Marett, Robert Ranulph

Robert Ranulph Marett (13 June 1866, Jersey - 18 February 1943, Oxford) was a British ethnologist. An exponent of the British evolutionary school, his work focused primarily on anthropology of religion. In this field he modified the theories of E. B. Tylor.

Marett was the only son of Sir Robert Pipon Marett, poet and Bailiff of Jersey, and Julia Anne Marett. He succeeded E.B. Tylor as Reader in Anthropology at Oxford in 1910, teaching the Diploma in Anthropology at the Pitt Rivers Museum. He worked on the palaeolithic site of La Cotte de St Brelade from 1910-1914, recovering some hominid teeth and other remains of habitation by Neanderthal man. In 1914 he established a Department of Social Anthropology, and in 1916 he published "The Site, Fauna, and Industry of La Cotte de St. Brelade, Jersey" (Archaeologia LXVII, 1916). He became Rector of Exeter College, Oxford. His students included Marius Barbeau, Dorothy Garrod, Earnest Albert Hooten, Henry Field and Rosalind Moss

Whereas E.B. Tylor had considered animism to be the earliest form of human religion, Marett was convinced that primitive man had not developed the intellectual ability to form the conceptual structures Tylor proposed, and this led Marett to criticize Tylor

Created 2015-10-29 by Anna St.Onge.

http://viaf.org/viaf/69925385 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Ranulph_Marett