Talk:Edward Burnett Tylor

American Anthropologist links to www.aaanet.org pdfs

I have made links to American Anthropologist pdfs at www.aaanet.org. They concern copyright material. The aaanet.org is the website of the American Anthropological Association which publishes the American Anthropologist (through Wiley-Blackwell) and so can be deemed to have made this copyright material publicly available for such linking. --LittleHow (talk) 09:26, 24 April 2012 (UTC)

Tylor's Anthropological ideas may reflect his experiences within Quakerism

I do not have any time to research this now, but for anybody who wishes to reflect upon it - this article as I have just read it 01-01-13 describes Tylor as an " undertaker " of religion and as hostile to Christianity. This seems to me extremely unlikey since both he and his wife as far as I know remained members of the Religious Society of Friends, but notably they were young adult Quakers in those decades when British Quakerism was convulsed by arguments about how a once progressive and adventurous religious group had turned in upon itself and become characterised by practices that were once meaningful but had become irrelevant and marginalising etc What emerged from those decades was that these practices and the Quietist and Evangelical Quakerisms associated with them were either formally discontinued or died out, and the Liberal and Universalist Quakerisms which followed them more or less subscribed to or supported similar views to Tylor's - so which came first ? Tylor most probably but he was not the first merely the most accomplished : the views that he expresses scientifically have had religious precedents long before Quakerism began in the 1650's. If anybody wants to begin to research this comment start with ' British Quakerism 1860 - 1920 ' by Thomas C Kennedy ... Google offer two pages of chapter five to read on-line - ' The New Quakerism ' - I know next to nothing about him, but Tylor sounds very much like a Universalist Quaker and might even have been an early Non-theist Quaker, of which some 25% of modern British Quakers are. His apparent attitude towards religious beliefs, his methods of enquiry and cautious arguments seem to me to be typical of a Quaker, it might be interesting to search for anything that he may have written upon his own religious convictions for such journals as The Friends Quarterly or The Friend ( a weekly ).DaiSaw (talk) 11:44, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps Tylor's approach to religion is better illustrated by his arguments about the ' psychic unity ' of mankind i.e. that primitive peoples possess less knowledge but create their bodies of knowledge in the same way having the same capacity for thought that those who conceive themselves as superior do, hence ' primitive ' ideas recur amongst the less well educated in modern societies as evidenced in this incident where Tylor discovered an onion pierced with pins for the purposes of sympathetic magic in Victorian England - http://england.prm.ox.ac.uk/englishness-tylors-onion.html - [ I am also looking around to find out the relationship between Edward and Charles, the latter the founding editor of The Friend - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Tylor ] DaiSaw (talk) 15:41, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Well, thank you professor. Your stance as Tylor's defense lawyer is not needed. Tylor is not on trial here and he needs no defense that his point of view may be inherent in Quakerism. Tylor founded cultural anthropology. What do you do with Marett and the others, who were mainly Anglican? No, the religions of the members of the school or anyone else's religion don't have a thing to do with it. This topic is in the history of ideas section. You don't have to be a slaver to sudy the history of slavery, do you? Tylor was on to the history of something he called culture. What his religion was has nothing to do with it. If you don't like that approach, too bad. WP is not a vehicle for your propaganda against it. If you don't like it, don't take it up in college, which you can do in just about every college everywhere. To get a general background I would suggest your reading up on the Scopes trial.Botteville (talk) 06:27, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

Oversimple and slanted

Tylor was the innovator of cultural anthropology. Thus the vague reference to "Tylor's Concept" is nowhere near adequate. He was an evolutionist. All culture evolved from no culture, including religion. Such a scheme presents the projected pre-historic development of belief systems, which must have occured, if society evolved and began with a zero or near-zero cultural state. This is a scheme for the development of religious belief, not religion. The editor would have us believe that Tylor attacked the belief in God or the practice of religion in general as a remnant. In the evolutionary school, whether or not anyone believes in God or has a religion or thinks of God as real; that is, the existential status of religion, has no relevance at all. They didn't care whether you believe what you believe. Whatever it is, if it is a social or customary belief they only wanted to reconstruct its history. Statements such as Tylor thinking that religion is a remnant are a gross distortion. He was a Quaker, you know. They don't go in for a lot a forms but they are not atheists or agnostics per se, although I am sure there are many among them, just as there are among people who profess to be of the religion you profess to be. That isn't the point. Where did you get this specific form of belief? Chances are, you did not invent it de novo and therefore it came from some tradition and that was what Tylor was interested in. In view of this misrepresentation of the cultural evolutionists I will be checking the article carefully and rewriting parts of it. We can probably dispense with the usual hideous Non-NPOV and multiple issue tags for the moment anyway. It seems clear that this article has been taken over by a propagandist of some specific ideology, and that isn't right. We don't need religion stuffed down our throats by some over-zealous advocate.Botteville (talk) 06:04, 20 March 2015 (UTC)

Doctrine of survivals

Our presentation of this concept is totally slanted. The slanting also reveals the source. We are back into the old dispute over evolution, and I know who we have to thank for that. A certain linguistics group located in the Bible Belt began as a "fundamentalist" Christian Messianic organization, which wished to study languages of people to whom they intended to send missionaries. They went over to straight linguistics instead. As linguists they have done a truly wonderful job. At one point they started allocating funds for the improvement of Wikipedia linguistics articles and I must say they did add an element of professionalism. I do not know if that is allowed or not. I suspect not. They don't do it now, supposedly. I appreciate the element of professionalism but at the same time their articles are hard to understand. No matter, but they didn't stop there. Anthropology seems to have gotten an overhaul as well from an anti-evolutionist viewpoint. There is a certain movement among some writers to deprecate the evolutionists (again). These people have invented the term "the doctrine of survivals" to which they attribute all sorts of slanted things never in Tylor. He mentions survivals but not in the way they say. Our article takes unfavorable language from a review of an anti-evolutionist book and applies it to Tylor. With all due respect to my fellow Christians, no way. Let's present Tylor as Tylor, let the chips fall where they may. He didn't mention any "baggage." Sorry, that has to go. He never said it but the editor has made it seem as though he did. The "doctrine of survivals" used as a descriptive term only can stay provided it is uttered by reasonably objective and balanced source. It isn't a sarcastic term. This isn't the Scopes trial. I'm sorry, my dear fellow Christians, but we went through this al;ready in American history and decided on a doctrine of separation of church and state. The rationalist reaction to witch-hunting in New England was final and binding, and we aren't going back.Botteville (talk) 06:22, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

The baggage

" Tylor asserted that when a society evolves, certain customs are retained that are unnecessary in the new society, like outworn and useless "baggage"."

The phraseology gives you the impression that there was some question in Tylor's mind whether society evolves. There might be some in the editor's mind but not in Tylor's. The editor's implication is that society might or might not evolve, but when it does it leaves baggage, this baggage having little to do with the real society (created by God), which does not evolve. This isn't cultural anthropology or Tylor, so forget it. We don't need a word from a reviewer of a book that mentions Tylor with prejudice, we need Tylor. This article is about Tylor. Where would it go? I don't know, some article that presents cultural anthropology as an alternative view to be criticised.Botteville (talk) 09:58, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

References

"Christianity"

" Fundamental to understanding Tylor's notion is his negative feelings towards religion, and especially Christianity."

All right. Now we know what is going on. The public should know, especially those not located in the US, what is going on here. The east coast of the United States was settled by various religious dissidents escaping from various persecutions during the long struggle for British freedom of conscience. Henry VIII started it but the creation of the Anglican Church is only the tip of the iceberg. Calvinism spread down the Rhine and entered Britain. The trouble really began with "Bloody Mary," the monarch who still retains the name after all these centuries, who attempted to restore Catholicism with a blood bath in the spirit of those being conducted in France. Good Queen Bess rectified the situation somewhat but there were now in Britain large numbers of people who had tasted bloody dissent, revolution if you will. They fought hard and were brave, but they couldnt hold. The British government drove them out for the good of the country. They came here first and then to Australia as undesirables. Now, the east coast was settled by various sects. The levellers tended to prefer New England. The various groups came here under such names as Separatists or Congregationalists and they still run the place. There was a little breakaway in Rhode Island but basically it all was separatist south through Connecticut. Further to the south the Quakers settled Pennsylvania. Maryland was Catholic. The main sect prevalent in the south is Baptism (Lincoln's religion) now split into baptism and southern baptism. You must not think that emigration solved any of the conflicts fought in Britain. Not at all. The main conflict is over the true religion. What is the true religion? Whatever I am, that is obviously the one true religion, and all you other people are obviously not even Christian. Hence the attack of the Quakers in this discussion. Why, if you don't agree with me, you are not even CHristian! Which gets us around to the current Non-NPOV remark. Anthropology is NOT an attack on religion. It is not an attack on Christianity. Neither is evolution an attack on religion or Christianity. Many churches have already made the jump to evolution. You find the main holdouts in "the Bible Belt" of the south, who have somehow managed to turn it into states rights thing as well. Anything to keep the Civil War alive. Lee might have surrendered but not the Bible Belt. So that is what we have here, a "fundamentalist" attack of WP. My suggest is, if you can;t even muster the objectivity to PRESENT anthropology, don't waste your time and ours with this propaganda. It won't last and it doesn;t change anything.ciao.Botteville (talk) 10:53, 21 March 2015 (UTC)

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Low Importance? Really?

Why is this article rated as "Low Importance" to WikiProject Anthropology, when at its start it names Tylor as the founder of cultural anthropology? YTKJ (talk) 20:50, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

анимизм

сүнс чөтгөр шүтэгчид 2405:5700:310:7EA9:F084:3D5D:964B:93BA (talk) 07:27, 26 December 2023 (UTC)