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  • Primitive Culture - 2-Volume Set by Edward Burnett Tylor book cover
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Primitive Culture - 2-Volume Set

by Edward Burnett Tylor

A foundational work in the history of anthropology

$138.34 USD
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AlbakiReads Editorial

A foundational work in the history of anthropology

First published in 1871, Edward Burnett Tylor’s two-volume work sets out a theory of cultural evolution: the idea that societies change over time and become more complex. Tylor separates this process from biological evolution and argues that human minds are alike across societies, regardless of their degree of cultural development. The book offers a window onto anthropology’s early theoretical foundations and the influential framework that shaped the discipline in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its historical importance is paired with ideas that belong to a specific period in the field’s development, making the work useful for examining how anthropological thought took shape.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers studying the history of anthropology and social theory
  • Those interested in nineteenth-century ideas about culture and social change
  • Students exploring early debates about cultural and biological evolution

Themes

Cultural evolutionAnthropological theoryCulture and social changeIntellectual history

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Book overview

Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) was an English anthropologist who is widely considered the founder of anthropology as a scientific discipline. He was the first Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oxford from 1896 to 1909, and developed a broad definition of culture which is still used by scholars. First published in 1871, this classic two-volume work explains Tylor's idea of cultural evolution in relation to anthropology, a social theory which states that human cultures invariably change over time to become more complex. Unlike his contemporaries, Tylor did not link biological evolution to cultural evolution, asserting that all human minds are the same irrespective of a society's state of evolution. His book was extremely influential in popularising the study of anthropology and establishing cultural evolution as the main theoretical framework followed by anthropologists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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