Matthew Arnold, E. B.

Tylor,
and the Uses of Invention’
GEORGE W. STOCKING, JR.
University ’of Calqornia, Berkeley

Briefly, the word culture with its modern technical or anthropological meaning was
established in English by Tylor in 1871,though it seems not to have penetrated to any general
or “complete” British or American dictionary until more than fifty years later-a piece of cul-
tural lag that may help to keep anthropologists humble in estimating the tempo of their influ-
ence on even the avowedly literate segment of their society (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952:9).

N THE absence of history, men create myths which explain the origin of
I their most sacred beliefs. Knowing this, should anthropologists then be sur-
prised that, in the absence of a history of anthropology, an element of myth
has crept into the story they tell of the origin of their central concept? Tradi-
tional account would have it that Edward Burnett Tylor created a science by
defining its substance-culture. But story recognizes also that Tylor did not in-
vent the word, that it had then and continues to have now a congeries of
“humanist” meanings in addition to its “correct” anthropological meaning
(Williams 1960; Cowell 1959: 237-398). The crucial differences in meaning
(from the anthropological point of view) would seem to be in the area of valu-
ation:
The [Matthew] Arnold-[John] Powys-[Werner] Jaeger concept of culture is not only
ethnocentric, ... it is absolutistic. I t knows perfection, or a t least what is most perfect in
human achievement, and resolutely directs its “obligatory” gaze thereto, disdainful of what
is “lower”. The anthropological attitude is relativistic, in that in place of beginning with a n
inherited hierarchy of values, it assumes that every society through its culture seeks and in
some measure finds values, and that the business of anthropology includes the determination
of the range, variety, constancy, and interrelations of these innumerable values (Kroeber and
Kluckhohn 1952:32).

I n the anthropological creation story, the two culture concepts are seen in com-
petition for dictionary and general intellectual precedence, which outside the
anthropological ethnos has perversely been awarded to the false or outmoded
humanist meaning. From out of story history gradually emerges; a preliminary
inquiry into the history of the culture idea in English and American anthro-
pology suggests that it did not leap full-blown from Tylor’s brow in 1871, and
that much of the lag in its penetration beyond anthropology has been more
apparent than real.
‘LCultureor Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that com-
plex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any
other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (Tylor
1871 :I, 1). For over thirty years after this “sharp and successful conceptual-
ization” in 1871, Tylor’s “classic” definition seems to have been without SUC-
cessor. One might think that “the length of this interval inevitably raises the
question whether an isolated statement, so far ahead as this of all the rest
783
784 American Anthropologist [65, 1963
. . . , can have been actuated by the same motivations . . . ”; but in Tylor’s
case the question was not raised (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952: 149-151).
Nevertheless, close consideration of Tylor’s definition in the context of his work
and time does in fact suggest that his idea of culture was perhaps closer to that
of his humanist near-contemporary Matthew Arnold than it was to the modern
anthropological meaning. And insofar as their usages differed, it can be argued
that in certain ways Arnold was closer than Tylor to the modern anthropo-
logical meaning.
Let us begin with the definition itself. “Culture or Civilization”-in this
very synonymity, which some modern renditions obscure by an ellipsis of the
last two words, Tylor begs the whole question of relativism and in effect makes
the modern anthropological meaning of “culture” impossible. The concept of a
plurality of civilizations had existed since the early 19th century (Febvre
1930), and is a t least implicit in portions of Tylor’s work; but when he went on
in this same passage to speak of the “civilization of the lower tribes as related
to the civilization of the higher nations” (1871:11 l), it is clear that he meant
degree rather than type or style of civilization. “Civilization,” for Tylor a s for
Lewis Henry Morgan, was the highest stage in an explicitly formulated se-
quence of progressive human development which began in “savagery” and
moved through “barbarism.” Inherited from the late 18th century (Teggart
1925; Bock 1956; Hodgen 1936), this sequence-and the “hierarchy of values”
it implied-was central to Tylor’s ethnology (e.g. Tylor 1881:24). If he was
less disdainful than most of his contemporaries of what was clearly “lower,”
it is obvious that Tylor had no doubt that European “civilization” was,
though not perfect, “at least what is most perfect in human achievement.”
True, he was a t much pain-indeed as we shall see it was his central purpose-
to prove that savagery and barbarism were early manifestations or grades of
civilization. But in all major areas of human activity, “culture” reached its full
flowering only in the third stage.
Although evident in the definition itself, the real meaning of Tylor’s “cul-
ture” is better understood in the light of the intellectual background and some-
what polemical purpose of his major work. Tylor’s two most important books,
Researches into the Early History of Mankind (1865) and Primitive Culture
(l871), were products of the decade of the 1 8 6 0 ’ ~and~ can only be understood
in terms of the intellectual and anthropological controversies of these years,
which were roughly the interval between Darwin’s Origin of Species and
Descent of Man. The publication of the Origin in 1859 focused a whole range of
developing knowledge in the biological and historical sciences on the question
of the origin and antiquity of mankind and of human civilization (see, e.g.
Ellegird 1958:24, 97, 101, 293,332). Indeed, i t is perhaps fair to say that “an-
thropology” in the broad sense was the central intellectual problem of the
1860’s. The recently accepted researches of Boucher de Perthes in pre-historic
archeology; archeological investigations of ancient historic civilizations; de-
velopments in comparative philology; the study of the physical types of man-
kind; the sociological and historical theorizing of writers like Comte and
STOCKING] Arnold, Tylor, and the Uses of Invention 785
Buckle; as well as more than two decades of organized activities in general
“ethnology”--these varied researches which had been the preoccupation of
scholars for some decades back into the first half of the 19th century became
suddenly terribly and interrelatedly important (Penniman 1952: 60-92).
If anthropology was the central intellectual problem of the sixties, an im-
portant aspect of this problem was that a t issue in the debate between the
degradationists (or degenerationists) and the developmentalists (or progres-
sionists). Although this discussion became a part of the contemporary debate
over Darwinian evolution, it had other and earlier roots. The idea that Euro-
pean civilization was the end product of an historic progress from a savage
state of nature, that the development of all human social groups (composed as
they were of beings of a single species with a common human nature) neces-
sarily followed a similar gradual progressive development, and that the stages
of this development could be reconstructed in the absence of historical evi-
dence by applying the “comparative method” to human groups co-existing in
the present, by the end of the 18th century had come to form the basis of much
Western European social thought (Bock 1956; Teggart 1925). Although this
theory continued to be widely accepted right on through the first half of the
19th century, several currents of thought and experience in this period tended
to undermine it (Hodgen 1936: 9-36).
Among these was the “polygenist” argument that the races of men were
aboriginally distinct and permanently unequal species. By 1863, James Hunt
and John Crawfurd, the presidents of the competing English anthropological
associations, whatever their many other personal and theoretical differences,
were both ardent polygenists (Crawfurd 1863; Hunt 1865). Indeed, the con-
version of British physical anthropologists to Darwinism was delayed for a
decade or so by its prima facie monogenist implications (Hunt 1868:77;
Stewart 1959: 12-17). Polygenism was heterodox; but the currents of romantic
doubt affected the orthodox as well, with no less serious implications for the
18th century view of the course of human social development and for social
theorizing based on the comparative method. Richard Whately, Archbishop of
Dublin, had argued in his 1857 lecture “On the Origins of Civilization,” that
all experience proved that “men, left in the lowest, or even anything approach-
ing to the lowest, degree of barbarism in which they can possibly subsist a t all,
never did and never can raise themselves, unaided, into a higher condition
(quoted in Tylor 1865: 160-161).” And indeed, where people were found in
savagery, it was because they had degenerated from an originally higher cul-
ture which had been conferred upon man by “divine intervention” (as sum-
marized by Tylor 1871:1, 34). Whately was not alone in arguing the de-
generationist point of view, and throughout the 1860’s the issue of degener-
ationism and progressionism was the subject of widespread and even acri-
monious debate among English intellectuals (Hodgen 1936: 26-34; EllegArd
1958:31-32, 301 ff.;Eiseley 1961:297-302).
I t is in this framework that Tylor’s early work must be considered. Whether
i t derived from the German social evolutionist ethnologist Gustav Klemm,
786 American Anthropologist [65, 1963
from the high priest of positivist sociology Auguste Comte, from his archeolo-
gist friend Henry Christy, from historian Henry Thomas Buckle, or simply
from his enculturative milieu, it is clear that Tylor’s anthropological thought
was part of the 19th century positivist incarnation of the progressionist
tradition which Whately attacked.2 I n 1863, Tylor reviewed the evidence of
European accounts of “Wild Men and Beast-Children,” concluding that they
offered little help towards the solution of a problem of “some importance to
anthropologists”: the establishment of “the lowest limit of human existence.”
The problem was in fact central to progressionist theory, and much of Tylor’s
later work is foreshadowed in his concluding remarks: “The enquirer who
seeks .. . the beginnings of man’s civilization must deduce general principles
by reasoning downwards from the civilized European to the savage, and then
descend to still lower possible levels of human existence . . . (1863:21, 32).” If
Whately’s argument were accepted, the whole framework of assumption under-
lying Tylor’s downward reasoning would be destroyed.
Two years later, Tylor turned to the work of shoring up theoretical timbers
weakened by the currents of early 19th century doubt. Not only did he devote
a central chapter to Whately and the “Growth and Decline of Culture,” but
the “Concluding Remarks” of his Researches told “distinctly for or against
some widely circulated Ethnological theories. . . . ” They suggested in the first
place “that the wide differences in the civilization and mental state of the vari-
ous races of mankind are rather differences of development than of origin,
rather of degree than of kind.” The “mental uniformity” of mankind was
shown by the difficulty of finding “among a listof twenty items of art or knowl-
edge, custom or superstition, taken a t random from a description of any un-
civilized race, a single one to which something closely analogous may not be
found elsewhere among some other race, unlike the first in physical char-
acters, and living thousands of miles off (1865:361-363).” I t is hard to appre-
ciate the heat which once emanated from the now scattered ashes of long dead
controversies, but the “ethnological theory” to which Tylor referred was
“polygenism,” and its place in his summary suggests the importance which the
controversy between monogenists and polygenists had in anthropological
circles in the 1860’s. For Tylor, the issue was particularly important: without a
common human nature, all historical reconstruction based on the assumption
of the psychic unity of mankind was necessarily invalid.
The rest of Tylor’s five major conclusions bore on the problem of progress.
On the question of the state of prime’va) man, he argued on the one hand that
while the present condition of savages was the product of a complex history, it
seemed close enough to that of primeval man to provide a basis “to reason
upon.” On the other, he speculated about the early “mental state” of man in
terms foreshadowing his subsequent theory of animism (1865: 368-370). On
the general course of human history, he argued that while there had apparently
been “local” degeneration among “particular tribes,” his “collections of facts
relating to various useful arts” showed that “in such practical matters a t least,
the history of mankind has been on the whole a history of progress.” All things
STOCKING] Arnold, Tylor, and the Uses of Invention 787
considered, the progressionist position was more “reasonable” than the de-
generationist (1865 :363-365).
Having concluded that the development of man was generally upward from
a primitive condition of savagery, Tylor suggested that “the question then
arises, how any particular piece of skill or knowledge has come into any par-
ticular place where it is found. Three ways are open, independent invention,
inheritance from ancestors in a distant region, transmission from one race to
another; but between these three ways the choice is commonly a difficult one”
(1865:365). At this point, Tylor seemed clearly inclined to favor the latter two
alternatives as both the more likely and the more fruitful for the reconstruction
of the actual history of mankind. But as a number of other writers have noted,
there is a change in emphasis between the Researches and Primitive Culture:
the argument for progress and from independent invention is more central to
his purpose in the second book (Andrew Lang, as quoted in Smith 1933: 168-
169; A. C. Haddon, as quoted in Bidney 1953:200; Teggart 1925:114;
Hodgen 1936:36 ff.; and Smith 1933:116183; cf., however, Lowie
1937:72-80 and Bidney 1953:198-201). This can be a t least partially ex-
plained by the intensification of the controversy between developmentalists
and degenerationists in the late 1860’s. And more importantly for present pur-
poses, I would suggest that this change in emphasis bears on the development
of the culture concept.
Tylor’s Researches were not the only contribution to the degenerationist-
progressionist debate published in 1865. The same year saw the appearance of
Sir John Lubbock’s Prehistoric Times, as illustrated b y ancient remains, and the
manners and customs of modern savages. Lubbock, who was explicitly Dar-
winian, was an ardent and total progressionist: “the most sanguine hopes for
the future are justified by the whole experience of the past”; “Utopia,” far
from being a dream, was rather “the necessary consequence of natural laws.
. . , ’’ (1865:490-492). In 1867 and 1869, Lubbock carried his defense of pro-
gressionism (which in 1868 came under the further attack of the Duke of
Argyll) before the meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science a t Dundee and Exeter (Lubbock 1868: 1-23). Each time the advocates
of both positions were heatedly participant; and a t least on the second occasion
Tylor was present (Anonymous 1868; 1869a).
The discussion was by no means limited to anthropological circles; in 1869,
an article summarizing the current status of the controversy appeared in T h e
Contemporary Review. Stressing the distinction between industrial, intellectual,
and moral progress (which distinction for Lubbock can hardly be said to have
existed), it attacked Lubbock for his failure to consider the role of migration
and contact. Since Whately had not denied savage progress per se, but only
unassisted savage progress, the real issue was not whether savages could rise, but
rather under what circumstances they had done so. More importantly, the im-
plications for reconstructions based on the comparative method were here
made devastatingly clear: “It was indeed an attractive thought to convert a
survey of contemporary races into a chronological history of their successive
788 American Anthropotogist [65, 1963
stages”-but if the Eskimo and the Patagonian were the end-results of de-
generation rather than the starting-points of progress, then the whole attempt
collapsed. Though discussion would undoubtedly continue, certain points had
already been firmly established: there was a crucial distinction between the
“origin of industrial arts and the origin of moral culture. I t is one thing to find
out . . . the methods by which man learnt to subdue the earth; it is another to
discover the influences through which he learnt to subdue his spirit. . . .
Spiritual progress is a very different thing from material, and can only be com-
prehended by the light of very different laws, which lie beyond the jurisdiction of
science. , . . We have reasons which science has no right to challenge for resting
satisfied that they are traceable t o a direct divine communion as their source”
(Hannah 1869: 160-177, my emphasis).
It was to answer this position, if not this writer, that Tylor wrote Primitive
Culture. Its essential purpose was to refute the degenerationist argument that
man’s spiritual or cultural life was not governed by the same natural laws of
progress as his material life and was therefore not a subject for scientific study.
Written to show that “the phenomena of culture” as well as the arts of life were
the products of progressive development, it sought to demonstrate that knowl-
edge, custom, art, and even religious belief had developed by a natural process
out of roots in primitive savagery (1871:1, Chapts. 1 and 2, passim). “The his-
tory of mankind is part and parcel of the history of nature,” and “our thoughts,
wills, and actions accord with laws as definite as those which govern the motion
of waves, the combination of acids and bases, and the growth of plants and
animals” (1871:1, 2). I t was not accidental to Tylor’s purpose that over half
the book was devoted to the evolution of religious beliefs, where more than
anywhere else one might have expected a development by “divine com-
muni~n.”~
Tylor’s somewhat polemical and markedly nomothetic purpose had, how-
ever, certain consequences which are important for an understanding of the de-
velopment of the culture concept. In his Researches Tylor had been interested in
historical process as well as evolutionary sequence, and indeed the book is
as “diffusionist” as it is “evolutionist.” But by 1871 Tylor’s primary purpose
was the establishment of a progressive sequence of stages in the evolution of
mental phenomena, and this commitment involved a subordination of his in-
terest in the three alternative processes (independent invention, inheritance
and transmission) by which any cultural element might come into the life of a
specific group. Most of the traditional evidence for Tylor’s diffusionism is taken
from the Researches; much less from Primitive Culture; none of it from Anthro-
pology (1881), the latest and most frankly popular of his major works, which is
essentially a series of chapters demonstrating the fact and course of progression
in various areas of life.4 Tylor continued to allow considerable role to diffusion;
it is in Primitive Culture, after all, that one finds the classic diffusionist epi-
gram: “Civilization is a plant much oftener propagated than developed” (1871 :
I, 48). But if the degenerationist argument that savages had never progressed
without assistance were to be refuted, then the evidence of independent inven-
STOCKING] Arnold, Tylor, and the Uses of Invention 789
tion was obviously much more to the point. The evidence of diffusion was a t
best neutral and perhaps even damaging to the progressionist case, since a pri-
ori it can be seen that diffusion would only act to obscure the essentially self-
generative stages of progressive development which it was Tylor’s primary pur-
pose to establish (1871 :I, l, 6, 14, passim).
The method by which these stages were to be reconstructed and arranged
in a “probable order of evolution” was the long-utilized and recently ques-
tioned comparative method, which Tylor explicated a t some length in the first
chapter of Primitive Culture. As employed by Tylor, it had a t least two impor-
tant implications for the culture concept. On the one hand, it forced the frag-
mentation of whole human cultures into discrete elements which might be
classified and compared out of any specific cultural context and then rear-
ranged in stages of probable evolutionary development; on the other, i t pre-
supposed a hierarchical, evaluative approach to the elements thus abstracted
and to the stages thus reconstructed.
“A first step in the study of civilization is to dissect it into details, and to
classify these in their proper groups. Thus, in examining weapons, they are to
be classed under spear, club, sling, bow and arrow, and so forth; ... myths are
divided under such headings as myths of sunrise and sunset, eclipse-myths,
.
earthquake-myths, . . ” etc. (1871:1,7-8). Tylor went on todiscuss thediffu-
sion of such cultural elements from area to area; but after a six-page detour into
the consideration of historical process, he returned to the central progressionist
point: “It being shown that the details of Culture are capable of being classified
in a great number of ethnographic groups of arts, beliefs, customs, and the rest,
the consideration comes next how far the facts arranged in these groups are
produced by evolution from one another” (1871:1, 13). Tylor went on to argue
on a number of grounds, including the evidence of material progress and the
now famous doctrine of “survivals,” that these comparatively derived se-
quences were in fact historical sequences, and that we could thus “reconstruct
lost history without scruple, trusting to general knowledge of the principles of
human thought and action as a guide in putting the facts in their proper order”
(1871 :I, 14). At one point in this discussion, Tylor spoke of the total relation-
ship of the cultural details collected in any given locality: “Just as the cata-
logue of all the species of plants and animals of a district represents its Flora and
Fauna, so the list of all the items of the general life of a people represents that
whole which we call its culture” (1871:1, 7-8). But a t no point in either Primi-
tive Culture or Anthropology did he concern himself with such a cultural whole
as an organized or functionally integrated or patterned way of life, nor does he
use the word “culture” in the plural form. Tylor was concerned rather with dis-
crete cultural elements and with the stages in the development of a single
human culture which he derived from them. When he spoke of “the culture” of
a group, or, as in this case, of “its culture,” i t is clear in almost every instance
that he meant “the culture-stage” or the “degree of culture” of that group.
“In taking up the problem of the development of culture as a branch of
ethnological research,” the first thing Tylor had to do was find “a means of
7 90 American Anthropologist [65, 1963
measurement” against which he could “reckon progression and retrogression
in civilization. . . . 11
Civilization actually existing among mankind in different grades, we are enabled to esti-
mate and compare it by positive examples. The educated world of Europe and America prac-
tically settles a standard by simply placing its own nations at one end of the social series and
savage tribes a t the other, arranging the rest of mankind between these limits according as
they correspond more closely to savage or to cultured life. The principle criteria of classifica-
tion are the absence or presence, high or low development, of the industrial arts, ... the ex-
tent of scientific knowledge, the definiteness of moral principles, the condition of religious be-
lief and ceremony, the degree of social and political organization, and so forth. Thus, on the
definite basis of compared facts, ethnographers are able to set up a t least a rough scale of
civilization. Few would dispute that the following races are arranged rightly in order of cul-
ture:-Australian, Tahitian, Aztec, Chinese, Italian (1871:I, 23-24).
What is this but an implicit formulation of the “inherited hierarchy of values”
of humanist culture? True, Tylor went on to suggest that “if not only knowl-
edge and art, but a t the same time moral and political excellence, be taken into
consideration, it becomes yet harder to reckon on an ideal scale the advance or
decline from stage to stage of culture” (1871:1, 25); but this was simply a
caveat as to the difficulties of evaluation. His conclusion is straightforwardly,
if humanely, ethnocentric: “Savage moral standards are real enough, but they
are far looser and weaker than ours. . . . That any known savage tribe would
not be improved by judicious civilization, is a proposition which no moralist
would dare to make; while the general tenour of the evidence goes far to justify
the view that on the whole the civilized man is not only wiser and more capable
than the savage, but also better and happier, and that the barbarian stands be-
tween” (1871:1, 28, my emphasis).
The point is simply that cultural hierarchism is not incidental but crucial
to Tylor’s ethnology. The refutation of the degenerationist separation of man’s
moral culture from his material progress required that the progressionist scale
include “moral principles” and “religious belief.” True, i t demanded that
savage morality be real morality, and thus introduced a kind of relativism into
the realm of values; but it demanded a t the same time that savage morality,
however real, be inferior to the morality of civilized peoples. If the culture of
savages was “real culture,” it was a t the same time partial, inferior or “lower”
culture. David Bidney, pointing to Tylor’s use of such phrases as “uncultured
man” and “cultured modern man,” has suggested that Tylor shifted “con-
stantly from the positive and relativistic to the normative and moral sense of
the term [culture]” (1953: 195). But there were no serious inconsistencies in
Tylor’s usage; they were all fundamentally normative, as indeed the peroration
of his magnum opus suggests: “The science of culture is essentially a reformer’s
science” (1871:11, 410).
To say that his “culture” was normative and fragmented does not exhaust
the uses Tylor made-or failed to make-of his invention. I t has been suggested
that Tylor’s “culture” was, “in essence, very similar” to the English social
Darwinist Walter Bagehot’s “cake of custom” (Kroeber and Kluckhohn
1952 :4). But Tylor’s “culture” was not, like the “cake of custom,” an accumu-
lation of social tradition passed on from generation to generation, acting
STOCKING] Arnold, Tylor, and the Uses of Inveiztiorz 791
through the mechanisms of unconscious imitation to determine and unify the
behavior of a social group (Bagehot 1867: 20, 24 ff., 71 ff.). Culture, for Tylor,
was only slightly developed beyond its earlier English verbal sense of “cultiva-
tion”; it had to do primarily with change and progress, not continuity or stasis.
If he considered “inheritance” one of the three ways by which cultural ele-
ments came to a specific group, he had only the vaguest sense of its actual
process; in fact, it seems occasionally to have been almost physical in the
Lamarckian sense, as indeed the cake of custom became for Bagehot (1867: 22,
78, 80). The historical or hereditary element in civilized life Tylor called
“survival i n culture” (187 1:I, 63 ff .). The phrase served to distinguish uncon-
scious and irrational inheritances of the past from ‘Lcultured”behavior, which
was above all conscious and rational. Tylor’s errors in the analysis of religious
phenomena are well known (Marett 1936:66, 108 ff., 168; Lowie 1937:84-85);
they arise from his tendency to explain all contributions to culture in terms of
conscious, rationalistic processes. Primitive man reasoned soundly from false
premises; as knowledge increased, premises became sounder and progress might
become systematic reform.
Had the experience of ancient men been larger, they would have seen their way to faster
steps in culture. But we civilized moderns have just that wider knowledge which the rude
ancients wanted. Acquainted with events and their consequences far and wide over the world,
we are able to direct our own course with more confidence toward improvement. In a word,
mankind is passing from the age of unconscious to that of conscious progress (Tylor 1881:
439-440; cf. 1871:11,410).

So also Bagehot’s “cake of custom” tended to break down in the “age of discus-
sion,” which freed men for the achievement of “verifiable progress” (1867 :
Chapts. 5 and 6, passim). Both men shared an ideal of civilized man’s creative
rational capacities much like the humanist concept of culture. But Bagehot’s
“cake of custom,” though part of a current of social psychological thinking
which was to flow into the modern anthropological culture concept, was not in
any sense the equivalent of Tylor’s “culture,” which lacked a n y significant
social psychological content?
At this point perhaps we should draw together the threads of this discus-
sion of the uses of invention. Beyond the first page of Primitive Culture, Tylor’s
culture concept loses in its actual usage much of the significance which modern
anthropologists have attributed to it. Noting the absence of so many of the ele-
ments crucial to the modern anthropological usage-relativity, integration,
meaningful historicity or behavioral determinism (cf. Kroeber and Kluckhohn
1952: 159-199)-, one cannot help wondering in what sense Tylor “defined”
the concept. On the other hand, why did Tylor give the word such prominence
in the title of his most important book? Had he, as Kroeber and Kluckhohn
thought, “wavered between culture and civilization and perhaps finally
chose[n] the former as somewhat less burdened with connotation of high degree
.
of advancement. . (1952:147)”? The discussion so far would suggest that
this was not the case. Here again, it may help to look a t intellectual currents
of the 1860’s.
792 American Anthropologist [65, 1963
I n the last half of this decade the humanist idea of culture became some-
thing of an issue in English intellectual life. During 1867 and 1868 the essays
which were to form the substance of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy
were published in The Cornhill Magazine. They provoked such a lively discus-
sion that when they were reprinted in 1869 the reviewer in the The Contempo-
rary Review thought it unnecessary to deal with their substance, since it would
already have been familiar to “the majority of our readers” (Anonymous
1869b:lSO; cf. Wilson 1932:xxi). In view of what we have already seen of the
nature of Tylor’s culture concept, it should hardly be surprising that it was in
some respects quite similar to Arnold’s. Even on the level of sheer enumeration
(and Tylor’s concept hardly gets beyond this [Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952:
43]), once we go behind Arnold’s “sweetness and light” (1869:72) to those as-
pects of human life which were involved in the “pursuit of perfection,” we
come up with a list very near the elements in Tylor’s definition: “art, science,
poetry, philosophy, history, as well as . . . religion” (1869:47). Taking into
consideration Arnold’s obvious concern for morality and manners (or customs),
the remaining differences in enumerative content (even, I would suggest,
Arnold’s failure to mention language) can be explained better as by-products
of Tylor’s ethnographic focus, than of any fundamental difference in concep-
tual orientation. Beyond this, both men conceived culture in normative terms,
though their standards of evaluation were not the same. And finally, both
Arnold and Tylor saw culture as a conscious striving toward progress or perfec-
tion, “by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the
best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowl-
edge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and
habits. .. .” (Arnold 1869:6, my emphasis). If the phrase is Arnold’s, the senti-
ment is exactly that of the last page of Primitive Culture, where Tylor defined
the “office of ethnography”: “to expose the remains of crude old culture which
have passed into harmful superstition, and to mark these out for destruction”
(1871:11, 410).
The differences between Tylor’s and Arnold’s uses of the term “culture” are
no less revealing than their similarities. For Arnold, “culture,” in mid-Vic-
torian England if not a t all times, was quite a different thing from “civiliza-
tion.” Civilization was outward and mechanical; culture was above all an “in-
ward condition of the mind and spirit.” It was therefore fundamentally “at
variance with the mechanical and material civilization in esteem with us, and
nowhere, as I have said, so much in esteem as with us” (1869:48-49). And if it
sought perfection, Arnold’s culture did not find it in a simple upward historical
progress so much as in isolated moments of cultural flowering, “when there is a
national glow of life and thought, when the whole of society is in the fullest
measure permeated by thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive”
(1869:69). For Arnold, England in the sixties was emphatically not one of these
moments. As the title of his book suggests, he offered “culture” to his age as an
alternative to an anarchy which threatened it. Tylor, however, saw his own time
as “an age scarcely approached by any former age in the possession of actual
STOCKING] Arnold, Tylor, and the Uses of Invention 793
knowledge and the strenuous pursuit of truth as the guiding principle of life”
(1871:11, 408). The difference is crucial; it suggests a basis in the sociology
of knowledge for the anthropological idea whose history we are sketching.
Since it is the sociology of Tylor’s knowledge which immediately concerns
us let us take Arnold’s ideas as given. For whatever reasons in his own encul-
turative experience, Arnold was a severe critic of urban industrial society, and
of the politically Liberal, religiously Nonconformist and culturally “Philistine”
middle class which had largely made and largely ruled it (Trilling 1949). In-
deed, the perfection that Arnold’s “culture” aimed a t was largely the perfection
of the Nonconformist middle class. One of the most important of the “stock
notions” upon which it would turn a “stream of fresh and free thought” was
the Liberal “fetish” of free-trade, whose mechanical worship had produced,
along with the “indefinite multiplication” of manufactories, railroads, popu-
lation, wealth, and cities, the grinding poverty of one twentieth of the English
people, whose children were “eaten u p with disease, half-sized, half-fed, half-
clothed, neglected by their parents, without health, without home, without
hope” (1869: 194). But both in background and conviction Tylor was part and
parcel of the Nonconformist, Liberal middle class. If as Nonconformist he
could not go to Arnold’s Oxford, the victories of 19th century Liberalism
eventually allowed him to teach there. And when ill-health forced his early
retirement from the business offices of his Quaker father’s brass foundry, a
“modest competency” made possible the travel which led him into anthropol-
ogy (Marett 1936:13). Tylor had no apparent qualms about free trade; he
ended his discussion of the evolution of commerce with a sentiment which
must have warmed old John Bright’s heart:
There is no agent of civilization more beneficial than the free trader, who gives the in-
habitants of every region the advantages of all other regions, and whose business is to work
out the law that what serves the general profit of mankind serves also the private profit of the
individual man (1881:286).
Tylor was not so alienated from middle-class civilization that he must define
culture as its anodyne. Quite the contrary, his identification was so thorough-
going that he made culture and civilization one by definition.
Conjectural intellectual biography is a dangerous undertaking a t best, but
I would suggest that Tylor wrote Primitive Culture and chose its title in the con-
text of Arnold’s polemic, and that his addition of “culture” to his earlier de-
finition of civilization (1865 :1) was in a sense an answer to Arnold as well as to
the degenerationists. That Tylor was aware of Arnold’s argument is suggested
not only by its contemporary notoriety, but by a passage in Primitive Culture
itself:
It may be taken as man’s rule of duty in the world, that he shall strive to know as well as he
can find out, and to do as well as he knows how. But the parting asunder of these two great
principles, that separation of intelligence from virtue which accounts for so much of the wrong-
doing of mankind, is continually seen to happen in the great movements of civilization (1871:
I, 25).
Though Tylor does not so label them, these “great principles’’ would seem to
be “two forces” central to Arnold’s thinking: Hellenism and Hebraism, “rivals
794 American Anthropologist [65, 1963
dividing the empire of the world between them, not by the necessity of their
own nature, but as exhibited in man and his history” (Arnold 1869: 129). Ac-
cording to Arnold, these “two disciplines” lay their main stress, “the one
[Hellenism], on clear intelligence, the other [Hebraism], on firm obedience; the
one, on comprehensively knowing the grounds of one’s duty, the other, on
diligently practicing i t ; the one, on taking all possible care . . . that the light
we have be not darkness, the other, that according to the best light we have we
diligently walk. . . . ” (Arnold 1869: 137). Like Arnold, Tylor felt that excel-
lence in knowing and in doing did not always go together; but as we have seen
already he went on to conclude that in the long run there was a general upward
progress in both: civilized man was not only “wiser and more capable than the
.
savage, but also better and happier. . , ” The point here is simply that
Arnold’s polemic on culture fitted quite well with the degenerationist argu-
ment: both assumed a distinction between civilization and culture; both called
into question the assumption that progress in virtue went hand in hand with
progress in technique. Writing largely in answer to the degenerationists, Tylor
might well have felt called upon to deal with Arnold a t the same time.
At this point we are in a position to formulate more precisely Tylor’s con-
tribution to the culture concept in Anglo-American anthropology. Far from de-
fining its modern anthropological meaning, he simply took the contemporary
humanist idea of culture and fitted it into the framework of progressive social
evolutionism. One might say he made Matthew Arnold’s culture evolutionary.
To do so was no small contribution. As a literary historian pointed out to me,
Matthew Arnold could never have called a work Primitive Culture: the very
idea would have been to him a contradiction in terms. To argue that culture
actually existed among all men, in however “crude” or “primitive” a form, may
be viewed as a major step toward the anthropological concept, especially inso-
far as it focused anthropological attention on manifestations of culture which
on account of their “crudity” were below the level of conscious cultivation
where “civilized” culture was to be found. Furthermore, the evolutionary ap-
proach contained a t least the germ of an idea of cultural plurality: one way (al-
though perhaps not the most direct) to the idea of different cultures was
through the concept of stages of culture. Perhaps more importantly, cultural
evolutionism implied a kind of functionalism in the realm of morals and values
which, if it was not the same as modern anthropological relativism, was a major
step toward it. That certain primitive beliefs represented stages in the evolu-
tion of their civilized counterparts implied also that they served similar func-
tions in the control of behavior, that the social purposes of a moral standard
might be accomplished in any number of ways. If all these ideas were by no
means original with Tylor, they are nonetheless central t o the evolutionary
ethnology which he did much to define. But to put humanist culture in an
evolutionist framework was hardly an unqualified advance toward the modern
anthropological meaning. I t involved a good deal of sideward and backward
motion as well.s
If the logic of Darwinism led to complete relativism in the realm of values,
STOCKING] Arnold, Tylor, and the Uses of Invention 795
the mid-Victorian mind was largely insulated from the full effects of this rela-
tivism by an “inherited hierarchy of values” deeply rooted in European social
thought and buttressed on every hand by the visible evidences of European
material progress and world dominion (cf. Houghton 1957: 13-18). If, unlike
Arnold, Tylor saw cultural perfection only a t the top of an endless evolutionary
ladder, he was on the whole sure that each step up that ladder advanced us
toward perfection. The cultural inferiority of those on lower rungs he never
seriously doubted. And if he envisioned further progress in civilization, his sys-
tem defined no future stage; European civilization was in this sense the goal
of all cultural development. But anthropological relativism depends not only on
a functionalist view of values in general; it requires also a certain attitude
toward the values of one’s own culture. Today, this attitude may be no more
than simple critical detachment; but as an historical development I would
argue that it involved, if not disillusion, a t least a rejection of contemporary
values and an alienation from contemporary society which Tylor and Lubbock
and probably most of the evolutionist ethnologists simply did not feel. I t in-
volved a distinction between “culture” and what was still ultimately an
ethnocentric concept of “civilization.” Arnold felt this alienation and made this
distinction, and if his idea of culture harked back to a n older Romantic absolu-
tism with which Tylor had no sympathy, it was nevertheless closer in a number
of respects to the anthropological idea of culture than was Tylor’s. Although
Tylor thought rather more in terms of evolutionary product and Arnold of in-
dividual process, both men conceived culture in normative humanist terms as a
conscious “cultivation” of the capacities which are most characteristically
human. But while Tylor took humanist culture and fragmented it for purposes
of analysis, Arnold’s culture (as the opposition in his title suggests) was, both
for the individual and for society, an organic, integrative, holistic phenomenon.
Tylor’s analytic evolutionary purpose forced him to place great emphasis on the
artifactual manifestations of culture, on those objects of “material culture”
which were easily and convincingly arranged in hierarchical sequence; Arnold’s
culture, like that of most modern anthropologists, was an inward ideational
phenomenon. For Arnold much more than for Tylor culture was a “way of
life”; it asked one to
Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones
of their voice; . . . observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the
words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their
minds; would any amount of wealth he worth having with the condition that one was to be-
come just like these people by having it (1869:52)?
And although here perhaps I am pushing the point, it seems to me that Arnold,
precisely because he saw culture inwardly, ideationally, and integratively, was
perhaps closer than Tylor to seeing the relationship between culture and per-
sonality. Human beings shared a capacity for various types of development;
calling himself Philistine, Arnold felt he might have been a Barbarian aristo-
crat:
Place me in one of his great fortified posts,..
. with all pleasures a t my command, with
most whom I met deferring to me, everyone I met smiling on me, and with every appearance
796 American Anthropologist [65, 1963
of permanence and security before and behind me,-then I too might have grown, I feel, into
a very passable child of the established fact, of commendable spirit and politeness, and .a..
. .
little inaccessible to ideas and light . (1869:10&107).

Thus a number of elements of the modern anthropological idea of culture which

were present, if only in germ, in the Arnoldian humanist idea of culture were
pushed into the background by the evolutionist focus on the demonstration of
progressive sequence; they did not fully reemerge as foci of serious anthropo-
logical investigation in Britain or the United States until the twentieth century.
These differences in foci suggest a final comparison between Tylor and
Arnold which bears heavily on the development of the culture concept. Both
men had contacts with German thought. But the taproot of Tylor’s thinking is
in the tradition of the French Enlightenment and British empiricism: in the
very first pages of Primitive Cullure, we find Tylor hastening to “escape from
the regions of transcendental philosophy and theology, to start on a more hope-
ful journey over more practicable ground” (1871:1, 3). Arnold, on the other
hand, is in the tradition of English Romanticism and of German transcendental
philosophy; his revulsion from “Jacobinism,” “Benthamism,” Comtean posi-
tivism and all other “mechanical” system-making is plain on every page of Cul-
ture and Anarchy (Arnold 1869:66, 68, passim). Both traditions contributed to
the development of the modern culture concept. If Tylor’s provided the im-
petus for the scientific study of civilization, Arnold’s contains the roots of cul-
ture as an integrative, organic, holistic, inner manifestation, whether in the
humanist or the anthropological sense. If Tylor’s 19th century evolutionary
positivism was a necessary stage in the growth of modern relativism, i t was
only in a later reaction against that positivism and its civilization, only in the
minds of men who felt an alienation similar to that of the Romantics, that a
fully anthropological relativism could emerge. By that time, developments in
anthropological theory and practice had laid the basis for the modern culture
concept. Not surprisingly, its formulation was the work of anthropologists with
closer contact than Tylor to the Germanic tradition.’
NOTES
This article is a revised version of the first half of a paper presented to the Conference on the
History of Anthropology held in New York on April 13 and 14, 1962, under the auspices of the
Social Science Research Council, and subsequently presented in abbreviated form at the American
Anthropological Association meetings (Chicago, November 1962). I am especially indebted to Dell
Hymes, Karl Kroeber, Henry May and John Rowe for helpful comment.
* The lack of any real biography of Tylor inhibits discussion of the sources of his thought.
R. R. Marett’s book (1936) is not intended as biography and offers little more on the sources of
Tylor’s anthropology than a reference or two to Klemm and Quetelet. Tylor acknowledges a debt
to Waitz and Bastian in the preface to Primitive Culture, and to Chrlsty on page 13 of Researches.
On the influence of Comte (see Teggart 1925:llO ff. and Bidney 1953:190). The influence of
Buckle is evident in the first pages of the Researches.
* Cf. Hodgen (1936:passim), on whom I have drawn. Tylor spoke of his subject as “mental
evolution,” and a quotation from the Duke of Argyll in Elleghrd (1958:317) suggests its relation
to the Darwinian controversy. Argyll defined the peculiarly human characteristics as “the gift of
articulate language,-the power of numbers,-the powers of generalization,-the power of con-
ceiving the relation of man to his Creator,-the power of foreseeing an immortal destiny,-the
STOCKING] Arnold, Tylor, and the Uses of Invention 797
power of knowing good from evil, on eternal principles of justice and truth.” Compare these to the
foci of Primitive Culture; Tylor was showing that these, too, were evolutionary products. For a
suggestively different, but I think unsatisfactory, interpretation of Tylor’s relation to the con-
troversies of the 1860’s (see Smith 1933: 116-183, especially 168 ff.).
’ In arguing the role of diffusionism in Tylor’s work, Lowie (1937:72-80) cites the Researches
about four times as often as Primitive Culture. Bidney (1953) cites each three times; neither writer
cites the Anthropology on this point. While Tylor wrote specifically diffusionist studies throughout
his life (one “On American Lot-Games, as Evidence of Asiatic Intercourse before the Time of
Columbus” was published as late as 1896), in general the titles and descriptions of his writings in
the bibliography compiled by Barbara W. Freire-Marreco (1907) conform to the interpretation
offered here on the basis of his three major works: the defense of progressionism early became and
remained through his life the dominating theme of his ethnological work.
Reasoning only from the language of Tylor’s definition, a quite different view of his con-
tribution is possible. Thus Otto Klineberg spoke in 1935 of culture as a “way of life” and went on
to paraphrase Tylor: “it includes all the capabilities and habits acquired by an individual as a
member of a particular society” (as quoted in Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952:SO). But Tylor did
not say “a particular society.” Remove the qualifying adjective, read the definition in the context
of a single evolving human society, and most of the apparent social psychological content dis-
appears.
For a quite different interpretation of Tylor’s contribution, see Murphree (1961). Although
in many respects an excellent contribution to our understanding of evolutionist ethnology, it seems
to me that Murphree’s essay reads into Tylor’s culture a consistent theoretical elaboration which
it simply did not have.
’ I refer, of course, to the students of Franz Boas, whose own contribution to the development
of the culture concept received inadequate appreciation by Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952: 151).
In the second half of the earlier longer version of this paper (see footnote 1) I have sketched what
seem to me the outlines of Boas’ contribution. I hope to elaborate this outline in a future longer
work; here I would simply suggest that it was the critics of evolutionism who developed the modern
anthropological concept of culture, which unlike Tvlor’s, is plural and branching rather than sin-
gular and unilinear.

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