ABSTRACT
Edward Burnett Tylor is considered the "founding father" of cultural anthropology. He was a Quaker and the first scholar who attempted an anthropological analysis of religion. He maintained that religion originated with animism, by which all elements of nature are considered to possess an independent life and should be thus considered "spiritual beings." As Tylor himself wrote: Animism characterizes tribes very low in the scale of humanity, and thence ascends, deeply modified in its transmission, but from first to last preserving an unbroken continuity, into the midst of high modern culture. William Robertson Smith was a minister of the Free Church of Scotland. Smith thought that there existed a blood relationship, a sort of alliance between an animal or a plant and a specific tribe. W. Robertson Smith was perhaps the first clearly to insist on the sociological context in all discussions which refer not merely to organization of groups but also to belief, to ritual, and to myth.
