Robert Ranulph Marett

University of Oxford Anthropology Diploma class of 1910-11. Marett is in the front and on the right

Part of a series on
Anthropology of religion
Basic concepts Ancestor worship (Veneration of the dead) Animism Communitas Divination Initiation ceremony Liminality Magic Religion Revitalization movement Rite of passage Ritual Sacred-profane dichotomy Shamanism Totemism
Case studies Magic Coral Gardens and Their Magic Neo-Paganism Dukun Kebatinan Ritual Slametan Revitalization movement Cargo cult Ghost dance Handsome Lake
Related articles The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life Purity and Danger Myth and ritual Archaeology of religion and ritual
Major theorists Akbar S. Ahmed Talal Asad Mary Douglas Émile Durkheim Arnold van Gennep E. E. Evans-Pritchard James Frazer Clifford Geertz Robin Horton Claude Lévi-Strauss Robert Marett Roy Rappaport Saba Mahmood Marshall Sahlins Melford Spiro Stanley Tambiah Victor Turner Daniel Martin Varisco Anthony F. C. Wallace
Journals Anthropological Perspectives on Religion
Social and cultural anthropology

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, and Henry Field.

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’s theories of animism, suggesting that early religion was more emotional and intuitional in origin. Marett therefore argued that animism was preceded by an earlier form of belief, a magical "pre-animism" characterized by an impersonal force which Marett identified with the Melanesian concept of mana. Marett's idea of mana was developed in The Threshold of Religion (1909), Anthropology (1912), and Psychology and Folklore (1920).

Works and lectures

• The Threshold of Religion, (1909)
• Anthropology, (1912)
• Psychology and Folklore, (1920)
• Faith, Hope and Charity in Primitive Religion, (1930–1932)
• Sacraments of Simple Folk, (1930–1932)
• A Jerseyman at Oxford, (1941) autobiography

External links

Works written by or about Robert Ranulph Marett at Wikisource

References

Notes

Bibliography

• Field, Henry. The Track of Man. New York: Doubleday, 1952.

Academic offices
Preceded by Lewis Richard Farnell	Rector of Exeter College, Oxford 1928–1943	Succeeded by Eric Arthur Barber