B. E. Tyler

Born in London in 1832, Edward Burnett Tylor became one of the most influential early thinkers in anthropology. After traveling in the Americas, he turned to the study of human culture and wrote books that tried to explain how beliefs, rituals, and social practices change over time.

Tylor is especially remembered for Primitive Culture (1871) and Anthropology (1881). He helped establish anthropology as a serious field of study and is often associated with one of its earliest broad definitions of culture.

He later served at the University of Oxford, where he became a professor of anthropology. Although some of his Victorian-era ideas are now debated or outdated, his work played a major role in shaping how scholars began to compare and study cultures systematically.