What exactly is Edward Tylor trying to convey in his essay Religion in Primitive Culture?
His ideas are pretty old but surprisingly resilient in Western culture. I don’t recall the specifics of the essay but E.B. Tylor is known for his belief that all humans beings have the same mental /capacity/ (i.e. intellectual potential) but that each culture has attained a specific level of intelligence based on what it has learned. Europeans, he felt, had learned more so they were more intellectually advanced. “Primitive” people, on the other hand, were like children (he was especially referring to hunting and gathering people). This was, unfortunately, an advance over the prevailing (Christian) belief that non-European people had degenerated from a state of grace and were largely irretrievable. Like children, hunting and gathering people had difficulty distinguishing between reality and fantasy and therefore believed that everything around them was alive — was “animated”, hence animism. While seen as childish by Tylor, such beliefs nevertheless laid the foundations for people to de
