Politics & Power Quote by Edward Burnett Tylor

A single, polite-sounding sentence that carries an entire empire’s worth of assumptions. Tylor’s phrasing is classic Victorian authority-speak: “I am afraid” performs mild regret while insulating the speaker from the charge of bias, and “not always” feigns moderation to make the judgment feel measured rather than sweeping. Then comes the clincher: “the Spanish American” as a flattened type, a category that turns complex societies into a specimen jar label. The claim isn’t merely that someone lied; it’s that an entire population lacks “a very strict regard for truth,” as if truthfulness were a cultural trait on the same shelf as skull measurements and kinship charts.

Context matters: Tylor helped professionalize anthropology in the late 19th century, a period when European and Anglo-American thinkers routinely coded cultural difference as developmental deficiency. Under that logic, “truth” isn’t a contested social practice; it’s a benchmark of civilization, policed by the people who get to define it. The subtext is administrative. If a group is framed as unreliable, their testimony can be discounted in courts, travel accounts, trade disputes, missionary reports, and colonial governance. Credibility becomes a gatekeeping tool: who counts as a trustworthy witness, who needs supervision, who deserves autonomy.

The line also reveals how “science” can launder prejudice as observation. Tylor isn’t yelling; he’s cataloging. That cool tone is the trick: it turns a political hierarchy into an empirical fact, making skepticism toward the colonized feel like common sense rather than strategy.