Sir Edward Burnett Tylor FRAI (2 October 1832 – 2 January 1917) was an English anthropologist, and professor of anthropology.

"[4] Tylor reintroduced the term animism (faith in the individual soul or anima of all things and natural manifestations) into common use.

Following medical advice to spend time in warmer climes, Tylor left England in 1855, and travelled to the Americas.

The experience proved to be an important and formative one, sparking his lifelong interest in studying unfamiliar cultures.

Tylor's association with Christy greatly stimulated his awakening interest in anthropology, and helped broaden his inquiries to include prehistoric studies.

His notes on the beliefs and practices of the people he encountered were the basis of his work Anahuac: Or Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern (1861), published after his return to England.

Tylor continued to study the customs and beliefs of tribal communities, both existing and prehistoric (based on archaeological finds).

Tylor was appointed Keeper of the University Museum at Oxford in 1883, and, as well as serving as a lecturer, held the title of the first "Reader in Anthropology" from 1884 to 1895.

[6][10][11] The word evolution is forever associated in the popular mind with Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution, which professes, among other things, that man as a species developed diachronically from some ancestor among the Primates who was also ancestor to the Great Apes, as they are popularly termed, and yet this term was not a neologism of Darwin's.

Herbert Spencer, a contemporary of Darwin, applied the term to the universe, including philosophy and what Tylor would later call culture.

He regarded his instances of parallel ethnographic concepts and practices as indicative of "laws of human thought and action."

[22] Unlike many of his predecessors and contemporaries, Tylor asserts that the human mind and its capabilities are the same globally, despite a particular society's stage in social evolution.

The difference, Tylor asserts, is education, which he considers the cumulative knowledge and methodology that takes thousands of years to acquire.

In the first chapter he uttered what would become a sort of constitutional statement for the new field, which he could not know and did not intend at the time: "History, so far as it reaches back, shows arts, sciences, and political institutions beginning in ruder states, and becoming in the course of ages, more intelligent, more systematic, more perfectly arranged or organized, to answer their purposes.

The theorist perhaps most influential on Tylor was John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury, innovator of the terminology, "Paleolithic" and "Neolithic."

His definition of survivals is processes, customs, and 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, and they thus remain as proofs and examples of an older condition of culture out of which a newer has been evolved.

[30] To Tylor, the fact that modern religious practitioners continued to believe in spirits showed that these people were no more advanced than primitive societies.

[31] By excluding scientific explanation in their understanding of why and how things occur, he asserts modern religious practitioners are rudimentary.

[31] However, Tylor did not believe that atheism was the logical end of cultural and religious development, but instead a highly minimalist form of monotheist deism.