E. B. Tylor and the Problem of Primitive Culture

Abstract Edward Burnett Tylor’s (1832–1917) theory of survivals, or elements of the “primitive” or archaic past that continued to play an active part in the beliefs of the present day, hallmarks the Victorian effort to isolate and display what were thought to be the most developed features of the contemporary world. However, in focusing on what was outmoded in society, the theory of survivals brought primitive beliefs into an uncomfortable relationship with the beliefs of the present, threatening to disrupt the harmony of this conception. The resulting problems of recognition and understanding in the theory of survivals led Tylor finally to affirm a static and mechanical view of the continuity of cultures, in opposition to the radical, dynamic view with which he had been working until the publication in Citation1871 of Primitive Culture. Keywords: Edward Burnett TylorTheory of SurvivalsPrimitive CultureVictorian AnthropologyDevelopment Theory Notes 1 One of Tylor’s biographers, R. R. Marett, defined Tylor’s theory against that of Herbert Spencer as “the survival of the un‐fittest” (Marett Citation1936: 26). Marett also reports that “In 1884 Tylor took the opportunity of running South to New Mexico … for a turn in the Pueblo country” (1936: 14–15). This “Pueblo country” was the same region of the southwestern United States in which Warburg later gathered the material for his famous lecture on snake ritual. 2 See, for example, the recent study by Adam Kuper, The Reinvention of Primitive Society: Transformations of a Myth (Kuper Citation2005), especially Part 1. 3 See also Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (Citation1991). In his Archaeology of E. B. Tylor Richard J Parmentier writes that “The problem of rationality emerges as the central concept in Tylor’s problematic” (Citation1976: 62). 4 It is instructive to note the parallels in this difference between “official” and “unofficial” views of Tylor and the variations that Joan Leopold discovers between Tylor’s views of the origin of Indo‐European myths during his published work of the 1860s. See Leopold (Citation1973: 13).