Anthropology and a look at Victorian notions of afterlife.

Edward B. Tylor was a famous Victorian-era British anthropologist, although not an anthropologist in the modern sense of the word. He did not travel widely and engage in fieldwork. He is nonetheless considered to be one of the formative figures of that discipline. Keep in mind as you read the final chapter of Primitive Culture – the final chapter of which is called ‘Animism’ – that Tylor was writing all of this back in the 1880’s. His language is antiquated (as you can tell by his use of “terms” like ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ etc. Don’t get hung up on that. There is an undercurrent that is going on throughout this text that borrows a lot from Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism. Put simply, Tylor, as a man of science, believes that (so-called) primitive peoples used a primitive religion as a proto-science, because they needed to explain things in their world but lacked a developed science to give them accurate explanations. According to Tylor, he is suggesting that when Science arrives upon the scene, all religious beliefs should fall by the wayside as they will have been proven incorrect. 

Reading assignment:

https://archive.org/stream/primitiveculture01tylouoft?ref=ol#page/416/mode/2up

Please go to your first discussion group for your first discussion question.

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