ABSTRACT
The generic type of person, social configuration, aesthetic style, religious life, or whatever else the term “primitive” supposedly qualifies—whether denigrated, romanticized, constructed in the distant past, or imagined to inhabit some far-off land in the present and thereby said to be representative of what late-nineteenth-century scholars regularly called “the childhood of the species”—has played a large role in theorizing and generally thinking about religion within the academy. It is within contexts that the idea of “the primitive” took shape in the imaginary of earlier generations of scholars associated with the study of religion along with sociology and anthropology. There may be no better early example than Edward Burnett Tylor, the English comparativist, who argued in his once important book, Primitive Culture, that studying such survivals holds the key to unlocking our understanding of the past.
