Primitive Culture

Due to his Quaker family background, Edward Burnett Tylor (b. 1832; d. 1917) never received a higher school or university degree. He discovered his interest in human culture during a journey to Mexico in 1856 that was arranged as a treatment of his tuberculosis, resulting in his first work Anahuac: Or Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern (1861). Inspired by the growing literature on biological and cultural evolution, Tylor aimed at a more thorough explanation of cultural history in his second book Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization (1865). His most influential work, however, was Primitive Culture, published in two volumes in 1871. Here, we find his most important contributions to academic discourse – the concepts of “animism” and of “survival”. In recognition of his scientific merits, Tylor was first appointed a reader in anthropology (1884). In 1896, Tylor became the first professor of anthropology in England (University of Oxford).

We present an excerpt from chapter four of the first volume of Primitive Culture on “Survivals in culture”. Tylor employs the term “survival” to signify and explain vestiges of former thoughts and practices (such as customs, games, riddles, sayings, etc.) that had lost their utility but were retained, even if poorly integrated, in contemporary culture. Tylor's rationale for classifying “magic” as a “survival” is an overall scheme of cultural evolution: “magic”, he claims, belongs “in its main principle to the lowest known stages of civilization” and while “progressive races have been learning to submit their opinions to closer and closer experimental tests, occult science has been breaking down into the condition of a survival”.