these visible, tangible things. In Hebrew, nephesh passes from “breath” into all the meanings of “life, soul, mind, animal”; ruach and neshamah make the same transition from “breath” to “spirit.” Sanskrit atman and prana, Greek psyche and pneuma, Latin animus, anima, spiritus all follow the same pattern.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) The pattern was too consistent across unrelated language families to be coincidental. It indicated that the soul was universally conceived by analogy with what could be seen or felt leaving a living body at death.

The second kind of evidence was medical. The animistic theory of vitality generated a specific theory of disease: illness was explained as the departure of the soul from the body, or as the entry of a foreign soul into the body. Soul-loss as a cause of sickness was documented from the Americas to Asia. Among Algonquin Indians, sickness was explained as the patient’s shadow “being unsettled or detached from his body”; the convalescent was warned not to expose himself before his shadow was safely settled back in.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) Karen people of Burma explained illness as the là (soul) having departed, and their spirit-doctors’ professional task was to retrieve it.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871)

Soul-retrieval is a regular part of the sorcerer’s or priest’s profession in various countries, as with the Salish medicine-man solemnly replacing the lost spirit through the patient’s head.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) The Salish Indians of Oregon regard the spirit as distinct from the vital principle, and capable of quitting the body for a short time without the patient being conscious of it.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871)

Greenlanders believed the soul “goes out hunting, dancing, and visiting” during dreams.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) Karen people explained that the soul could only visit regions where its body had already been.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871)

Many societies recognized not one soul but several, each performing different functions. Fijians distinguished the “dark spirit” that went to Hades from the “light spirit” that remained near the death site. Dakotas held that a person had four souls — one remaining with the corpse, one staying in the village, one moving in the air, and one going to the land of spirits.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) Tylor connected these plural-soul schemes to analogous divisions in ancient Egyptian religion, Rabbinical tradition, and Platonic philosophy, arguing that all could be traced back to the same original reasoning about dreams and death that generated the ghost-soul in the first place.

The doctrine of a Future Life is the all but necessary outcome of savage Animism.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) Because lower races already believe that the figures of the dead seen in dreams and visions are their surviving souls, the survival of the soul beyond bodily death follows naturally from the ghost-soul theory.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) Tylor identifies two main forms of this afterlife: the transmigration of souls (metempsychosis) and the independent future life in a spirit-land.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871)

Tylor traced metempsychosis (the transmigration of souls into new bodies) from its simplest forms — Algonquin burial of dead children beside the road so their souls could re-enter passing mothers(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) — through its most elaborated form in Hindu philosophy, where the Book of Manu specified the exact animal bodies into which different crimes would condemn the soul, and where all creatures stood in kinship with one another because any animal might once have been human.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) The continuity between these forms was, for Tylor, not coincidence but development: the Hindu metempsychosis was the savage transmigration belief given a systematic moral architecture.

Survivals Theory

The most influential methodological concept Tylor introduced was the survival: a “process, custom, opinion, or so forth, which has been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which it had its original home,” persisting as a living relic of an earlier cultural condition.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) He illustrated the concept with a Somersetshire woman still weaving on a hand-loom after the flying shuttle had replaced it — not a century behind the times in general, but a case of survival in one practice. The same logic applied to beliefs.

Survivals mattered because they provided evidence.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) A practice that had lost its original rationale but continued by habit recorded the earlier conditions in which it had made sense.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871)

Magic was Tylor’s main extended example of how survivals worked in intellectual life. Magic, he argued, was based on the Association of Ideas: early humans, having learned by experience to associate certain things in thought (smoke and fire, clouds and rain), reasoned inversely and concluded that association in thought must also produce connection in reality. To hurt an enemy, one acted on his hair clippings, his nail parings, or his clothing — objects associated with him.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) This was not stupidity; it was a logical inversion of a correct inference, applied to a domain where it did not hold. The error was systematic, and its traces persisted: Tylor documented the fear of leaving nail clippings where enemies might find them not only among “Australian and Polynesian savages” but throughout European folklore.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871)

Modern spiritualism was, in Tylor’s reading, not a new phenomenon but a revival of ancient animistic beliefs, with old thoughts and practices bursting out afresh in the history of modern spiritualism.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) Tylor held that the study of such survivals has practical importance because “a reasonable explanation is superstition’s deadliest enemy.”(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) He further argued that spiritualism had its source in early stages of culture, in close connection with witchcraft, and that phenomena like spirit-rapping, spirit-writing, and the performances of tied mediums — documented globally — were not modern inventions but continuations of the same animistic philosophy the educated modern world professed to have outgrown.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871)

Disease-possession was another survival of major importance for the history of medicine. Tylor documented the possession theory of illness — the belief that disease was caused by a foreign spirit entering the body — across Malay, Dayak, Polynesian, West African, and American sources.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) The person convulsing in fever, writhing as though something alive were tearing him from within, seemed to primitive diagnosis to offer direct evidence of an inhabiting spirit. The exorcist who talked to, threatened, and expelled the disease-spirit was the natural complementary professional figure. Tylor then traced this theory without interruption into classical Greece, where Hippocrates’ epilepsy was a “seizure” by superhuman agents, into the New Testament accounts of demoniacs, into early Christian congregations where “energumens” (the possessed) had assigned standing-places, and into the medical and religious practices of his own century.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) The same logic governed the Delphic oracle — a fact Tylor pressed home with some force: a Pacific Islander visiting Delphi to watch the Pythia convulse and prophesy “would have needed no explanation whatever of a rite so absolutely in conformity with his own savage philosophy.”(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871)

The possession theory also explained why certain kinds of people became healers and seers. Among Siberian tribes, Tylor observed, shamans selected children “liable to convulsions” as suitable recruits for the profession, which was apt to become hereditary with the epileptic tendencies it expressed.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) The “sickly brooding enthusiast” who was constitutionally prone to dissociation — trance, fits, prolonged ecstatic states — was not disqualified by his condition but selected for it: his symptoms were taken as evidence that spirits had already singled him out. Tylor saw this as a continuous pattern across cultures: “a class of sickly brooding enthusiasts” maintained “power over the minds of their lustier fellows” throughout history.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871)

The Comparative Method and Cultural Evolution

Tylor proposed a three-stage scheme for the development of culture: savagery, barbarism, and civilization.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) He was careful to specify that these stages described intellectual and technological development, not racial capacity — any society could in principle move through them. The scheme was not primarily a ranking but an analytical tool: it allowed the ethnographer to place a given practice within a developmental sequence and ask what earlier conditions produced it.

The comparative method underpinned everything. Cultural phenomena, treated as species, could be mapped across the globe and their distribution studied for patterns of transmission and independent origin.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) When the same practice appeared in societies with no documented contact, this was evidence of independent development from common causes — the uniformity of human minds under similar conditions. When a practice appeared in a more advanced society in a diminished or altered form, this was evidence of survival from an earlier stratum.

Tylor applied this method to religion in a sequence: animism (belief in individual souls) expanded by the logic of “spirits as personified causes” — all events affecting human life were explained as the willful actions of soul-like personal beings — into a full philosophy of natural religion.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) The human soul served as the template on which all other spiritual beings, from local demons to high gods, were fashioned. Ancestor veneration (manes-worship) was “one of the great branches of the religion of mankind,” found in societies from Brazil to Japan: the logic was simply that the dead ancestor, having passed into a spiritual state, continued to protect his own family and receive service from them as he had in life.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) Tylor traced this continuously into Christian hagiolatry, where saints performed exactly the same protective functions previously assigned to local patron gods — a direct survival. The animistic theory of embodiment — enabling spirits to inhabit material objects — provided the logical foundation for fetishism and idolatry: a spirit could be “laid” in a foreign body to neutralize it, or carried in a material object for use, or set up in an animal or image as a deity, the object serving as a vessel containing the spirit as a vessel contains a fluid.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871)

Prayer, sacrifice, fasting, trance, and ritual purification all followed the same developmental arc in Tylor’s analysis. Tylor organized the analysis around a fundamental theoretical division: religious rites fall into two categories that blend in practice — expressive symbolic performances (the dramatic utterance of religious thought, the gesture-language of theology) and practical means of intercourse with spiritual beings, whose intention is “as directly practical as any chemical or mechanical process.”(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) The first category is about expression; the second is about achieving results in a world populated by spirits. Prayer moved from unethical petition (requests for personal benefit) to ethical prayer incorporating moral self-improvement.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) Sacrifice originated in the gift-theory — presenting a deity with valuables or life as one would give a powerful human patron — and evolved toward symbolic homage.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) Fasting, drug-use, and sleep-deprivation were documented cross-culturally as methods for producing the visionary ecstasy in which spirits were encountered and healing power obtained, with Tylor showing continuity from lower-culture trance induction through classical mystery rites to medieval Christian asceticism.(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) In each case, the later religious practice preserved the earlier one’s form while transforming its meaning.

Influence and Critique

Tylor stated the practical purpose of his work plainly in his final chapter. Ethnography’s task was to trace the intellectual ancestry of modern opinion — to ask, for each belief currently held, whether it rested “on the strong ground of soundest modern knowledge, or how far only on such knowledge as was available in the earlier and ruder stages of culture where their types were shaped.”(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) He classified beliefs into three kinds: those supported by direct positive evidence; those derived from cruder originals but adapted well enough to serve advanced purposes; and survivals — “opinions belonging properly to lower intellectual levels, which have held their place into the higher by mere force of ancestral tradition.”(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) The third class was his target.

He applied this classification explicitly to theology. Every religious doctrine and rite, he proposed, should be tested: is it “a product of the earlier theology yet sound enough to maintain a rightful place in the later”? Is it “derived from a cruder original yet so modified as to become a proper representative of more advanced views”? Or is it “a survival from a lower stage of thought, imposing on the credit of the higher by virtue not of inherent truth but of ancestral belief”?(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871) Tylor was not urging the abolition of religion. He was proposing ethnographic analysis as a tool for distinguishing genuine theological insight from cultural inertia. The science of culture was, he wrote, “essentially a reformer’s science.”(Tylor, Edward Burnett, 1871)

The influence of this program was wide and uneven. James Frazer extended Tylor’s comparative method in The Golden Bough (1890), systematizing the survivals analysis across an enormous range of European and non-European material. Sigmund Freud drew directly on Tylor’s animism framework in Totem and Taboo (1913), using the concept of the omnipotence of thought — which Freud derived from Tylor’s account of magic as inverted associationism — as the psychological mechanism linking primitive animism to obsessional neurosis. Franz Boas, who had worked within the evolutionary framework before repudiating it, maintained Tylor’s insistence on the rigorous collection of evidence even while rejecting the developmental sequence Tylor had built from it.

The critiques that came in the twentieth century targeted the evolutionary scheme rather than the comparative method as such. Anthropologists after Boas objected that Tylor’s three-stage model imposed a single developmental track on enormously varied cultural histories; that the evidence gathered by missionaries and colonial officers was systematically distorted by the conditions under which it was collected; and that the confidence with which Tylor positioned “savage” belief as the ancestral form of “civilized” belief depended on assumptions about progress that were not themselves scientific. The animism theory specifically was challenged on empirical grounds: many so-called primitive peoples had complex cosmologies that did not fit the ghost-soul model, and the claim that animism was the universal minimum of religion was contested by evidence of traditions organized around impersonal forces rather than personal spirits.

Tylor’s definition of culture, however, survived these critiques largely intact. The formula from Chapter I of Primitive Culture — “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” — remained a touchstone in anthropology well into the twentieth century, precisely because it gave no priority to any particular element and left the full range of human practice open to investigation.

See Also

• animism
• survivals
• comparative-method
• james-frazer
• sigmund-freud
• franz-boas
• shamanism
• spirit-possession
• soul-doctrine

Sources