Edward Burnett Tylor, Religion and Culture

Description

Through revisiting and challenging what we think we know about the work of Edward Burnett Tylor, a founding figure of anthropology, this volume explores new connections and insights that link Tylor and his work to present concerns in new and important ways. At the publication of Primitive Culture in 1871, Tylor was at the centre of anthropological research on religion and culture, but today Tylor's position in the anthropological canon is rarely acknowledged. Edward Burnett Tylor, Religion and Culture does not claim to present a definitive, new Tylor. The old Tylor - the founder of British anthropology; the definer of religion; the intellectualist; the evolutionist; the liberal; the utilitarian; the avatar of white, Protestant rationalism; the Tylor of the canon - remains. Part I explore debates and contexts of Tylor's lifetime, while the chapters in Part II explore a series of new Tylors, including Tylor the ethnographer and Tylor the Spiritualist, re-writing the legacy of the founder of anthropology in the process. Edward Burnett Tylor, Religion and Culture is essential reading for anyone interested in the study of religion and the anthropology of religion.

Paul-Francois Tremlett is Senior Lecturer of Religious Studies at The Open University, UK Liam Sutherland is a doctoral student in Religious Studies at the University of Edinburgh, UK Graham Harvey is Professor of Religious Studies at the Open University, UK

Not shying away from the parts that many of us today agree to be problematic, the essays in this collection shine a new light on the parts of Tylor's oeuvre that are worth reconsidering, taking seriously that, despite our advances, we may be more indebted to his generation's debates that we might at first realize. * Russell T. McCutcheon, Professor of Religious Studies, University of Alabama, USA * Tylor comes alive in this elegant and coherent collection. Thinking with, and against, Tylor, an astutely chosen set of authors provide new, and rediscovered, insights into religion, academia, and what it means to be human. It is well worth reading. * Douglas Ezzy, President of the Australian Association for the Study of Religion, and Professor of Sociology, University of Tasmania, Australia * A fascinating and timely volume of essays on an important early anthropologist whose ideas on animism, myth and psychic unity are now being revisited with great interest. Yet unlike other early figures such as Durkheim and Robertson Smith, Tylor remains understudied. This volume redresses the balance through a set of strong interdisciplinary chapters which range from ethnography to cognitive science. Essential reading in Religious Studies * Steven J. Sutcliffe, Senior Lecturer in the Study of Religion, University of Edinburgh, UK * A provocative collection of essays that does the painstaking and exciting work of re-humanizing a major founder of the fields of human sciences. Revivifiying the abstracted Tylor, best known from undergraduate lectures as a caricature of reductionist and ethnocentric thinking about religion, the authors here both disrupt popular assumptions about his place in anthropological debates within his lifetime and demonstrate his perhaps surprising relevance to many of our own today. * Laurel Zwissler, Assistant Professor of Religion, Central Michigan University, USA * The present collection's efforts to move [Tylor] beyond his evolutionary framework and highlight the relevance of his work to contemporary studies, both within and outside the discipline of social anthropology, should ... be appreciated. * Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford * The editors have done a wonderful job in putting this volume together. Over the course of ten chapters the reader is skilfully guided through the theoretical, methodological and conceptual implications of Tylor's work. * Fieldwork in Religion *