Edward Burnett Tylor

Edward Burnett Tylor opened Primitive Culture, published in 1871, with a definition of culture as that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by a person as a member of society, a phrasing still cited as the discipline's founding statement of its own subject. He argued that societies pass through a common sequence of stages from savagery through barbarism to civilization, a position known as unilinear cultural evolution that later anthropologists, Boas among them, rejected as ethnocentric and unsupported by fieldwork. Tylor became the first professor of anthropology at Oxford in 1896.