""On a Method of Investigating the Development of Institutions;
Applied to Laws of Marriage and Descent" (1888)
Tylor was first person appointed to an academic chair in anthropology. He was appointed curator at Pitt-Rivers Museum in 1883, a reader of anthro at Oxford in 1884, and first chair in anthropology in 189x. However, he was not an academic by training or career. In 1884, he had been writing and lecturing for 23 years, but after that published only one academic article of consequence. At the turn of the century, though, he was still the most honored anthropologist of his generation.
George Stocking, in his original 1965 essay on presentism and historicism, cites his own writing on E. B. Tylor to defend his historicism: "E.B. Tylor may speak to present anthropologists, but they will be better able to understand him if they are able to distinguish between the questions he asked which have long since been answered, the questions which are still open, and the questions which we would no longer recognize as suchc [T]o approach Tylor in these terms requires a standpoint in the present. But it also requires that we know what the questions were to which Tylor's ideas were answers, and the alternatives which his answers were designed to exclude" (1965:11).
In his essays on Tylor,
Stocking wrote that "Tylor's central anthropological problem was to 'fill
the gap between Brixham Cave and European Civilization without introducing the
hand of God'—that is, to show that human culture was, or might have been,
the result of a natural evolutionary development. No anthropologist today would
question the fact that culture was, in a broad sense, the product of such an
evolutionary development. That question has been answered. On the other hand,
the question of filling in gaps is still very much open, and although our methods
of approaching this problem are perhaps quite different, Tylor may still have
something to say to us. However, the question of the hand of God, which greatly
exercised a number of Tylor's contemporaries, and therefore Tylor, we would
not regard as a question."
Tylor read this paper at a meeting of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland on November 13, 1888. He had delivered an earlier version of the paper at Oxford. George Stocking has singled out this paper of Tylor as containing "in compressed form all the major methodological and conceptual assumptions of evolutionary anthropology" (1995:3).
Tylor's paper was intended as a brief for a method and a conclusion. The method was that of "social arithmetic," or statistical analysis of the presence of "adhesions" (= correlations) between "traits" (= customs and institutions) among a large sample of human societies ("roughly three hundred and fifty peoples"). He sought to compare the presences and the adhesions to find those that seemed greater than the laws of chance (on the logical presumption that similar traits were produced by similar causes). The traits (customs) that he takes up in this address are:
He is dealing with both societal types and developmental stages. In this paper, though he does not induce them from the traits and adhesions. The societal types (e.g., patrilineal and matrilineal) are applications of existing rubrics. Rather, he employs a concept of "survivals" to test the developmental priority of societal types and associated traits.
Tylor's larger purpose was to demonstrate to scientists (Sir Francis Galton was President of the Institute and chaired the session) that anthropology—and the "comparative method" that was at the heart of evolutionary anthropology—was amenable to quantifiable methods.
We may trace the exposition of the paper's argument is as follows:
1. He first tabulates the distribution of avoidance behavior and post-marital residence rules, to discover that there is a statistically significant adhesion of "ceremonial avoidance by the husband of the wife's family is in some way connected with his living with them" and vice versa.
He then asks why, and likens the behavior to his own society's practice of "cutting." Here avoidance marks the stranger in the relatives' midst. Tylor does observe that the correlation itself has the status of a scientific fact" but the explanation is on "less solid ground" of inference.
2. He then takes up what he labels teknonymy (the parent renamed for his/her child). See the Venn-like diagram that plots the non-random occurrence of these three customs. Why? The father is treated as a stranger until the birth of his first born child.
3. He returns to the residence-avoidance adhesion to consider those cases of patrilocal residence yet the husband-and-in-laws avoidance. This he explains as a "survival" of a time past when residence was matrilocal. In fact he constructs a diagram to demonstrate an evolutionary shift from matrilocal through transitional to patrilocal "stages of residence."
4. Tylor then turns to a second set of traits, taking up descent in its "matriarchal" and "patriarchal" forms (252). He makes a useful distinction between descent, authority, succession, and inheritance as four dimensions of this distinction. He pursues the developmental relationship by means of widow-remarriage, which he divides into two forms: the levirate (being married to one of the deceased husband's classificatory brothers) (N=120) and the practice of the wife passing to the sons. He believes the distribution demonstrates a passage from matrilineal to patrilineal rules.
5. The couvade is his next custom, by which "the father, on the birth of his child, makes a ceremonial pretense of being the mother, being nursed and taken care of, and performing other rites such as fasting and abstaining form certain kinds of food or occupation, lest the new-born should suffer thereby" (254). Here, he validates Bachofen's proposition that it is the turning point between matrilineal and patrilineal (the father is almost recognized, as a "second mother")
"[Note that part of Tylor's reasoning is that the maternal stage is the earliest because it doesn't have survivals of other stages, while the other stages have survivals from the maternal stage—e.g., 256]
6. Marriage by capture is introduced next (259-261). He distinguishes three types: hostile capture is equally distributed through the three stages; connubial capture, in which the husband carries the wife to his own house, is only patrilineal; and formal, ritual capture is also patrilineal. His reasoning seems contorted here, but it is that hostile capture rests uneasily with matrilocal patterns (!) and thus is part of the transition out of matrilocal, while the other two are particularly characteristic of the transitional stage towards patrilineal systems.
7. On p. 261, Tylor shifts focus again to address the matter of exogamy, and offers an explanation for this institution of "early marriage law" by showing it to be closely correlated with another pattern, that of classificatory kinship (261-268). Indeed, he concludes that they are two sides of the same institution. He proposes that what he terms "cross-cousin marriage" is based on a simple rule of two-class exogamy, which he claims on the basis of adhesions to be the original form. In addition to his evolutionary claims, he also reiterates his earlier functionalist point that exogamy binds "different tribes together in friendship by intermarriage" (266, and following discussion through 268). A group surrounded by hostile neighbors, he reasons, can either marry out or be killed out. "Exogamy is thus an early method of political self-preservation" (page 92 of same Journal issue).
8. Tylor concludes (269) (1) "that in statistical investigation the future of anthropology lies" (citing Bastian) and (2) "the institutions of man are as distinctly stratified as the earth on which he lives. They succeed each other in series substantially uniform over the globe, independent of what seem the comparatively superficial differences of race and language, but shaped by similar human nature acting through successively changed conditions in savage, barbaric, and civilized life" (269) He ends by acknowledging the "imperfect" and "fragmentary" nature of the data on which his "social arithmetic" rests and pleads for filling in the "blank want of information" by a "quest" for data in the face of "fast vanishing memory."
In the discussion that followed, Galton, at the time, the Institute's president and chair of that evening's session, raised his famous methodological question: "It was extremely desirablec that full information should be given as to the degree in which the tribes and races which are compared together are independent" (270). That is, were the instances independent invention or diffusion?
Other points to note about the article:
A note of Tylor's "The Science of Culture," in his Primitive Culture, pp. 1-9 [1871].
His work warns us against two common misperceptions of 19th-century proto-anthropology—that it was evolutionist in a Darwinian sense and that it was racist. It was some of each, but more complicated in form. First, it was more about "developmentalism" than a simple evolutionism. It was Spencer more than Darwin who influenced at least English social thinking, with his propositions that societal survival depends on progressive differentiation into increasingly complex forms. Fluctuations in environment require appearance, selection for, and integration of new ideas and behaviors. The logic of developmentalism included a premise of cultural integration—the notion that parts were systematically related to one another (e.g., Tylor's famous definition of "culture" as a complex whole).
Its methodology was a version of the comparative method, which took the analyst from traits to types to stages to laws:
traits: search for similar traits (or "customs" or "institutions") on the presumption that similar traits had similar causes;
adhesions: which go back to Spencer's search for correlations [e.g., high warfare and low status of women, between despotic government and elaborate ritual]
survivals: some traits seen as survivals of archaic practices/beliefs in attentuated or marginal places like children's games (42).
Composing complexes of traits allowed the researcher to identify societal types that could be then arrayed into developmental stages. Tylor deployed the same three as Morgan (Savagery, Barbarism, Civilization), although he did not elaborate and subdivide them to same degree as Morgan. Such a framework of evolutionary, finally, was the foundation for searching for laws of development. Tylor's most famous proposal was the supposed movement from elementary animism through polytheism to monotheism.
Note that it was this orthogenetic comparative method that Boas attacked in his 1896 article.
Secondly, Tylor's assessment
of "primitive peoples" was not that they were degenerate but were
rather were stations along the way to fully-realized progress. Heredity was
inadmissible explanation of variation. They share the same natural endowments
as civilized people, and their forms of thought are reasonable and intelligible.
He saw anthropology as the "reformer's science" and much of his career
was spent combating what he saw as prejudice.