Primitive Culture
Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom

The highly influential classic study of cultural evolution as an anthropological theory, first published in 1871.

Edward Burnett Tylor (Author)

9781108017503, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 December 2010

468 pages
21.6 x 14 x 3 cm, 0.59 kg

Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) was an English anthropologist who is widely considered the founder of anthropology as a scientific discipline. He was the first Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oxford from 1896 to 1909, and developed a broad definition of culture which is still used by scholars. First published in 1871, this classic work explains Tylor's idea of cultural evolution in relation to anthropology, a social theory which states that human cultures invariably change over time to become more complex. Unlike his contemporaries, Tylor did not link biological evolution to cultural evolution, asserting that all human minds are the same irrespective of a society's state of evolution. His book was extremely influential in popularising the study of anthropology and establishing cultural evolution as the main theoretical framework followed by anthropologists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Volume 1 focuses on social evolution, language and myth.

Preface
1. The science of culture
2. The development of culture
3. Survival in culture
4. Survival in culture continued
5. Emotional and imitative language
6. Emotional and imitative language continued
7. The art of counting
8. Mythology
9. Mythology continued
10. Mythology continued
11. Animism.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC]