Robert Ranulph Marett

Robert Ranulph Marett (1866 to 1943) was a British ethnologist from Jersey and a leading proponent of the British Evolutionary School of cultural anthropology founded by his older colleague Edward Burnett Tylor. He focused mainly on the anthropology of religion, and modified Tylor's animistic theory to include the concept of mana, arguing for a preanimistic stage in which a diffuse religious feeling came before belief in spirits. His reputation grew from his 1899 paper Pre-animistic Religion and his first collection of essays, The Threshold of Religion (1900). Educated at Oxford, he was a tutor in philosophy at Exeter College from 1891, succeeded Tylor as Reader in Anthropology in 1910, founded a Department of Social Anthropology in 1914, and was Rector of Exeter College from 1928 until his death, training many notable anthropologists.