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Edward Burnett Tylor, Religion and Culture Ii i Edward Burnett Tylor, Religion and Culture ii Also available from Bloomsbury Contemporary Evolutionary Theories of Culture and the Study of Religion, Radek Kundt Indigenous Religions: A Companion, edited by Graham Harvey Readings in Indigenous Religions, edited by Graham Harvey Religion and the Discourse on Modernity, Paul- François Tremlett Words Remembered, Texts Renewed: Essays in Honour of John F. A. Sawyer, edited by Jon Davies, Graham Harvey and Wilfred G. E. Watson iii Edward Burnett Tylor, Religion and Culture Edited by Paul- François Tremlett, Liam T. Sutherland and Graham Harvey Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc LONDON • OXFORD • NEW YORK • NEW DELHI • SYDNEY iv Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Paul- François Tremlett, Liam T. Sutherland, Graham Harvey and Contributors, 2017 Paul- François Tremlett, Liam T. Sutherland and Graham Harvey have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-0341-5 ePDF: 978-1-3500-0343-9 ePub: 978-1-3500-0342-2 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India v Contents Contributors vii Acknowledgements viii Introduction: Why Tylor, Why Now? Paul- François Tremlett, Liam T. Sutherland and Graham Harvey 1 Part 1 Contexts and Debates 9 1 The Debate between E. B. Tylor and Andrew Lang over the Theory of Primitive Monotheism: Implications for Contemporary Studies of Indigenous Religions James L. Cox 11 2 Tylor, ‘Fetishes’ and the Matter of Animism Graham Harvey 29 3 ‘Belief in Spiritual Beings’: E. B. Tylor’s (Primitive) Cognitive Theory of Religion Jonathan Jong 47 4 From Nineteenth- to Twentieth- Century Theorizing about Myth in Britain and Germany: Tylor versus Blumenberg Robert A. Segal 63 5 Tylor and Debates about the Definition of ‘Religion’: Then and Now Liam T. Sutherland 87 Part 2 Tylor beyond the Canon 105 6 Edward Burnett Tylor as Ethnographer Miguel Astor- Aguilera 107 7 ‘Necromancy Is a Religion’: Tylor’s Discussion of Spiritualism in Primitive Culture and in His Diary Anne Kalvig 123 8 Edward Tylor, Archaeologist? The Archaeological Foundations of ‘Mr Tylor’s Science’ Katy Soar 141 9 Telling Tylorian Tales: Reflections on Language, Myth and Religion Martin D. Stringer 163 vi vi Contents 10 Deconstructing the Survival in E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture: From Memes to Dreams and Bricolage Paul- François Tremlett 179 Bibliography 195 Index 215 vii Contributors Miguel Astor- Aguilera is associate professor in religious studies at Arizona State University, USA. James L. Cox is professor and honorary fellow in the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Graham Harvey is professor of religious studies at the Open University, UK. Jonathan Jong is a research fellow and co- lead for Brain, Belief and Behaviour at Coventry University, UK. Anne Kalvig is professor of religious studies at the University of Stavanger, Norway. Robert A. Segal is professor and holds a chair in religious studies at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Katy Soar is a lecturer in Classical Archaeology at the University of Winchester. Martin D. Stringer is professor and pro- vice chancellor at Swansea University, Wales. Liam T. Sutherland is a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Paul- François Tremlett is senior lecturer in religious studies at the Open University, UK. viii Acknowledgements The editors extend their warmest gratitude to the Faculty of Arts and Social Science at the Open University for funding an authors’ workshop in London in May 2016. We also extend our thanks to Donovan Schaefer and Peggy Morgan for their respective endeavours to support the book. We thank the authors for their enthusiasm and commitment, and Lalle Pursglove and Lucy Carroll at Bloomsbury for their help and encouragement throughout. Finally, we thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions on the volume. newgenprepdf 1 Introduction: Why Tylor, Why Now? Paul- François Tremlett, Liam T. Sutherland and Graham Harvey Were scientific systems the oracular revelations they sometimes all but pre- tend to be, it might be justifiable to take no note of the condition of mere opinion and fancy that preceded them. But the investigator who turns from his modern text books to the antiquated dissertations of the great thinkers of the past, gains from the history of his own craft a truer view of the relation of theory to fact, learns from the course of growth in each current hypothesis to appreciate its raison d’être and full significance and even finds that a return to older starting- points may enable him to find new paths, where the mod- ern tracks seem stopped by impassable barriers. (Tylor 1903 [1871] 2: 444) It has been one hundred years since the death of the founder of social anthro- pology, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832– 1917). Tylor was born into a prosper- ous Quaker family in London, in 1832. At the age of 23, while working in the family’s brass foundry, he contracted tuberculosis and was urged to travel to warmer climes. It was this decision that, in Eric Sharpe’s memorable phrase, ‘deprived industry of a brassfounder and gave the world an anthropologist’ (1986: 53). While travelling, Tylor spent time in Mexico and became fascinated with indigenous cultures. He also met fellow English Quaker and archaeologist, Henry Christy. On returning to England, he published a book based on these travels: Anahuac: or Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern, in 1861. Other major publications followed, including Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization in 1865, and probably his most famous book, his two- volume magnum opus Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art and Custom in 1871, in which he set out his general theory of religion, followed a decade later by Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization (for a com- plete list of Tylor’s publications see Rivers, Marett and Thomas 1907). Tylor became the first ever reader in social anthropology in 1884 and its first ever 2 2 Tremlett, Sutherland and Harvey professor in 1896, which is an impressive achievement for a man who had received no higher education due to his Quaker background. He was knighted in 1912. On the publication of Primitive Culture in 1871, Tylor and his work were at the centre of the cross- cultural, non- confessional and social scientific research on religion and culture. Today, although acknowledged as a founding figure, Tylor’s position in the anthropological canon is an odd one, severely circum- scribed, rarely acknowledged and yet, as the chapters in this volume make clear, still worth thinking with and thinking against. In 1907, to mark the occasion of his seventy- fifth birthday, some of the most famous names in British anthropol- ogy at the turn of the twentieth century including J. G. Frazer, A. C. Haddon, A. Lang, R. R. Marett, W. H. R. Rivers, C. G. Seligman and E. Westermarck, contributed to a volume of anthropological essays and ‘to lay a gift before the greatest of English anthropologists’ (Rivers, Marett and Thomas 1907: Preface). Their essays reflect up to a certain point Tylor’s interests in kinship, antiquity, magic, totemism, taboo and religion but it is as if even then, the contributors did not quite know what to do with Tylor’s legacy: the evolutionary lens that had framed Tylor’s anthropology was already cracked. Anthropology had begun its move to the local and the particular. ‘In anthropology’, wrote Marett, ‘it will not do to press a generalization overmuch’, for ‘human history cannot be shown . to be subject to hard-and- fast laws’ (1907: 219). No prizes for guessing the tar- get of that gentle rebuke. The contributors could not escape their debt to Tylor (hence the necessity of the gift), but nor were they clear as to how to write Tylor into an emergent anthropological canon. Yet, one of the key founding figures of modern sociology and the anthropology of religion, Emile Durkheim, in setting out his own approach to religion in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1915), self- consciously did so in contrast to the approach of Tylor although the importance of reading Primitive Culture alongside The Elementary Forms is rarely remarked upon today. To date, the only biography of Tylor was written by his student Ronald Ranulph Marett, who departed from his former teacher in numerous ways but wrote in the Preface to his biography that ‘in venturing to write about Tylor I feel inclined to begin by exclaiming, with Socrates: Who am I that I should lay hands on my father Parmenides?’ (Marett 1936: 7). This, of course, was as much a reflection of their personal relationship as their scholarly one. Yet, when Evans- Pritchard wrote that Tylor’s theory of religion was ‘a priori speculation’, ‘specious’ and ‘a fine example of the introspectionist psychologist’s or ‘if I were a horse’ fallacy, to which I shall have to make frequent reference’ (1968: 24), the requirement for courtesy had clearly long since passed.
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