Work useful to religion and the humanities: A history of the development of the comparative method in religion from Bartolome Las Casas to Edward Burnett Tylor (Bernardino de Sahagun, Jose de Acosta, Joseph Lafitau)

My dissertation outlines a new approach to the history of comparison by tracing its development from the first moments of contact with the New World through the recognized origin of the discipline of anthropology in the nineteenth-century. In this dissertation, I trace the lineage of the comparative study of religion from Bartolome Las Casas through Bernardino de Sahagun, Jose de Acosta and Joseph Lafitau to the recognized originator of that method, Edward Burnett Tylor. The comparisons made by Las Casas, Sahagun and Acosta have been used by missionaries and anthropologists alike in order to understand European history as well Amerindian culture and life. One such missionary, Joseph Lafitau, pre-figures Tylor's comparative method. Lafitau argued understanding Amerindian practices and beliefs allowed him to better understand pre-Christian European practices and beliefs and to see their development. Similarly, one hundred years later Tylor argued previous stages of European history could be seen in what he called "primitive" religion and in that way he parallels Lafitau's idea that indigenous peoples provide a way of seeing previous stages of human history. However, Tylor argued that Catholic missionaries created the similarities they saw when they constructed their comparisons between Europeans and indigenous peoples and he did not need to create such similarities because his method of identifying 'survivals' from previous periods of human history demonstrated the connections between different stages of religious evolution. The similarities and differences between Lafitau and Tylor demonstrates a change of emphasis on the role of religion in order to understand Europeans and indigenous peoples but not a sharp break in either comparative method or explanation. The historical trajectory I have outlined from Las Casas to Tylor suggests that the Enlightenment does not mark a sharp break in the understanding of comparative religion. Instead, my dissertation demonstrates the continuity of the comparative method from the discovery of the New World through the nineteenth-century.