Tylor

Tylor’s understanding of the meaning of culture is clearly very different from that of most modern anthropologists. Tylor believed that “culture” was, ultimately, a single body of information of which different human groups had greater or lesser amounts. This understanding is based on his belief in the psychic unity of humankind, here referred to as “the uniform action of uniform causes.”

Marx/Engels believes that that men developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.

Weber believed that individuals could profoundly affect their societies. He called the ability of an individual to influence others charisma as an “extraordinary power” a sort of spiritual force possessed by an individual. He states that in some people this natural charisma simply exists naturally in them, in others it is a “germ” that must be awakened.

Durkheim proposed that the origin of culture is a process of “social condensation” created by a critical mass of individuals coming together.

From research in the text, I discovered many things about the unilineal evolutionary theorists and their theories as well as the theories of the sociological theorists from our text. The concept of “culture” in the eyes of the unilineal evolutionary theorist Tylor, was seen as a body of information of which different humans had greater or less amounts of culture within them. Along with theorists Marx and Engels, whose views on culture are that our life is determined by our own consciousness or own “culture”. These theories are approached in similar ways to each other and are similar in values.

Culture from the point of view of the sociological theorist Weber, claimed that some people had the ability to influence their charisma and greatly affects the individuals societies. The theorist Durkheim believed that individuals coming together in a social way created culture. These two theories are alike in the way that Weber and Durkheim believe that culture is a learned behavior and something that is earned and not something that you are born with, like what the three uniluineal evolutionary theorists believe in.

The early sociologists moved away from the notion of unilineal evolution that was embraced by the first group of theorists (Marx/Engels and Tylor) by forming theories that surround the ideas of culture being a learned process, and the idea that individuals can affect a whole society and their ways of culture.