ANTHROPOLOGY THOUGHT JUNE 2019

Neo-Evolutionists: Steward, White, Service

Neo-evolutionary anthropology developed in the mid-Twentieth Century as a response to the need to develop theories that better explained cultural differences, similarities and the processes of culture change than the British Structural-Functionalists or the American Historical Particularists. The need was especially felt in archeology for an empirical method that could be used to categorize types of societies from material evidence. This new theoretical perspective incorporated evolutionary theory with Marxism, Structural-Functionalism of British anthropology, the American Historical Particularists and other perspectives. Neo-evolutionists Julian Steward, Leslie White influenced their successors at Columbia University Elman Service, Morton Fried, Marvin Harris and Sidney Mintz . The following essay will compare and contrast the explanations for social evolution of Steward and White and that of their successors Service and Fried.

Julian Steward (1902-1974)

Julian Steward, an archeologist of Native American hunter-gatherer cultures, established a taxonomy for categorizing cultures based on the material evidence of their “social, political, and religious patterns” that were “empirically determined” by their “cultural core”. A society’s “cultural core” according to Steward was composed of a “constellation of features which are most closely related to subsistence activities and economic arrangements”–or in other words the natural and social environment . Steward called his study of the process of culture change “cultural ecology.” Cultural ecology is a term he coined to explain culture as an adaptation of a society to their environment. Like the evolutionists that preceded him, Steward believed that “significant cross-cultural regularities exist” among societies. However, unlike them Steward did not believe that these regularities are universal or progressive, from simple to complex, for all societies.

Steward claims that since the activities that produced cultural patterns and society were historically situated and multiple, his evolutionary schematic of social evolution that explained cultural differences and simularities would be called “multilineal” evolution. He contrasted his multilineal perspective of social evolution with the “unilineal” theories of Childe and White, both of whom believed in a sort of cultural evolutionary determinism that failed to explain the development of the cultural variations and the “particular features of individual cultures”.

Steward says that since “all men eat,” subsistence is a universal that can be categorized and studied empirically and objectively. Since all men eat, their cultures are always changing and adaptive to the environment. He agrees that personality is shaped by culture but disputes the Boasian perspective as too “short-range” and overly particularistic and historically contextual.

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ANTHROPOLOGY THOUGHT JUNE 2019

Leslie A. White (1900-1975)

Leslie White, author of The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome (1959), approached the problem of identifying levels of progressive cultural evolution using his pre-anthropological background in science and physics. He subscribed to the 19th Century evolutionary theories of Lewis Henry Morgan and Edward B. Tylor and preferred to be called an “Evolutionist”. His model of social evolution is a progressive one that is based on levels of technological innovation rather than environmental adaptation. White claims that industrialized cultures and complex societies are more advanced because they have the capacity to harness more energy–”thermodynamics” than non-industrialized and simple societies. White even gives a hard science credibility to his theory by developing a mathematical formula for “culture process” that is now known as “White’s Law”: E x T > P, where E=energy, T=technology and P=product. However, White over-reaches when he claims that “theology,” wasn’t possible until after the “Agricultural Revolution” (White 1959:354). We now know that isn’t true now from a variety of sources such as the recent discovery of society of foragers who built a massive stone temple complex about 11,600 years ago–pre-agriculture in Göbekli Tepe, Turkey: White made the un- scientific and ethnocentric assumption that the systems of knowledge and beliefs of pre- agricultural societies were “likewise simple and undeveloped” (White 1959:38).

We also know now that the Childe’s “Agricultural Revolution” that White mentions many times and seems to take as truth really wasn’t a “revolution” at all (White 1959:279). It was a gradual process of plant domestication in both the Old World and New, sometimes lasting for thousands of years, of foraging vs. farming cost-benefit calculi by various groups. It was a slow and uneven progression from semi-sedentary “foragers” to evolve to semi-sedentary “collectors” and then to sedentary “cultivators” once it took less energy to produce surplus food from farming than by other means. A climate or environmental change would retard the progression force sedentary cultivators to migrate and survive by foraging (Flannery 1986a:13).

Neo-Evolutionary Theories of Julian Steward vs. Leslie White:

Julian Steward (1902-1974) Leslie A. White (1900-1975)

Driving Force of Social Evolution Environment Technology (Culture Change):

Subsistence change > culture Technological innovation > culture

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change “reactions to change (society is dependent on environmental changes”… technology (White 2007[1959]:10) “industrialization created new goods, values, and patterns” (Steward 1972[1955]: 222)

Theoretical “Cultural Ecology” Social Systems vs. “Culturology” Contributions:

“Multilinear Evolution” Unilineal Evolution

White’s Law: E x T x V –> P (E=energy, “Culture Core” – Determines social T=technology, V=environment, and cultural patterns P=production)

Progress is due to “matter and energy” where evolution occurs “Environmental adaptation when “matter becomes more highly underlies all cultural ecology” organized and energy is raised from lower to higher levels of concentration”

Alfred L. Kroeber & Robert Lowie Louis Henry Morgan & Edward B. (American cultural anthropologists, Influences: Tylor (19th Century Evolutionists); N. American Indian cultures); background in science and physics Archeology

“Extrasomatic” (outside the body) and non-instinctual learned behavior; Definition of symbolic communication; Human use Culture: of tools –> Technology (Tylor’s definition of culture)

Articulate speach; “symbolic faculty” What makes us

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ANTHROPOLOGY THOUGHT JUNE 2019 human?

Different environmental systems Two Variables of culture difference: “entail different social [1] Subsistence (based on Creates cultural arrangements in each technology), [2] Offense & Defense differences: environment” (Steward (not reproduction or population 1972[1955]:38) pressure

Symbolic and language systems Society as an adaptive organism: (White 2007[1959]: 8); “… societies “All societies of living beings are Creates cultural supply custom and codes to hold systems, organic wholes composed coherence: societies toegether and to enable of interrelated parts” (Steward them to function properly” (White 1972[1955]: 209) 2007[1959]: 275)

Elman R. Service (1915-1996)

Elman Service, a former student of Julian Steward and a member of the neo-evolutionary group at Columbia University who called themselves the “Mundial Upheaval Society” claimed that social evolution was based on adaptations to the environment. In Origins of the State and Civilization: The Processes of Cultural Evolution (1975),

Service said the societies used an over-arching ideology to maintain social control and that the “earliest governments worked to protect, not another class or stratum of the society, but itself. It legitimized itself in its role of maintaining the whole society” (Service 1975:8). Service believed that government itself was a social adaptation that maintains a society with as a sort of Rousseau-like “social contract” of a shared ideology that maintains the hierarchy through reinforcement”, “leadership” and “mediation” (Service 1975:12-14).

Service believed that civilizations that fell were adaptive failures to a changing environment. They suffered from a “kind of failure of bureaucratic governance” by not being able to save its society from “external and internal threats to its integrity” (Service 1975:311).

Service predicts that China’s modern civilization, newly industrializing in 1975 when the book was published, may one day supercede the United States due to the American dependence of fossil fuels. He notes prophetically: “This inverse relationship between adaptation and potentiality is probably ‘true’, and such an eventuality as the ‘fall’, the bypassing the United

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States by some other region, is probable–other factors being constant [his italics]” (Service 1975:323).

Service explains social stratification due to relationships with differing access to resources and claims tha “differential power exists actually or potentially in all human groups” . Service believes that the centralized power of a civilization has built in efficiencies and so is able to better govern warfare and the establishment of alliances thereby maintaining peace more effectively than governance by moral code and custom is far more stable and effective than governance by physical force.

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