HISTORY OF ETHNOLOGICAL THEORIES

Abstract

THE first interpretation of primitive mentality that can lay claim to any degree of completeness was that advanced by E. B. Tylor in his two famous books Researches into the Early History of Mankind and Primitive Culture. It goes without saying that no theory promulgated in England between 1860 and 1880 could possibly be other than evolutionistic and so we find in Tylor the study of the cultures of primitive people subordinated to the larger issue of their bearing on the history of mankind in general and of modern civilizations in particular. He was, in fact, not specifically interested in the analysis of primitive mentality. His interest lay rather in the determination of the nature of the basic cultural foundations from which the higher civilizations of Europe and Asia had developed. For that reason his works treat as fully, if not more so, the beliefs, customs, and superstitions of the illiterate peoples of Europe and Asia as those of so-called primitive people. If ever a series of evolutionary steps seemed perfect and free from all illusion it was the one he was so largely instrumental in establishing. For Europe he postulated first, a period in which magical rites, superstitious observances, and meaningless customs were still functioning, then one where all these elements still persisted but functioned only partially and where at least a small minority had progressed far beyond them, and finally modern Europe since the Renaissance. To him the history of Europe was but a special example of a very general cultural phenomenon. What happened there he argued, must have taken place in other regions as wellAsia Minor, Egypt, China, India, etc. For Tylor and his school, primitive peoples represented the earliest period in a long series of cultural stages and they were studied from a definitely evolutionary orientation. As we have stated, the precise nature of primitive mentality was of comparatively subordinate interest to them. Tylor and his school began