Department of Anthropology College of Arts and Sciences The University of Alabama
ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORIES:
A GUIDE PREPARED BY STUDENTS FOR STUDENTS
NINETEEN CENTURY SOCIAL EVOLUTIONISM
KELLY CHAKOV
kchakov@tenhoor.as.ua.edu
In the early years of anthropology, the prevailing view was that culture generally develops (or evolves) in a uniform and progressive manner. It was thought that most societies pass through the same series of stages, to arrive ultimately at a common end. The sources of culture change were generally assumed to be embedded within the culture from the beginning, and therefore the ultimate course of development was thought to be internally determined.
This notion of evolutionary progress of society was widely accepted as far back as the Enlightenment. Both French and Scottish social and moral philosophers were using evolutionary schemes during the 18th century. Among these was Montesquieu, who proposed an evolutionary scheme consisting of three stages: hunting or savagery, herding or barbarism, and civilization. This division became very popular among the 19th century social theorists, Tylor and Morgan in particular adopted this scheme (Seymour-Smith 1986:105).
By the mid-nineteenth century, the cycle of European exploration, conquest, and colonization had yielded vast possessions with a variety of peoples culturally alien to European existence, and thus both politically and scientifically problematic. The discipline of anthropology, beginning with these early social theories arose largely in response to this encounter between cultures (Winthrop 1991:109). Cultural evolution - anthropology’s first systematic ethnological theory - was intended to help explain this diversity among the peoples of the world.
The notion of dividing the ethnological record into evolutionary stages ranging from the most primitive to the most civilized was fundamental to the new ideas of the nineteenth century social evolutionists. Drawing upon Enlightenment thought, Darwin’s work, and new cross-cultural, historical, and archaeological evidence, a whole generation of social evolutionary theorists emerged with Tylor and Morgan. These theorists developed rival schemes of overall social and cultural progress, as well as the of the origins of different specific institutions such as religion, marriage, and the family.
Edward B. Tylor disagreed with the contention of some early-nineteenth-century French and English writers, led by Comte Joseph de Maistre, that such groups as the American Indians were examples of degenerated peoples. Tylor maintained that culture evolved from the simple to the complex, and that all societies passed through the three basic stages of development suggested by Montesquieu: from savagery through barbarism to civilization. “Progress” was therefore possible for all.
To account for cultural variation, Tylor and other early evolutionists postulated that different contemporary societies were at different stages of evolution. According to this view, the “simpler” peoples of the day had not yet reached “higher” stages. Thus, simpler contemporary societies were thought to resemble ancient societies. The more advanced societies, on the other hand, testified to cultural evolution by exhibiting what Tylor called survivals - traces of earlier customs that survive in present-day cultures. The making of pottery is an example of a survival in the sense used by Tylor. Earlier peoples made their cooking pots out of clay; today we generally make them out of metal because it is more durable. But we still prefer dishes made out of clay.
Tylor believed that there was a kind of psychic unity among all peoples that explained parallel evolutionary sequences in different cultural traditions. In other words, because of the basic similarities common to all peoples, different societies often find the same solutions to the same problems independently. But Tylor also noted that cultural traits may spread from one society to another by simple diffusion - the borrowing by one culture of a trait belonging to another as the result of contact between the two.
Another nineteenth-century proponent of uniform and progressive cultural evolution was Lewis Henry Morgan. A lawyer in upstate New York, Morgan became interested in the local Iroquois Indians and defended their reservation in a land-grant case. In gratitude, the Iroquois adopted Morgan, who regarded them as “noble savages.”
In his best-known work, Ancient Society, Morgan divided the evolution of human culture into the same three basic stages Tylor had suggested (savagery, barbarism, and civilization). But he also subdivided savagery and barbarism into upper, middle, and lower segments (Morgan 1877: 5-6), providing contemporary examples of each of these three stages. Each stage was distinguished by technological development and had a correlate in patterns of subsistence, marriage, family, and political organization. In Ancient Society, Morgan commented, “As it is undeniable that portions of the human family have existed in a state of savagery, other portions in a state of barbarism, and still others in a state of civilization, it seems equally so that these three distinct conditions are connected with each other in a natural as well as necessary sequence of progress” (Morgan 1877:3).
Morgan distinguished these stages of development in terms of technological achievement, and thus each had its identifying benchmarks. Middle savagery was marked by the acquisition of a fish diet and the discovery of fire; upper savagery by the bow and arrow; lower barbarism by pottery; middle barbarism by animal domestication and irrigated agriculture; upper barbarism by the manufacture of iron; and civilization by the phonetic alphabet (Morgan 1877: chapter 1). For Morgan, the cultural features distinguishing these various stages arose from a “few primary germs of thought” - germs that had emerged while humans were still savages and that later developed into the “principle institutions of mankind.”
Morgan postulated that the stages of technological development were associated with a sequence of different cultural patterns. For example, he speculated that the family evolved through six stages. Human society began as a “horde living in promiscuity,” with no sexual prohibitions and no real family structure. Next was a stage in which a group of brothers was married to a group of sisters and brother-sister mating were permitted. In the third stage, group marriage was practiced, but brothers and sisters were not allowed to mate. The fourth stage, which supposedly evolved during barbarism, was characterized by a loosely paired male and female who lived with other people. Then came the husband-dominant family, in which the husband could have more than one wife simultaneously. Finally, the stage of civilization was distinguished by the monogamous family, with just one wife and one husband who were relatively equal in status.
Morgan believed that family units became progressively smaller and more self-contained as human society developed. However, his postulated sequence for the evolution of the family is not supported by the enormous amount of ethnographic data that has been collected since his time. For example, no recent society that Morgan would call savage indulges in group marriage or allows brother-sister mating.
Although their work reached toward the same end, the evolutionary theorists each had very different ideas and foci for their studies. Differing from Morgan, Tylor and Frazer focusing on the evolution of religion, viewed the progress of society or culture from the viewpoint of the evolution of psychological or mental systems. Among the other evolutionary theorists who put forth schemes of development of society, including different religious, kinship, and legal institution were Frazer, Maine, McLellan, and Bachofen.
It is important to once again note that all of these early evolutionary schemes are unilineal because they argue for a single series of stages along which it was assumed that all human groups would progress through (although at uneven rates). Thus a contemporary “primitive” group could be taken as a representative of an earlier stage of development of more advanced types.
The evolutionist program can be more or less summed up in this segment of Tylor’s Primitive Culture which notes:
Evolutionism as a reaction to other intellectual concerns:
The argument as to whether civilization had evolved or had always existed with the primitives as miserable, sinful outcasts was not easily settled. The degeneration theory of savagery (that primitives regressed from the civilized state) had to be fought vigorously before social anthropology could progress. The social evolutionists countered the degenerationist views regarding primitivism as an indication of the fall from Grace.
Social evolutionism offered an alternative to the Christian/theological approach to understanding cultural diversity, and thus encountered more opposition. The new views presented evolution as a line of progression in which the lower stages were prerequisite to the upper. This idea countered old ideas about the relationships between God, mankind, and the nature of life and progress. Evolutionists criticized the Christian approach as requiring divine revelation to explain civilization.
Reactions within evolutionist thought:
There existed high rhetoric among the evolutionists, particularly concerning the most primitive stages of society. It was highly debated as to the order of primitive promiscuity, patriarchy, and matriarchy.
Reactions to evolutionism:
Karl Marx was struck by the parallels between Morgan’s evolutionism and his own theory of history. Marx and his co-worker, Friedrich Engels, devised a theory in which the institutions of monogamy, private property, and the state were assumed to be chiefly responsible for the exploitation of the working classes in modern industrialized societies. Marx and Engels extended Morgan’s evolutionary scheme to include a future stage of cultural evolution in which monogamy, private property, and the state would cease to exist and the “communism” of primitive society would once more come into being.
The beginning of the twentieth century brought the end of evolutionism’s reign in cultural anthropology. Its leading opponent was Franz Boas, whose main disagreement with the evolutionists involved their assumption that universal laws governed all human culture. Boas pointed out that these nineteenth-century individuals lacked sufficient data (as did Boas himself) to formulate many useful generalizations. Thus historicism (and later functionalism) were reactions to nineteenth century social evolutionism.
These terms are added only supplementarily, and more elaborate understandings can be discerned from reading the above basic premises:
The Comparative Method
Harris (1968:150-151) has an excellent discussion of this approach. “…The main stimulus for [the comparative method] came out of biology where zoological and botanical knowledge of extant organisms was routinely applied to the interpretation of the structure and function of extinct fossil forms. No doubt, there were several late-nineteenth-century anthropological applications of this principle which explicitly referred to biological precedent. In the 1860’s, however, it was the paleontology of Lyell, rather than of Darwin, that was involved. … John Lubbock justified his attempt to “illustrate” the life of prehistoric times in terms of an explicit analogy with geological practices:
All theorists of the latter half of the nineteenth century proposed to fill the gaps in the available knowledge of universal history largely by means of a special and much-debated procedure known as the “comparative method.” The basis for this method was the belief that sociocultural systems observable in the present bear differential degrees of resemblance to extinct cultures. The life of certain contemporary societies closely resembles what life must have been like during the paleolithic; other groups resemble typical neolithic culture; and others resemble the earliest state-organized societies. Morgan’s view of this prolongation of the past into the present is characteristic:
Tthe mapping of spatial distributions of culture into social distributions of culture
Understanding “stone age contemporaries” through ethnographic accounts collected firsthand or collected from missionaries, ship captains, or travelers
The early evolutionists represented the first efforts to establish a scientific discipline of anthropology (although greatly hampered by the climate of supernatural explanations, a paucity of reliable empirical materials, and their engagement in “armchair speculation”). They aid the foundations of an organized discipline where none had existed before. They left us a legacy of at least three basic assumptions which have become an integral part of anthropological thought and research methodology:
Morgan believed that family units became progressively smaller and more self-contained as human society developed. However, his postulated sequence for the evolution of the family is not supported by the enormous amount of ethnographic data that has been collected since his time. For example, no recent society that Morgan would call savage indulges in group marriage or allows brother-sister mating.
A second criticism is for the use by Tylor, McLellan, and others of recurrence - if a similar belief or custom could be found in different cultures in many parts of the world, then it was considered to be a valid clue to reconstructing the history of human society. The great weakness of this method lay in the evaluation of evidence plucked out of context, and in the fact that much of the material, at a time when there were almost no trained field workers, came from amateur observers.
The evolutionism of Tylor, Morgan, and others of the nineteenth century is largely rejected today. For one thing, their theories cannot satisfactorily account for cultural variation - why, for instance, some societies today are in “upper savagery” and others in “civilization.” The “psychic unity of mankind” or “germs of thought” that were postulated to account for parallel evolution cannot also account for cultural differences. Another weakness in the early evolutionists theories is that they cannot explain why some societies have regressed or even become extinct. Also, although other societies may have progressed to “civilization,” some of them have not passed through all the stages. Thus, early evolutionist theory cannot explain the details of cultural evolution and variation as anthropology now knows them. Finally, one of the most common criticisms leveled at the nineteenth century evolutionists is that they were highly ethnocentric - they assumed that Victorian England, or its equivalent, represented the highest achievement of mankind.
Harris called Morgan and Tylor racists (1968:137,140), but they were the great thinkers of their time. I learned Tylor’s definition of culture as an undergraduate and all cultural anthropology classes discuss Morgan’s stages of development. These were the guys who got the ball rolling in social anthropology. They came up with the theories which opposed the traditional views. Their theories caused a new wave of thinking by people who agreed and changed their views and also by people who disagreed and came up with new theories to replace those of the evolutionists. The work of the nineteenth century social evolutionists represents an important step toward the field of anthropology today.
Return to Anthropology
536
Return to M.D. Murphy's Page
Return to Anthropology Department Web Page
Return to ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORIES:
A GUIDE PREPARED BY STUDENTS FOR STUDENTS