Science Quote by Edward Burnett Tylor

“Everything that is really Mexican is either Aztec or Spanish” isn’t just a claim about heritage; it’s a power move disguised as taxonomy. Edward Burnett Tylor, a foundational Victorian anthropologist, speaks here in the confident, sorting-hat voice of 19th-century “science,” when classification often doubled as ideology. The line compresses Mexico into two source codes legible to European thought: the pre-Columbian “ancient” (Aztec) and the colonial “civilized” (Spanish). What drops out is the messy middle where most people actually live: centuries of mixing, regional difference, African diasporic presence, other Indigenous nations, and modern reinvention.

The intent is simplification in service of explanation. Tylor’s project treated cultures as assemblages of survivals and stages, and Mexico becomes a neat exhibit: conqueror plus conquered, thesis plus antithesis. The subtext is quieter but sharper: authenticity is defined externally, by what can be traced to monumental ruins or imperial archives. “Really Mexican” reads like an authenticity test administered from abroad, implying that the contemporary, hybrid, everyday Mexico is derivative rather than generative.

Context matters: this is the era when European scholars mined colonized or recently colonized societies for data to support grand theories of human development. The quote “works” rhetorically because it’s brisk, binary, and flattering to the classifier: two labels, one country, problem solved. Its lasting sting is how familiar the maneuver remains. Culture gets treated as a duel between origin myths, while the living present is reduced to footnotes.