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Primitive Culture is an 1871 book by Edward Burnett Tylor. In his book, Tylor debates the relationship between "primitive" societies and "civilized" societies, a key theme in 19th century anthropological literature.
It has been used by Edward Tylor in his book Primitive Culture. [4] The name is included in the motto (drawn originally from the Satires of Juvenal) Quidquid agunt homines nostri farrago libelli est – "whatever men do forms the motley subject of our page" which was written on the first issue of the famous eighteenth-century periodical Tatler.
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. [7] At the end of Primitive Culture, Tylor writes, "The science of culture is essentially a reformers' science." [24]
Robert Ranulph Marett (13 June 1866 – 18 February 1943) was a British ethnologist and a proponent of the British Evolutionary School of cultural anthropology.Founded by Marett's older colleague, Edward Burnett Tylor, it asserted that modern primitive societies provide evidence for phases in the evolution of culture, which it attempted to recapture via comparative and historical methods.
Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1871 [10]: 116 Lewis H. Morgan, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871), Ancient Society, 1877; John Wesley Powell, The Arid Lands (originally published as Report on the Lands of the Arid Regions of the United States), 1878 [10]: 39
Frazer's interest in social anthropology was aroused by reading E. B. Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871) and was also encouraged by his friend, the biblical scholar William Robertson Smith, who was comparing elements of the Old Testament with early Hebrew folklore.
Tylor and Morgan elaborated the theory of unilinear evolution, specifying criteria for categorising cultures according to their standing within a fixed system of growth of humanity as a whole and examining the modes and mechanisms of this growth. Theirs was often a concern with culture in general, not with individual cultures.
One of the earliest articulations of the anthropological meaning of the term "culture" came from Sir Edward Tylor: "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."