Classification and criticisms The word „evolution“ is forever associated in the popular mind with
Charles Darwin's
Theory of Evolution, which professes, among other things, that man as a species developed diachronically from some ancestor among the
Primates who was also ancestor to the
Great Apes, as they are popularly termed, and yet this term was not a
neologism of Darwin's. He took it from the cultural milieu, where it meant etymologically "unfolding" of something heterogeneous and complex from something simpler and more homogeneous.
Herbert Spencer, a contemporary of Darwin, applied the term to the universe, including philosophy and what Tylor would later call culture. This view of the universe was generally termed evolutionism, while its exponents were evolutionists. In 1871 Tylor published
Primitive Culture, becoming the originator of
cultural anthropology. His methods were comparative and historical ethnography. He believed that a "uniformity" was manifest in culture, which was the result of "uniform action of uniform causes". He regarded his instances of parallel ethnographic concepts and practices as indicative of "laws of human thought and action". He was an evolutionist and therefore considered the task of cultural anthropology to discover "stages of development or evolution". Evolutionism was distinguished from another creed,
diffusionism, postulating the spread of items of culture from regions of innovation. A given apparent parallelism thus had at least two explanations: the instances descend from an evolutionary ancestor, or they are alike because one diffused into the culture from elsewhere. These two views are exactly parallel to the
tree model and
wave model of historical linguistics, which are instances of evolutionism and diffusionism, language features being instances of culture. Two other classifications were proposed in 1993 by Upadhyay and Pandey, Classical Evolutionary School and Neo Evolutionary School, the Classical to be divided into British, American, and German. The Classical British Evolutionary School, primarily at Oxford University, divided society into two evolutionary stages, savagery and civilization, based on the archaeology of
John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury. Upadhyay and Pandey list its adherents as
Robert Ranulph Marett,
Henry James Sumner Maine,
John Ferguson McLennan, and
James George Frazer, as well as Tylor. Marett was the last man standing, dying in 1943. By the time of his death, Lubbock's archaeology had been updated. The American School, beginning with
Lewis Henry Morgan, was likewise superseded, both being replaced by the
Neoevolutionist School, beginning with
V. Gordon Childe. It brought the archaeology up-to-date and tended to omit the intervening society names, such as savagery; for example, Neolithic is both a tool tradition and a form of society. There are some other classifications. Theorists of each classification each have their own criticisms of the Classical/Neo Evolutionary lines, which despite them remains the dominant view. Some criticisms are in brief as follows. There is really no universality; that is, the apparent parallels are accidental, on which the theorist has imposed a model that does not really fit. There is no uniform causality, but different causes might produce similar results. All cultural groups do not have the same stages of development. The theorists are arm-chair anthropologists; their data is insufficient to form realistic abstractions. They overlooked cultural diffusion. They overlooked cultural innovation. None of the critics claim definitive proof that their criticisms are less subjective or interpretive than the models they criticise.
Basic concepts Culture Tylor's notion is best described in his most famous work, the two-volume
Primitive Culture. The first volume, The
Origins of Culture, deals with ethnography including social evolution, linguistics, and myth. The second volume,
Religion in Primitive Culture, deals mainly with his interpretation of
animism. On the first page of
Primitive Culture, Tylor provides a definition which is one of his most widely recognised contributions to anthropology and the study of religion: Also, the first chapter of the work gives an outline of a new discipline,
science of culture, later known as culturology.
Universals Unlike many of his predecessors and contemporaries, Tylor asserts that the human mind and its capabilities are the same globally, despite a particular society's stage in social evolution. This means that a hunter-gatherer society would possess the same amount of intelligence as an advanced industrial society. The difference, Tylor asserts, is education, which he considers the cumulative knowledge and methodology that takes thousands of years to acquire. 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. Critics argued that he identified the term but provided an insufficient reason as to why survivals continue. Tylor's
meme-like concept of survivals explains the characteristics of a culture that are linked to earlier stages of human culture. Studying survivals assists ethnographers in reconstructing earlier cultural characteristics and possibly reconstructing the evolution of culture.
Evolution of religion Tylor argued that people had used religion to explain things that occurred in the world. He saw that it was important for religions to have the ability to explain why and for what reason things occurred in the world. For example, God (or the divine) gave us sun to keep us warm and give us light. Tylor argued that animism is the true natural religion that is the essence of religion; it answers the questions of which religion came first and which religion is essentially the most basic and foundation of all religions. For him, animism is the best answer to those questions and so it must be the true foundation of all religions. Animism is described as the belief in spirits inhabiting and animating beings or souls existing in things. To Tylor, the fact that modern religious practitioners continue to believe in spirits shows that such people were no more advanced than primitive societies. For him, that implied that modern religious practitioners do not understand the ways of the universe and how life truly works because they have excluded science from their understanding of the world. By excluding scientific explanation in their understanding of why and how things occur, he asserts modern religious practitioners are rudimentary. He perceived the modern religious belief in God as a "survival" of primitive ignorance. However, Tylor believed that
atheism was not the logical end of cultural and religious development but instead a highly-minimalist form of
monotheist deism. He thus posited an anthropological description of "the gradual elimination of
paganism" and
disenchantment but not
secularization. ==Awards and achievements==