How Do Cultures Evolve? - featuring Edward Burnett Tylor — Anthropology Theory #1

How Do Cultures Evolve? - Anthropological Theory – Edward Burnett Tylor

19th Century Anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor developed “unilineal cultural evolution”—a theory implying that cultures evolve from simple to complex forms. Unfortunately, some “Primitive” cultures could be considered “stuck” and unable to evolve.

Tylor believed that all of our cultural innovations, not only firearms, but also science, mathematics, and even religion, evolved. But in their evolution, some cultural practices, like shaking hands or saying “Bless you,” were carried into the present, even though many of their original meanings have been lost; shaking hands originally was a way to show that we came in peace and didn’t have any weapons; and we used to say “God Bless you,” because of an old belief that it was the soul trying to escape. For Tylor, cultural survivals like these proved that all cultures evolved from older “primitive” forms that look similar to what we see all over the world today. This idea that some contemporary cultures depict an evolutionary stage that ALL cultures evolved from is called uniformitarianism—which is a term borrowed from the natural sciences.

Tylor’s research focused mainly on religion. Being born into a British Quaker family, Tylor developed agnostic beliefs that led him to see religion as just another cultural and intellectual system. This is seen in his first book which is based off his observations from when he accompanied an archaeologist through Mexico. Here, Tylor (1861, 126) describes how a lot of the instability and poverty there was born out of the “doleful ignorance” that the Catholic Church perpetuated, especially as priests, who Tylor claimed concealed their own ignorance with fake wisdom and long words, had a monopoly on the educational system.

In some ways, Tylor rejected racism because his “uniformitarianism” argued that all human minds are similar, and so we can look at other humans to see older stages of culture. In his two-volume series Primitive Culture, Tylor outlines all his ideas, as well as giving what’s considered to be the first real definition of culture as: “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”

Later anthropologists, like Franz Boas, would reject “evolution” as a proper theory altogether because it assumes way too much. Instead, Boas would argue that we need to understand the specific cultural contexts that cultures developed, and a large part of this is rooted in history.

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This video uses data from FIVE sources:
1.
Erickson, Paul A., and Liam D. Murphy. 2017. A History of Anthropological Theory, 5th ed. University of Toronto Press.
Find book here: https://amzn.to/2FXkCSu
2.
Hsu, F. L. 1964. Rethinking the Concept "Primitive". Current Anthropology, 5(3), 169-178.
3.
Moore, Jerry D. 2012. Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists. New York: Alta Mira Press.
Find book here: https://amzn.to/2I6W7nR
4.
Tylor, Edward. 1861. Anahuac: Or, Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern. London UK: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts.
Access FREE at: https://archive.org/details/anahuacor...
For physical copy: https://amzn.to/2ruaMCA
5.
Tylor, Edward. 1958. Primitive Culture. New York, NY: Harper & Row. [Originally published 1871.]
Volume 1: https://amzn.to/2FX01xD
Volume 2: https://amzn.to/2HZNIGM
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Topics:
edward burnett tylor
anthropology
cultural evolution
how cultures change over time
how cultures evolve
edward burnett tylor anthropologist
edward tylor anthropologist
how cultures are different
cultural evolution anthropology