Edward Burnett Tylor

Edward Burnett Tylor was an English anthropologist who founded the scientific study of cultural anthropology in the nineteenth century. Born in 1832 to a wealthy Quaker family in Camberwell, London, he left school at sixteen and developed his lifelong interest in unfamiliar cultures after a formative 1855 journey to the Americas, where he worked with the ethnologist and archaeologist Henry Christy. His most influential book, Primitive Culture (1871), helped establish anthropology as a discipline and set out the foundational definition of culture as the complex whole of knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and other capabilities acquired by a person as a member of society. Tylor reintroduced the term animism into scholarly use, treating it as the earliest stage of religious development, and argued that all societies passed through three developmental stages of savagery, barbarism and civilization. In 1896 he became Oxford University's first Professor of Anthropology, and he was knighted in 1912 for his scholarly contributions. He died in 1917 in Wellington, Somerset.