![]() So let me try to untangle some of our confusions about the culture, both Tylorian and Arnoldian, of what we have come to call the west. Yet these contrasting notions of culture are locked together in our concept of western culture, which many people think defines the identity of modern western people. Tylor thought it absurd to propose that a person could lack culture. ![]() Arnold’s ideal was “the man of culture” and he would have considered “primitive culture” an oxymoron. The two concepts of culture are, in some respects, antagonistic. Nowadays, when people speak about culture, it is usually either Tylor’s or Arnold’s notion that they have in mind. ![]() Civilisation, as Arnold understood it, was merely one of culture’s many modes. It is to Tylor more than anyone else that we owe the idea that anthropology is the study of something called “culture”, which he defined as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, arts, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”. For Tylor was eventually appointed to direct the University Museum at Oxford, and then, in 1896, he was appointed to the first chair of anthropology there. Arnold wasn’t interested in anything as narrow as class-bound connoisseurship: he had in mind a moral and aesthetic ideal, which found expression in art and literature and music and philosophy.īut Tylor thought that the word could mean something quite different, and in part for institutional reasons, he was able to see that it did. For Arnold, culture was the “pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world”. Primitive Culture was, in some respects, a quarrel with another book that had “culture” in the title: Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, a collection that had appeared just two years earlier. In 1871, he published his masterwork, Primitive Culture, which can lay claim to being the first work of modern anthropology. And his Mexican sojourn fired in him an enthusiasm for the study of faraway societies, ancient and modern, that lasted for the rest of his life. Tylor was impressed by what he called “the evidence of an immense ancient population”. ![]() In 1855, in his early 20s, he left for the New World, and, after befriending a Quaker archeologist he met on his travels, he ended up riding on horseback through the Mexican countryside, visiting Aztec ruins and dusty pueblos. Tylor came from a prosperous Quaker business family, so he had the resources for a long trip. L ike many Englishmen who suffered from tuberculosis in the 19th century, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor went abroad on medical advice, seeking the drier air of warmer regions. ![]()
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