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Tylor, Sir Edward Burnett

A Dictionary of Sociology

Tylor, Sir Edward Burnett (1832–1917) An English Victorian anthropologist who was the first to teach social anthropology under its name at Oxford, beginning in 1884. He is best known for formulating the first well known definition of culture as ‘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’.

In Primitive Culture (1871), Tylor contributed to the development of the tools of comparative religion, especially with his theory of animism (see TOTEMISM), which he saw as a primordial form of primitive religion. Tylor was a proponent of evolutionary theory, deeming some aspects of culture to be functionless survivals from the past, and seeing other elements as survival strategies. One of his famous statements on this subject was that, in the history of societal evolution, the choice facing many peoples was ‘to marry out or die out’. In this way, by creating alliances through intermarriage, potentially threatening groups could be co-opted.

Tylor was ground-breaking in his use of social arithmetic—the use of statistics in the analysis of societies. Using such methods, he demonstrated convincingly that the avoidance of in-laws by daughters or sons was based upon choice of residence at marriage. If residence is uxorilocal, the son would be expected to avoid his in-laws, but if residence is virilocal, the daughter is more likely to practise such behaviour. On the basis of this evidence, Tylor proceeded to explain other customs, including the presence of certain kinship terms. This style of analysis, which interwove distinct cultural practices, contributed to the development of functionalism, which later became the first major paradigm of modern British social anthropology.

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© A Dictionary of Sociology 1998, originally published by Oxford University Press 1998.