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Kulturcrisis! Cultural Evolution Going Round in Circles

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Kulturcrisis! Cultural Evolution Going Round in Circles 136 Evolutionary Anthropology CROTCHETS & QUIDDITIES KulturCrisis! Cultural Evolution Going Round in Circles KENNETH WEISS AND FRANCES HAYASHIDA Culture changes over time and has geographic and other patterns. Evolutionary tures can be classified, in western models have often been proposed to account for this. What has become of those terms at least, on a scale of technical ideas? sophistication and association with population size; (2) geographically close peoples share similar cultural “There is no such thing as ‘natural with Sorel that they are self-serving traits, like pottery styles or language; law’ ” muses Julien Sorel, the hero of political constructs rather than essen- (3) local traits and short-term change, Stendahl’s 1831 novel The Red and the tial truth. based as they are in symbol, often Black, shortly before he is to be exe- Nonetheless, an idea that’s politi- seem wholly arbitrary relative to at- cuted for a single crime of passion. cally convenient can also be true. Any- tributes of the physical world; yet, (4) Natural law, he says, is a construct of one who has overlooked the Roman similar cultural traits were found (in the powerful by which they justify Forum and the main square at Teoti- the “ethnographic present”) in discon- their own myriad offenses against so- huacan might be reminded of the old nected places around the earth, such ciety and control the small and the phrase “the psychic unity of man- as similar kinship systems on differ- poor. Twenty-eight years later, kind.” There must be something about ent continents. Charles Darwin’s famous book ap- human culture that explains these How does this apparent patterning peared with the contrary message that striking similarities. What are the ba- arise? The 19th century’s heady belief not only are there natural laws,1 but sic facts that theories of culture have in universal laws of nature led to they apply to the entire living world. tried to explain, and what are the con- grand theories about culture, associ- Hadn’t physics also shown that nature nections between evolutionary no- ated with EB Tylor, LH Morgan, and was law-like? tions across the subfields of anthro- of course those fellows Marx and En- The concept of evolution stimulated pology? gels. Herbert Spencer specifically ac- much of western thinking, about soci- counted for culture change in terms of ety as well as organisms, and anthro- natural selection, and it was he, not CULTURAL EVOLUTION: pologists have used evolutionary met- Darwin, who coined the phrase “sur- aphors off and on ever since. PROCESS OR HISTORY? vival of the fittest.” Anthropologists However, social change by means of The “laws” of biological evolution scouted the world of cultures, much laws like natural selection was conve- involve vertical (parent to offspring) as biologists scouted for beetles and niently compatible with the competi- inheritance of particulate elements butterflies for the drawing rooms of tive worldview of colonial nations at (genes) following specifiable rules Europe. They sought to classify cul- their peak of power, and many an- with specifiably probabilistic muta- tures by finding worldwide patterns in thropologists have objected even to tional change, and quantifiable effects traits like kinship structures, mythol- the search for such laws, agreeing of differential transmission (selec- ogy, art styles, and tools (Figure 1). tion) and geographic diffusion. A ma- Theories were developed to explain jor part of the sticking power of dar- observed patterns of similarity among winian biology is that these principles world cultures, typically invoking Ken Weiss is a biological anthropologist, make it possible to develop a formal strong determinism, usually by and Frances Hayashida an archaeologist, vaguely specified forces, and a kind of both at Penn State University. theory of evolution that can relate what is testable in a laboratory to inevitability that was often accompa- what is observable in biodiversity, nied by notions of progress. Taxono- Evolutionary Anthropology 11:136–141 (2002) biogeography, and paleontology. mies ranked cultures in broad univer- DOI 10.1002/evan.10029 There have been several attempts to sal sequences, from “simple” to Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). develop a comparably comprehensive “complex” such as Morgan’s stages of theory of culture, as we’ll discuss (and savagery, barbarism, and civilization. 1For example, the universal consequences of over- see Harris, 1968). These have tried to Guess who was “naturally” at the top? reproduction in a finite world of resources. explain the perceptions that (1) cul- Not all views of cultural regularities CROTCHETS & QUIDDITIES Evolutionary Anthropology 137 Figure 1. Pitt-River’s scheme of the universal development of weaponry from a simple stick (center) to more complex forms, as represented in examples distributed around Australia (Pitt-Rivers, 1906). rested on deterministic forces, how- silly, because culture circles were de- eralizing across cultures, and going ever. Some investigators viewed pat- fined by multiple rather than individ- far beyond the actual data, Boas ad- terns of culture as due to the continu- ual traits, for which the chance of in- vocated a concentrated examination ity of history: patterns arose from the dependent invention would seem to of individual cultures and how they diffusion of traits by population be trivially small. Although this as- operated as integrated wholes, rather movement or borrowing over time sumption did not rest on causal pro- than invoking over-arching natural and space. Culture-area maps were as- cess or parallel inevitability, some of laws. sembled, much as was also being done the same progressive stage ideas were The particularistic and contextual by biogeographers. buried within their strong historicism approach dominated American eth- Perhaps the extreme diffusionist (see Harris, 1968). nology for the first half of the 20th view was the Kulturkreis, or culture In many ways, this grand histori- Century. But its lack of interest in gen- circle theory, most closely associated cism was as encompassing as the evo- eralities or process was not very satis- with the Austrians Fritz Graebner and lutionary theories, and both went far fying to some, and induced a backlash Wilhelm Schmidt. They hypothesized beyond tight explanations, which in- of renewed evolutionary and compar- a set of primary culture circles (Kre- duced the strong reaction we most ative thinking, largely led by Leslie ise) that corresponded to the same closely associate with Franz Boas. He White and Julian Steward. White ad- ladder of complexity the cultural evo- thought such generalizations were vocated an unabashed return to a sci- lutionists were suggesting (Figure 2). speculative and exaggerated at best. ence of culture that he dubbed cultur- But rather than parallel evolution, Similarities between traits plucked ology, rather than mere description. their notion was that similar cultures from their cultural contexts may be He also explicitly revived the 19th cen- have diffused from a common source, superficial or just projections of the tury lineal and universal evolutionism no matter where they were found in researcher’s perceptions, rather than of Tylor and Morgan (White, 1969), the world. This was not completely meaningful and real. Rather than gen- but he added a universal thermody- 138 Evolutionary Anthropology CROTCHETS & QUIDDITIES ture as explicable in non-biological terms. That the two of us are here in North America, read books, eat torti- llas, and speak English manifestly shows what he meant. For Steward and many ecologically minded anthro- pologists (such as human behavioral ecologists [Winterhalder and Smith, 2000] and many processual archaeolo- gists), culture may be adaptive in the general darwinian sense, but its dynam- ics and change relate to the rational use of material resources. Culture as Somatic, Determined by Genetic Traits Ever since Darwin’s other famous Figure 2. Kulturkreise: Graebner’s distribution of matrilineal cultures (Source: Graebner, 1924). book (Descent of Man, 1871), there has been interest in the degree to which human behavioral and cultural traits might have an evolutionary, bi- namic causal engine, that a culture’s Peace to show how greater forces, not ological basis. Darwin rested human structure reflected its per capita en- that Great Man, controlled history. evolution heavily on sexual selection ergy extracting ability. As a tribe be- Comparative evolutionary ap- (competitive mate choice behavior). came larger or more technically com- proaches that focus on nonbiological In the 1960’s and 70’s, largely led by plex, it would have to evolve traits are still around, particularly Washburn and DeVore, the compara- among archaeologists, to explain hierarchical and heritable power tive method of biology used numerous things like the emergence of political structures with control hierarchies primate field studies, to explain hu- inequality or the escalating and in- and economic specialization charac- man behavior. Male dominance hier- creasingly coercive means of elites to teristics of chiefdoms, etc. archies, harem family structures, rit- impose their will. But by the 1970s the A generation of researchers at- ual symbolism related to territory and pendulum in ethnology began its nat- tempted to explain culture traits and resource access and distribution are ural cycle back, and a majority of the change in terms of such causal forces. examples of its targets. Because
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