Edward Burnett Tylor

Edward Burnett Tylor was born on 2 October 1832 and became the English professor who gave anthropology its scientific form. Drawing on Charles Lyell's evolutionary theories, he published Primitive Culture in 1871 and Anthropology in 1881, works that defined the discipline's scope and method for the nineteenth century. He proposed that all societies moved through three stages - savagery, barbarism, civilization - a framework that reflected his era's faith in universal progress. He reintroduced "animism" to describe what he saw as religion's first phase: the belief that souls animate all things and natural forces. Tylor thought studying human history and prehistory could guide the reform of British society itself. He died on 2 January 1917, a founding figure whose evolutionary lens shaped the field even as later anthropologists dismantled his hierarchies.