Cultural anthropology and animism theory

Edward B. Tylor

1832 – 1917

Sir Edward Burnett Tylor was the founding father of cultural anthropology and the first Professor of Anthropology at Oxford University, best known for his landmark two-volume Primitive Culture (1871), which systematized the concept of animism — the belief that spiritual beings constitute the earliest universal form of religion. His evolutionary model of religious development from animism through polytheism to monotheism, and his concept of survivals — vestigial magical practices persisting into modern life — became the theoretical framework through which Western scholars analyzed magic, folk belief, and esoteric tradition. Tylor's framework, however contested, shaped every subsequent academic approach to the relationship between magic and religion.