Post #11: Religion

In 19th century Edward Tylor proposed one of the earliest anthropological theories about religion. At the core of his theory was the notion of animism, or the belief that souls or spirits inhabit not only humans but everything in our world, including animals, plants, inanimate objects such as rocks and even geographical features like rivers and mountains (link). According to Tylor animism was the first great theory in human history. It was first invented by our ancient forebears who "puzzled by their experiences of dreams and of visions, and desirous of achieving a satisfying account of death" decided to explain such things as being the actions of various independently-existing spirits (link).

It is rather obvious how Edward Tylor's theory of religion is influenced by his theoretical orientation on anthropology. Because Tylor was one of the founders of 19th century's school of cultural evolutionism he firmly believed that all cultures passed at varying rates through a set of stages of development, from "savagery" to "barbarism" and finally to "civilization". So in his theory of religion, Tyler brings up a similar idea of cultural progress in how he views world religions evolutionarily progressing from "savage" state of childlike inference (based on firsthand experience and dreams) on the polytheist/animist end of religious spectrum all the way to the "civilized" monotheist religions such as Christianity (link). Tylor proposed his theory of religion to counter the degenerationist theories of his Victorian contemporaries, who argued that contemporary religion such as Christianity were "degenerations" of the "higher" religions of our ancestors. Many of his modern critics note that in his theory Tylor overlooks the social and emotional dimensions of religion. On the other hand, Evans-Pritchard noted that Tylor's religion theory has the quality of a "just-so story"(link). The website also mentions that "many specifics of Tylor's theorizing are unacceptable to us today and I think it is easy to see that since Edward Tylor presents a very ethnocentric, or specifically eurocentric, point of view which wouldn't be acceptable by modern cultural relativist anthropologists because the theory intentionally critisizes other cultures based on their religious beliefs. Overall, I think that the website was very informative and did a great job of documenting the 19th century evolutionist perpective on the origin of religion.