Abstract

KORSBAEK, Leif. Edward Burnett Tylor: "Anahuac or Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern". Cuicuilco [online]. 2009, vol.16, n.46, pp.35-53. ISSN 0185-1659.

The text contains two parts. The first part is a brief description of the life of Edward Burnett Tylor, universally known as the founder of anthropology as a modern discipline in its own right, and his relevant activities. The reader is made familiar with some of the facts of his life: he came from a wealthy family of quaker merchants, in the middle of the British Empire and, as Malinowski (another of the founding fathers of anthropology) he suffered from asthma, so his parents sent him on a voyage of reconvalescence to the Caribbean and to Mexico, where a great deal of his observations turned around the presence of black slaves in the plantations, and of their exploitation. The second part is a Spanish translation of the first chapter of the book "Anahuac, or Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern", that Tylor published some five years after his visit to Cuba and the Caribbean but four years previous to the publication of his first important anthropological text, "Researches into the Early History of Mankind". The text is a pleasant and easygoing description of a piece of nature by a foreigner, written by a gifted and observant traveler, who has not yet decided to dedicate his life to the development of a new double discipline: anthropology and ethnography. We wish to add the information that his dossier closes with a review of the Spanish edition of Tylor's book, which was Publisher in Mexico a few months ago.

Keywords : Cuba; Edward B. Tylor; evolutionism; slavery; slave trade.

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