What This Work Is
Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom (first edition April 1871; sixth edition June 1920, Vol. I) is the foundational masterpiece that established anthropology as a rigorous, inductive science of human culture. Tylor defines culture or civilization, in its wide ethnographic sense, 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.”
The book’s central thesis is that the phenomena of culture are related according to definite laws of uniformity, development, permanence, modification, and survival. Tylor treats culture not as a random assortment of customs or a divine gift, but as a connected evolutionary process that can be studied exactly like any other branch of natural science. He demonstrates that the condition of culture among the various societies of mankind forms stages of development—from savage through barbaric to civilized—each the outcome of previous history and shaping the future.
Key revolutionary contributions that make the work enduring:
- The doctrine of survivals: customs, beliefs, opinions, and practices carried on by habit into a new state of society different from that in which they had their original home. These act as living “fossils” revealing earlier cultural strata.
- The minimum definition of religion as “belief in Spiritual Beings,” termed animism, treated as a natural philosophy of the lower races rather than theology.
- A strictly comparative and inductive method: massive accumulation of ethnographic facts from travellers, missionaries, and prehistoric archaeology (Stone Age tools, lake-dwellings, shell-heaps, megaliths) to show that the same mental laws operate everywhere.
- Rejection of both pure degeneration theory and unchecked progressionism in favour of a balanced development theory in which advancement is primary and degeneration secondary.
Tylor explicitly models his approach on the natural sciences (Pythagorean order in the Kosmos, Aristotle, Leibnitz). He insists that human thought and action obey laws as definite as those governing physics or biology, and that studying the “lower races” illuminates the higher because “one set of savages is like another.” The 1920 edition keeps original paging for reference, incorporates minor corrections and added evidence, and remains substantially the 1871 argument.
Vol. I (the volume documented here) lays the methodological and theoretical foundation and examines culture’s development, survivals, language, the art of counting, mythology, and the origins of animism. Vol. II continues with further animism, rites, and the transition to higher religion and philosophy.
Chapter I. The Science of Culture
The Problem of Knowledge and Scientific Method
Tylor opens with the bold claim that culture can and should be studied as a natural science. He addresses the popular resistance rooted in metaphysics and theology (especially the notion of uncaused free will) and insists that definite natural causes determine human action to a great extent. The uniformity pervading civilization arises from the uniform action of uniform causes on uniform human nature.
Uniformity and Development as Twin Principles
Tylor identifies two great principles: (1) the uniformity which so largely pervades civilization, and (2) its various grades as stages of development or evolution. He compares the ancient Swiss lake-dweller with the mediæval Aztec and the Ojibwa with the Zulu to show that similar conditions produce similar cultural features across time and space.
Method: Classification, Evidence, and Survival
The task is to classify and arrange cultural phenomena stage by stage in a probable order of evolution. Evidence comes from living “lower races,” prehistoric archaeology, and historical records. The chapter sets the entire programme: investigating uniformity and development in ethnography, with special attention to how the civilization of the lower tribes relates to that of the higher nations.
Chapter II. The Development of Culture
State of Culture and the Three Theories
Tylor outlines the state of culture—industrial, intellectual, political, moral—and shows that development largely corresponds to the transition “from savage through barbaric to civilized life.” He weighs three competing theories:
- Progression-theory (culture generally advances).
- Degeneration-theory (culture declines from a higher original state).
- Development-theory (includes both, with progression primary and degeneration secondary).
Evidence from Prehistoric Archaeology
Historical and traditional evidence is weak for the lowest stages, but prehistoric archaeology extends the antiquity of man in low civilization and proves “original low culture throughout the world.” Traces of the Stone Age, corroborated by megalithic structures, lake-dwellings, shell-heaps, and burial-places, demonstrate progressive development in industrial arts (stone to bronze to iron). Comparison of branches of the same race reveals both rise and occasional fall.
Tylor’s key insight: the “primitive” is not a degenerate remnant of higher civilization but the ancestral condition of all mankind.
Chapter III. Survival in Culture
The Doctrine of Survivals
Tylor introduces his most famous and influential concept: survivals—processes, customs, opinions, and so forth, which have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which they had their original home. They function as evidence of earlier cultural stages and often appear as superstitions in civilized life.
Illustrations and Significance
Examples include children’s games, games of chance, traditional sayings, nursery poems, proverbs, riddles, the sneezing-formula (“God bless you!”), the rite of foundation-sacrifice, and the prejudice against saving a drowning man. These survivals link savage thought directly to modern civilization and reveal the “rudimental origin among savage tribes” of many phenomena of civilization.
Tylor shows how seemingly irrational practices become intelligible when traced to their original rational context in lower culture.
Chapter IV. Survival in Culture (continued)
Magic and the Occult Sciences as Survivals
Tylor extends the survival doctrine to the occult sciences. Magical processes rest on the Association of Ideas (like produces like; contact once made continues). He examines omens, augury, oneiromancy, haruspication, scapulimancy, chiromancy, cartomancy, rhabdomancy, dactyliomancy, coscinomancy, and astrology.
Witchcraft, Spiritualism, and Practical Bearing
Witchcraft originates in savage culture, declines then revives in early medieval Europe; its practices belong to earlier stages. Spiritualism (spirit-rapping, spirit-writing, levitation, tied mediums) has its source in the same early cultural complex. The intellectual conditions accounting for the persistence of magic belong to lower culture. The practical value of studying survivals: it explains and undermines irrational beliefs still active in civilized society.
Chapter V. Emotional and Imitative Language
Directly Expressive Sound as the Origin of Language
Tylor investigates the origins of language through directly expressive sound, using the test of independent correspondence across distinct languages. Constituent processes include gesture, expression of feature, emotional tone, articulate sounds (vowels determined by musical quality and pitch, consonants), emphasis, accent, and phrase-melody (recitative).
From Interjections to Sense-Words
Sound-words, interjections, calls to animals, and emotional cries form the basis. Sense-words evolve from interjections; affirmative and negative particles illustrate the process. Language is shown to be an original product of the lower culture—not a divine gift but a human invention rooted in emotional and imitative faculties.
Chapter VI. Emotional and Imitative Language (continued)
Imitative Words and Their Evolution
Further development of imitative words: human actions named from sound, animals’ names from cries, musical instruments. Words are modified to adapt sound to sense (reduplication, graduation of vowels to express distance and difference). Children’s language provides evidence. Sound-words relate closely to sense-words; language grows as a natural product of lower-culture mental processes.
Chapter VII. The Art of Counting
Number Concepts from Bodily Experience
Ideas of number derive from experience. Tylor surveys the state of arithmetic among uncivilized races: small extent of numeral-words, counting by fingers and toes, hand-numerals showing derivation of verbal reckoning from gesture-counting. Etymology of numerals and the worldwide distribution of quinary, decimal, and vigesimal notations all trace back to body-counting. Adoption of foreign numeral-words occurs with cultural advance. The evidence proves development of arithmetic from a low original level of culture.
Chapter VIII. Mythology
Myth as a Stage in the History of the Human Mind
Mythic fancy is based, like other thought, on experience. Tylor traces the change in public opinion regarding the credibility of myths—from literal belief to rationalization as allegory or history—and advocates ethnological treatment: myths must be studied in their actual existence and growth among modern savages and barbarians.
Original sources include early doctrines of general animation of nature, personification of natural phenomena (sun, moon, stars, water-spout, sand-pillar, rainbow, waterfall, pestilence), analogy turned into myth and metaphor, myths of rain and thunder, and the effect of language (grammatical gender, proper names) on myth formation. The mental state proper to mythic imagination and the doctrine of werewolves illustrate the processes of phantasy and fancy.
Chapter IX. Mythology (continued)
Nature-Myths and Their Interpretation
Nature-myths, their origin, canon of interpretation, and preservation of original sense through significant names. Comparison of nature-myths of upper savage races with related forms among barbaric and civilized nations: Heaven and Earth as Universal Parents; Sun and Moon (eclipse and sunset as hero or maiden swallowed by monster; rising from sea and descent to under-world; jaws of night and death; eye of heaven); Sun and Moon as mythic civilizers; Moon’s inconstancy, periodical death and revival; stars and constellations; wind, tempest, thunder, earthquake.
Chapter X. Mythology (continued)
Philosophical Myths and Their Ethnological Import
Philosophical myths in which inferences become pseudo-history; geological myths; effect of the doctrine of miracles. Myths of relation of apes to men (development or degeneration); ethnological import of myths of ape-men, men with tails, men of the woods. Myths of error, perversion, and exaggeration (giants, dwarfs, monstrous tribes); fanciful explanatory myths; myths attached to legendary or historical personages; etymological myths; eponymic myths (names of tribes, nations, countries); pragmatic myths by realization of metaphors and ideas; allegory; beast-fable. Conclusion on the place of mythology in the primitive history of the human mind.
Chapter XI. Animism
Minimum Definition of Religion
Religious ideas appear generally among low races of mankind. Tylor provides the now-classic minimum definition of religion as the “Doctrine of Spiritual Beings,” here termed animism. It is treated as belonging to Natural Religion and divided into two sections: the philosophy of Souls and of other Spirits.
Doctrine of Souls
The Doctrine of Souls is a theoretical conception of primitive philosophy designed to account for phenomena now classed under biology—life and death, health and disease, sleep and dreams, trance and visions. The apparitional soul or ghost-soul relates to shadow, blood, breath; division or plurality of souls; soul as cause of life; exit of soul in trances, dreams, visions; apparitions, wraiths, doubles. The primitive soul is material in substance. Transmission of souls to future life via funeral sacrifice (wives, attendants, animals, plants, objects). Historical development from the ethereal soul of primitive biology to the immaterial soul of modern theology.
Overall Structure and Significance
The provided document covers the full front matter (title pages, edition history 1871–1920, prefaces) and Chapters I–XI of Volume I. These chapters form the theoretical and methodological core of the entire work, establishing the science of culture, the principle of development, the doctrine of survivals, the origins of language and counting, the nature of mythology, and the foundational philosophy of animism. The remaining chapters of Volume I and all of Volume II build directly on this foundation.
Conclusion: Tylor’s Vision of Cultural Evolution
Tylor reconstructs the history of human thought by treating culture as an evolutionary science governed by natural laws. He demonstrates that the “primitive” is not alien but ancestral; survivals link us to our savage past; mythology and animism reveal the earliest attempts to understand the world through the same mental laws still operating today. The work insists that even the lowest cultures display rationality within their own terms and that progress is real, measurable, and law-governed.
Core Argument in Brief
Tylor’s unifying principle is the doctrine of development through survivals. Culture is a single, connected evolutionary process. “Primitive” beliefs and practices are not errors or degenerations but necessary early stages whose remnants illuminate the path from savagery to civilization. Animism—the belief in spiritual beings—is the root of all religion. By comparative ethnography and the study of survivals, Tylor places anthropology on a scientific footing: culture, like nature, obeys definite laws of uniformity, modification, and progressive development. The book’s enduring power lies in its refusal to exoticize the “primitive,” its massive accumulation of evidence, and its vision of a connected history of human thought from the lowest to the highest civilizations. Primitive Culture remains a landmark in the understanding of humanity’s shared intellectual and cultural development.