The surviving image: Aby Warburg and Tylorian anthropology

Warburg's theorisation of time is discussed in relation to ideas deriving from the British ethnologist, Edward B. Taylor. Whereas earlier commentators on Warburg have stressed the differences between the two, this article proposes that Tylor provided a more constructive source for Warburg's 'extension of methodological boundaries'. Tylor's 'science of culture' aimed at defining an historical and philological perspective on his material, such as to make sense of the survival of archaic practices into the present. This recognition of the complexities of time as a methodological construct lent itself to Warburg's project to break with notions of 'progress' and historical 'development', as exemplified by his use of the concept of Nachleben.