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Victorian Fetishism argues that fetishism was central to the development of cultural theory in the nineteenth century. From 1850 to 1900, when theories of social evolution reached their peak, European intellectuals identified all \"primitive\" cultures with \"Primitive Fetishism,\" a psychological form of self-projection in which people believe everything in the external world—thunderstorms, trees, stones—is alive. Placing themselves at the opposite extreme of cultural evolution, the Victorians defined culture not by describing what culture was but by describing what it was not, and what it was not was fetishism. In analyses of major works by Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Edward B. Tylor, Peter Melville Logan demonstrates the paradoxical role of fetishism in Victorian cultural theory, namely, how Victorian writers projected their own assumptions about fetishism onto the realm of historical fact, thereby \"fetishizing\" fetishism. The book concludes by examining how fetishism became a sexual perversion as well as its place within current cultural theory.

“Oxford has arguably contributed more to our understanding of tribal societies than any other department of anthropology in the world…Through creating a virtual community, by uniting their work and their lives, by their assurance, generations of Oxford scholars have been able to make the leaps which take us into new and previously unsuspected worlds. They had the privileges, the shared zeal and the shock of similarity-with-difference which engenders true creativity and they made good use of it.” · [from the Preface] “[The volume’s] virtues include giving outsiders a sense of Oxford anthropology’s oral tradition.” · JRAI “There is no doubt that Oxford has been a leading player in the discipline of anthropology. It is precisely the fact that this resounding success can be taken for granted that makes possible this deliciously indiscreet retrospective.” · Books & Culture

Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) is often considered the father of the discipline of anthropology. Despite such eminence, his biography has never been written and the connections between his life and his work have been largely obscured or ignored. This article presents Tylor's main theories in the field of anthropology, especially as presented in his four published books, the most famous of which is Primitive Culture, and in the manuscript sources for his last, unpublished, one on ‘The natural history of religion’. One of Tylor's major areas of interest was the use of anthropological evidence to discover how religion arose. This preoccupation resulted in his influential account of ‘animism’. Drawing upon biographical information not known by previous scholars, Tylor's Quaker formation, later religious scepticism and personal life are connected to his intellectual work. Assumptions such as his evolutionary view of human culture and intellectualist approach to ‘savage’ customs, his use of the comparative method, and distinctive notions of his such as ‘survivals’ are first explained, and then the discussion is taken a step further in order to demonstrate how they were deployed to influence contemporary religious beliefs and practices. Tylor argued that the discipline of anthropology was a ‘reformer's science’. Working within the warfare model of the relationship between faith and science, I reveal the extent to which this meant for him using the tools of this new field of inquiry to bring about changes in the religious convictions of his contemporaries.

A survey of articles published in the American Anthropologist over a 100-year period indicates that substantive collaboration across anthropological subfields is largely a myth - amounting to only 311 of 3,264 articles surveyed (or 9.5 percent of the total). Working with the anthropological insights of Bronislaw Malinowski, Edward Tylor, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, this article considers why a myth of subfield collaboration nonetheless exists within anthropology. This article concludes by calling for new forms of holism.

The basic analytical unit used by E. B. Tylor, Franz Boas, Clark Wissler, A. L. Kroeber, and other early anthropologists interested in cultural transmission was the cultural trait. Most assumed that such traits were, at base, mental phenomena acquired through teaching and learning. The lack of an explicit theoretical concept of cultural trait meant that the units varied greatly in scale, generality, and inclusiveness among ethnographers. Efforts to resolve the difficulties of classification and scale were made but were largely unsuccessful. The history of the concept of cultural trait reveals not only the roots of modern theoretical difficulties with units of cultural transmission but also some of the properties that such a unit needs to have if it is to be analytically useful to theories of cultural evolution.

Here I look at E.B. Tylor's classic work Primitive culture, particularly that aspect that deals with animism. I discuss several of the critiques of animism, showing how most of them have actually misread Tylor's original intentions in relation to his supposed `theory of origins' and his understanding of `spirit', among other things. Then, by focusing on Tylor's theory of myth and the process by which he constructs his argument concerning animism, I provide a re-reading that focuses on discourse and layers of religious practice within individual societies. Finally, I indicate how this re-reading of Tylor relates to contemporary writing on animism and modern religions.

It is argued that the appreciation of the legitimacy that Thorstein Veblen claimed in his work \"The Theory of the Leisure Class\" must distinguish its pervasive irony from its occasional ventures into satire and recognize the rationale that would have justified each. The influence of Edward Burnett Tylor and his theory of survivals on Veblen's social criticism are discussed.

Seven Theories of Religion by Daniel L. Pals.