Sociocultural evolution
This article needs additional citations for verification. (February 2023) |
Part of a series on |
Anthropology |
---|
Sociocultural evolution, sociocultural evolutionism or social evolution are theories of sociobiology and cultural evolution that describe how societies and culture change over time. Whereas sociocultural development traces processes that tend to increase the complexity of a society or culture, sociocultural evolution also considers process that can lead to decreases in complexity (degeneration) or that can produce variation or proliferation without any seemingly significant changes in complexity (cladogenesis).[1] Sociocultural evolution is "the process by which structural reorganization is affected through time, eventually producing a form or structure that is qualitatively different from the ancestral form".[2]
Most of the 19th-century and some 20th-century approaches to socioculture aimed to provide models for the evolution of
More recent approaches focus on changes specific to individual societies and reject the idea that cultures differ primarily according to how far each one has moved along some presumed linear scale of
Introduction
Societies exist in complex social environments (for example: with differing natural resources and constraints) and adapt themselves to these environments. It is thus inevitable that all societies change.
Specific theories of social or cultural evolution often attempt to explain differences between coeval societies by positing that different societies have reached different stages of development. Although such theories typically provide models for understanding the relationship between technologies, social structure or the values of a society, they vary as to the extent to which they describe specific mechanisms of variation and change.
While the history of evolutionary thinking with regard to humans can be traced back at least to
Most 19th-century and some 20th-century approaches aimed to provide models for the evolution of humankind as a single entity. However, most 20th-century approaches, such as
In his seminal 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins wrote that "there are some examples of cultural evolution in birds and monkeys, but ... it is our own species that really shows what cultural evolution can do".[4]
Stadial theory
Enlightenment and later thinkers often speculated that societies progressed through stages: in other words, they saw history as
While earlier authors such as
Philosophical concepts of
These developments took place in a context of wider processes. The first process was colonialism. Although imperial powers settled most differences of opinion with their colonial subjects through force, increased awareness of non-Western peoples raised new questions for European scholars about the nature of society and of culture. Similarly, effective colonial administration required some degree of understanding of other cultures. Emerging theories of sociocultural evolution allowed Europeans to organise their new knowledge in a way that reflected and justified their increasing political and economic domination of others: such systems saw colonised people as less evolved, and colonising people as more evolved. Modern civilization (understood as the Western civilization), appeared the result of steady progress from a state of barbarism, and such a notion was common to many thinkers of the Enlightenment, including Voltaire (1694–1778).
The second process was the
Eventually, in the 19th century three major classical theories of social and historical change emerged:
- sociocultural evolutionism
- the social cycletheory
- the Marxist theory of historical materialism.
These theories had a common factor: they all agreed that the history of humanity is pursuing a certain fixed path, most likely that of social progress. Thus, each past event is not only chronologically, but causally tied to present and future events. The theories postulated that by recreating the sequence of those events, sociology could discover the "laws" of history.[5]
Sociocultural evolutionism and the idea of progress
While sociocultural evolutionists agree that an evolution-like process leads to social progress, classical social evolutionists have developed many different theories, known as theories of unilineal evolution. Sociocultural evolutionism became the prevailing theory of early sociocultural anthropology and
Already in the 18th century, some authors began to theorize on the evolution of humans. Montesquieu (1689–1755) wrote about the relationship laws have with climate in particular and the environment in general, specifically how different climatic conditions cause certain characteristics to be common among different people.[9] He likens the development of laws, the presence or absence of civil liberty, differences in morality, and the whole development of different cultures to the climate of the respective people,[10] concluding that the environment determines whether and how a people farms the land, which determines the way their society is built and their culture is constituted, or, in Montesquieu's words, the "general spirit of a nation".[11] Also Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) presents a conjectural stage-model of human sociocultural evolution:[12] first, humans lived solitarily and only grouped when mating or raising children. Later, men and women lived together and shared childcare, thus building families, followed by tribes as the result of inter-family interactions, which lived in "the happiest and the most lasting epoch" of human history, before the corruption of civil society degenerated the species again in a developmental stage-process.[13] In the late 18th century, the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794) listed ten stages, or "epochs", each advancing the rights of man and perfecting the human race.
Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), Charles Darwin's grandfather, was an enormously influential natural philosopher, physiologist and poet whose remarkably insightful ideas included a statement of transformism and the interconnectedness of all forms of life. His works, which are enormously wide-ranging, also advance a theory of cultural transformation: his famous The Temple of Nature is subtitled 'the Origin of Society'.[14] This work, rather than proposing in detail a strict transformation of humanity between different stages, instead dwells on Erasmus Darwin's evolutionary mechanism: Erasmus Darwin does not explain each stage one-by-one, trusting his theory of universal organic development, as articulated in the Zoonomia, to illustrate cultural development as well.[15] Erasmus Darwin therefore flits with abandon through his chronology: Priestman notes that it jumps from the emergence of life onto land, the development of opposable thumbs, and the origin of sexual reproduction directly to modern historical events.[14]
Another more complex theorist was Richard Payne Knight (1751-1824), an influential amateur archeologist and universal theologian. Knight's The Progress of Civil Society: A Didactic Poem in Six Books (1796) fits precisely into the tradition of triumphant historical stages, beginning with Lucretius and reaching Adam Smith––but just for the first four books.[16] In his final books, Knight then grapples with the French revolution and wealthy decadence. Confronted with these twin issues, Knight's theory ascribes progress to conflict: 'partial discord lends its aid, to tie the complex knots of general harmony'.[16] Competition in Knight's mechanism spurs development from any one stage to the next: the dialectic of class, land and gender creates growth.[17] Thus, Knight conceptualised a theory of history founded in inevitable racial conflict, with Greece representing 'freedom' and Egypt 'cold inactive stupor'.[18] Buffon, Linnaeus, Camper and Monboddo variously forward diverse arguments about racial hierarchy, grounded in early theories of species change––though many thought that environmental changes could create dramatic changes in form without permanently altering the species or causing species transformation. However, their arguments still bear on race: Rousseau, Buffon and Monboddo cite orangutans as evidence of an earlier prelinguistic human type, and Monboddo even insisted Orangutans and certain African and South Asian races were identical.
Other than Erasmus Darwin, the other pre-eminent scientific text with a theory of cultural transformation was advanced by Robert Chambers (1802-1871). Chambers was a Scottish evolutionary thinker and philosopher who, though he was then and now perceived as scientifically inadequate and criticized by prominent contemporaries, is important because he was so widely read. There are records of everyone from Queen Victoria to individual dockworkers enjoying his Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), including future generations of scientists. That The Vestiges did not establish itself as the scientific cutting edge is precisely the point, since the Vestiges's influence means it was both the concept of evolution the Victorian public was most likely to experience, and the scientific presupposition laid earliest in the minds of bright young scholars.[19]
Chambers propounded a 'principle of development' whereby everything evolved by the same mechanism and towards higher order structure or meaning. In his theory, life advanced through different 'classes', and within each class animals began at the lowest form and then advanced to more complex forms in the same class.[20] In short, the progress of animals was like the development of a foetus. More than just an indistinct analogy, this parallel between embryology and species development had the status of a genuine causal mechanism in Chambers' theory: more advanced species developed longer as embryos into all their complexity.[21] Motivated by this comparison, Chambers ascribed development to the 'laws of creation', though he also supposed that the whole development of species was in some way preordained: it was just that the preordination of the creator acted through establishing those laws.[21] This, as discussed above, is similar to Spencer's later concept of development. Thus Chambers believed in a sophisticated theory of progress driven by a developmental analogy.
In the mid-19th century, a "revolution in ideas about the antiquity of the human species" took place "which paralleled, but was to some extent independent of, the Darwinian revolution in biology."
Both Spencer and Comte view society as a kind of organism subject to the process of growth—from simplicity to complexity, from chaos to order, from generalisation to specialisation, from flexibility to organisation. They agree that the process of societal growth can be divided into certain stages, have[clarification needed] their beginning and eventual end, and that this growth is in fact social progress: each newer, more-evolved society is "better". Thus progressivism became one of the basic ideas underlying the theory of sociocultural evolutionism.[25]
However, Spencer's theories were more complex than just a romp up the great chain of being. Spencer based his arguments on an analogy between the evolution of societies and the ontogeny of an animal. Accordingly, he searched for "general principles of development and structure" or "fundamental principles of organization", rather than being content simply ascribing progress between social stages to the direct intervention of some beneficent deity.[27] Moreover, he accepted that these conditions are "far less specific, far more modifiable, far more dependent on conditions that are variable": in short, that they are a messy biological process.[28]
Though Spencer's theories transcended the label of 'stagism' and appreciate biological complexity, they still accepted a strongly fixed direction and morality to natural development.[29] For Spencer, interference with the natural process of evolution was dangerous and had to be avoided at all costs. Such views were naturally coupled to the pressing political and economic questions of the time. Spencer clearly thought society's evolution brought about a racial hierarchy with Caucasians at the top and Africans at the bottom.[29] This notion is deeply linked to the colonial projects European powers were pursuing at the time, and the idea of European superiority used paternalistically to justify those projects. The influential German zoologist Ernst Haeckel even wrote that 'natural men are closer to the higher vertebrates than highly civilized Europeans', including not just a racial hierarchy but a civilizational one.[30] Likewise, Spencer's evolutionary argument advanced a theory of statehood: "until spontaneously fulfilled a public want should not be fulfilled at all" sums up Spencer's notion about limited government and the free operation of market forces.[31]
This is not to suggest that stagism was useless or entirely motivated by colonialism and racism. Stagist theories were first proposed in contexts where competing epistemologies were largely static views of the world. Hence "progress" had in some sense to be invented, conceptually: the idea that human society would move through stages was a triumphant invention. Moreover, stages were not always static entities. In Buffon's theories, for example, it was possible to regress between stages, and physiological changes were species' reversibly adapting to their environment rather than irreversibly transforming.[32]
In addition to progressivism, economic analyses influenced classical social evolutionism. Adam Smith (1723–1790), who held a deeply evolutionary view of human society,[33] identified the growth of freedom as the driving force in a process of stadial societal development.[34] According to him, all societies pass successively through four stages: the earliest humans lived as hunter-gatherers, followed by pastoralists and nomads, after which society evolved to agriculturalists and ultimately reached the stage of commerce.[35] With the strong emphasis on specialisation and the increased profits stemming from a division of labour, Smith's thinking also exerted some direct influence on Darwin himself.[36] Both in Darwin's theory of the evolution of species and in Smith's accounts of political economy, competition between selfishly functioning units plays an important and even dominating rôle.[37] Similarly occupied with economic concerns as Smith, Thomas R. Malthus (1766–1834) warned that given the strength of the sex drive inherent in all animals, Malthus argued, populations tend to grow geometrically, and population growth is only checked by the limitations of economic growth, which, if there would be growth at all, would quickly be outstripped by population growth, causing hunger, poverty, and misery.[38] Far from being the consequences of economic structures or social orders, this "struggle for existence" is an inevitable natural law, so Malthus.[39]
Auguste Comte, known as "the father of sociology", formulated the law of three stages: human development progresses from the theological stage, in which nature was mythically conceived and man sought the explanation of natural phenomena from supernatural beings; through a metaphysical stage in which nature was conceived of as a result of obscure forces and man sought the explanation of natural phenomena from them; until the final positive stage in which all abstract and obscure forces are discarded, and natural phenomena are explained by their constant relationship.[40] This progress is forced through the development of human mind, and through increasing application of thought, reasoning and logic to the understanding of the world.[41] Comte saw the science-valuing society as the highest, most developed type of human organization.[40]
Herbert Spencer, who argued against
Regardless of how scholars of Spencer interpret his relation to Darwin, Spencer became an incredibly popular figure in the 1870s, particularly in the
In his 1877 classic Ancient Societies, Lewis H. Morgan, an anthropologist whose ideas have had much impact on sociology, differentiated between three eras:
Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), a pioneer of anthropology, focused on the
Anthropologists Sir E.B. Tylor in England and Lewis Henry Morgan in the United States worked with data from
Their analysis of cross-cultural data was based on three assumptions:
- contemporary societies may be classified and ranked as more "primitive" or more "civilized"
- there are a determinate number of stages between "primitive" and "civilized" (e.g. band, tribe, chiefdom, and state)
- all societies progress through these stages in the same sequence, but at different rates
Theorists usually measured progression (that is, the difference between one stage and the next) in terms of increasing social complexity (including class differentiation and a complex division of labour), or an increase in intellectual, theological, and aesthetic sophistication. These 19th-century ethnologists used these principles primarily to explain differences in religious beliefs and kinship terminologies among various societies.
Lester Frank Ward (1841–1913), sometimes referred to[by whom?] as the "father" of American sociology, rejected many of Spencer's theories regarding the evolution of societies. Ward, who was also a botanist and a paleontologist, believed that the law of evolution functioned much differently in human societies than it did in the plant and animal kingdoms, and theorized that the "law of nature" had been superseded by the "law of the mind".[50] He stressed that humans, driven by emotions, create goals for themselves and strive to realize them (most effectively with the modern scientific method) whereas there is no such intelligence and awareness guiding the non-human world.[51] Plants and animals adapt to nature; man shapes nature. While Spencer believed that competition and "survival of the fittest" benefited human society and sociocultural evolution, Ward regarded competition as a destructive force, pointing out that all human institutions, traditions and laws were tools invented by the mind of man and that that mind designed them, like all tools, to "meet and checkmate" the unrestrained competition of natural forces.[50] Ward agreed with Spencer that authoritarian governments repress the talents of the individual, but he believed that modern democratic societies, which minimized the role of religion and maximized that of science, could effectively support the individual in his or her attempt to fully utilize their talents and achieve happiness. He believed that the evolutionary processes have four stages:
- First comes cosmogenesis, creation and evolution of the world.
- Then, when life arises, there is biogenesis.[51]
- Development of humanity leads to human mind.[51]
- Finally there arrives sociogenesis, which is the science of shaping the evolutionary process itself to optimize progress, human happiness and individual self-actualization.[51]
Ward regarded modern societies as superior to "primitive" societies (one need only look to the impact of medical science on health and lifespan[
Émile Durkheim, another of the
Although Max Weber is not usually counted[by whom?] as a sociocultural evolutionist, his theory of tripartite classification of authority can be viewed[by whom?] as an evolutionary theory as well. Weber distinguishes three ideal types of political leadership, domination and authority:
- charismatic domination
- traditional domination(patriarchs, patrimonialism, feudalism)
- legal (rational) domination(modern law and state, bureaucracy)
Weber also notes that legal domination is the most advanced, and that societies evolve from having mostly traditional and charismatic authorities to mostly rational and legal ones.
Critique and impact on modern theories
The early 20th-century inaugurated a period of systematic critical examination, and rejection of the sweeping generalisations of the unilineal theories of sociocultural evolution. Cultural anthropologists such as
However, the school of Boas ignore some of the complexity in evolutionary theories that emerged outside Herbert Spencer's influence. Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species gave a mechanistic account of the origins and development of animals, quite apart from Spencer's theories that emphasized the inevitable human development through stages. Consequently, many scholars developed more sophisticated understandings of how cultures evolve, relying on deep cultural analogies, than the theories in Herbert Spencer's tradition.[57] Walter Bagehot (1872) applied selection and inheritance to the development of human political institutions. Samuel Alexander (1892) discusses the natural selection of moral principles in society.[58] William James (1880) considered the 'natural selection' of ideas in learning and scientific development. In fact, he identified a 'remarkable parallel […] between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of zoological evolution as expounded by Mr Darwin on the other'.[58] Charles Sanders Pierce (1898) even proposed that the current laws of nature we have exist because they have evolved over time.[58] Darwin himself, in Chapter 5 of the Descent of Man, proposed that human moral sentiments were subject to group selection: "A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection."[59] Through the mechanism of imitation, cultures as well as individuals could be subject to natural selection.
While these theories involved evolution applied to social questions, except for Darwin's group selection the theories reviewed above did not advance a precise understanding of how Darwin's mechanism extended and applied to cultures beyond a vague appeal to competition.[60] Ritchie's Darwinism and Politics (1889) breaks this trend, holding that "language and social institutions make it possible to transmit experience quite independently of the continuity of race."[61] Hence Ritchie saw cultural evolution as a process that could operate independently of and on different scales to the evolution of species, and gave it precise underpinnings: he was 'extending its range', in his own words, to ideas, cultures and institutions.[62]
Thorstein Veblen, around the same time, came to a similar insight: that humans evolve to their social environment, but their social environment in turn also evolves.[63] Veblen's mechanism for human progress was the evolution of human intentionality: Veblen labelled men 'a creature of habit' and thought that habits were 'mentally digested' from those who influenced him.[57] In short, as Hodgson and Knudsen point out, Veblen thinks: "the changing institutions in their turn make for a further selection of individuals endowed with the fittest temperament, and a further adaptation of individual temperament and habits to the changing environment through the formation of new institutions." Thus, Veblen represented an extension of Ritchie's theories, where evolution operates at multiple levels, to a sophisticated appreciation of how each level interacts with the other.[64]
This complexity notwithstanding, Boas and Benedict used sophisticated ethnography and more rigorous empirical methods to argue that Spencer, Tylor, and Morgan's theories were speculative and systematically misrepresented ethnographic data. Theories regarding "stages" of evolution were especially criticised as illusions. Additionally, they rejected the distinction between "primitive" and "civilized" (or "modern"), pointing out that so-called primitive contemporary societies have just as much history, and were just as evolved, as so-called civilized societies. They therefore argued that any attempt to use this theory to reconstruct the histories of non-literate (i.e. leaving no historical documents) peoples is entirely speculative and unscientific.
They observed that the postulated progression, which typically ended with a stage of civilization identical to that of modern Europe, is
Later critics observed that the assumption of firmly bounded societies was proposed precisely at the time when European powers were colonising non-Western societies, and was thus self-serving. Many anthropologists and social theorists now consider unilineal cultural and social evolution a Western
Thus modern sociocultural evolutionism rejects most of classical social evolutionism due to various theoretical problems:
- The theory was deeply ethnocentric—it makes heavy value judgments about different societies, with Western civilizationseen as the most valuable.
- It assumed all cultures follow the same path or progression and have the same goals.
- It equated civilization with material culture (technology, cities, etc.)
Because social evolution was posited as a scientific theory, it was often used to support unjust and often
Max Weber, disenchantment, and critical theory
Weber's major works in
Weber's thought regarding the rationalizing and secularizing tendencies of modern Western society (sometimes described as the "
Modern theories
When the critique of classical social evolutionism became widely accepted, modern anthropological and sociological approaches changed respectively. Modern theories are careful to avoid unsourced, ethnocentric speculation, comparisons, or value judgments; more or less regarding individual societies as existing within their own historical contexts. These conditions provided the context for new theories such as cultural relativism and multilineal evolution.
In the 1920s and 1930s,
In 1941 anthropologist Robert Redfield wrote about a shift from 'folk society' to 'urban society'. By the 1940s cultural anthropologists such as Leslie White and Julian Steward sought to revive an evolutionary model on a more scientific basis, and succeeded in establishing an approach known as neoevolutionism. White rejected the opposition between "primitive" and "modern" societies but did argue that societies could be distinguished based on the amount of energy they harnessed, and that increased energy allowed for greater social differentiation (White's law). Steward on the other hand rejected the 19th-century notion of progress, and instead called attention to the Darwinian notion of "adaptation", arguing that all societies had to adapt to their environment in some way.
The anthropologists
.Today most anthropologists reject 19th-century notions of progress and the three assumptions of unilineal evolution. Following Steward, they take seriously the relationship between a culture and its environment to explain different aspects of a culture. But most modern cultural anthropologists have adopted a general systems approach, examining cultures as emergent systems and arguing that one must consider the whole social environment, which includes political and economic relations among cultures. As a result of simplistic notions of "progressive evolution", more modern, complex cultural evolution theories (such as
Neoevolutionism
Neoevolutionism was the first in a series of modern multilineal evolution theories. It emerged in the 1930s and extensively developed in the period following the
While 19th-century evolutionism explained how culture develops by giving general principles of its evolutionary process, it was dismissed by the Historical Particularists as unscientific in the early 20th century. It was the neo-evolutionary thinkers who brought back evolutionary thought and developed it to be acceptable to contemporary anthropology.
Neo-evolutionism discards many ideas of classical social evolutionism, namely that of social progress, so dominant in previous sociology evolution-related theories.
Julian Steward, author of Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution (1955, reprinted 1979), created the theory of "multilinear" evolution which examined the way in which societies adapted to their environment. This approach was more nuanced than White's theory of "unilinear evolution." Steward rejected the 19th-century notion of progress, and instead called attention to the Darwinian notion of "adaptation", arguing that all societies had to adapt to their environment in some way. He argued that different adaptations could be studied through the examination of the specific resources a society exploited, the technology the society relied on to exploit these resources, and the organization of human labour. He further argued that different environments and technologies would require different kinds of adaptations, and that as the resource base or technology changed, so too would a culture. In other words, cultures do not change according to some inner logic, but rather in terms of a changing relationship with a changing environment. Cultures therefore would not pass through the same stages in the same order as they changed—rather, they would change in varying ways and directions. He called his theory "multilineal evolution". He questioned the possibility of creating a social theory encompassing the entire evolution of humanity; however, he argued that anthropologists are not limited to describing specific existing cultures. He believed that it is possible to create theories analysing typical common culture, representative of specific eras or regions. As the decisive factors determining the development of given culture he pointed to technology and economics, but noted that there are secondary factors, like political system, ideologies and religion. All those factors push the evolution of a given society in several directions at the same time; hence the application of the term "multilinear" to his theory of evolution.
In his Power and Prestige (1966) and Human Societies: An Introduction to Macrosociology (1974),
Talcott Parsons, author of Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (1966) and The System of Modern Societies (1971) divided evolution into four subprocesses: (1) division, which creates functional subsystems from the main system; (2) adaptation, where those systems evolve into more efficient versions; (3) inclusion of elements previously excluded from the given systems; and (4) generalization of values, increasing the legitimization of the ever more complex system.[71] He shows those processes on 4 stages of evolution: (I) primitive or foraging, (II) archaic agricultural, (III) classical or "historic" in his terminology, using formalized and universalizing theories about reality and (IV) modern empirical cultures. However, these divisions in Parsons' theory are the more formal ways in which the evolutionary process is conceptualized, and should not be mistaken for Parsons' actual theory. Parsons develops a theory where he tries to reveal the complexity of the processes which take form between two points of necessity, the first being the cultural "necessity," which is given through the values-system of each evolving community; the other is the environmental necessities, which most directly is reflected in the material realities of the basic production system and in the relative capacity of each industrial-economical level at each window of time. Generally, Parsons highlights that the dynamics and directions of these processes is shaped by the cultural imperative embodied in the cultural heritage, and more secondarily, an outcome of sheer "economic" conditions.
Foucault argues that the conceptual meaning from the
Sociobiology
Sociobiology departs perhaps the furthest from classical social evolutionism.
The current theory of evolution, the modern evolutionary synthesis (or neo-darwinism), explains that evolution of species occurs through a combination of Darwin's mechanism of natural selection and Gregor Mendel's theory of genetics as the basis for biological inheritance and mathematical population genetics.[80] Essentially, the modern synthesis introduced the connection between two important discoveries; the units of evolution (genes) with the main mechanism of evolution (selection).[80]
Due to its close reliance on biology, sociobiology is often considered a branch of the biology, although it uses techniques from a plethora of sciences, including
Sociobiology has remained highly controversial as it contends
Since the rise of evolutionary psychology, another school of thought,
Theory of modernization
Theories of
- Western countries are the most developed, and the rest of the world (mostly former colonies) is in the earlier stages of development, and will eventually reach the same level as the Western world.[87]
- Development stages go from the traditional societies to developed ones.[87]
- Third World countries have fallen behind with their social progress and need to be directed on their way to becoming more advanced.[87]
Developing from classical social evolutionism theories, the theory of modernization stresses the modernization factor: many societies are simply trying (or need) to emulate the most successful societies and cultures.[87] It also states that it is possible to do so, thus supporting the concepts of social engineering and that the developed countries can and should help those less developed, directly or indirectly.[87]
Among the scientists who contributed much to this theory are
The theory of modernization has been subject to some criticism similar to that levied against classical social evolutionism, especially for being too ethnocentric, one-sided and focused on the Western world and its culture.
Contemporary perspectives
Political perspectives
The
Technological perspectives
Many[
Anthropological perspectives
Current political theories of the
Thus, some have appealed to theories of sociocultural evolution to assert that optimizing the ecology and the social harmony of closely knit groups is more desirable or necessary than the progression to "civilization." A 2002 poll of experts on
The role of war in the development of states and societies
Particularly since the end of the Cold War, there has been a growing number of scholars in the social sciences and humanities who came to complement the more presentist neo-evolutionary research with studies into the more distant past and its human inhabitants. A key element in many of these analyses and theories is warfare, which Robert L. Carneiro called the "prime mover in the origin of the state".[92] He theorizes that given the limited availability of natural resources, societies will compete against each other, with the losing group either moving out of the area now dominated by the victorious one, or, if the area is circumscribed by an ocean or a mountain range and re-settlement is thus impossible, will be either subjugated or killed. Thus, societies become larger and larger, but, facing the constant threat of extinction or assimilation, they were also forced to become more complex in their internal organisation both in order to remain competitive as well as to administer a growing territory and a larger population.[93]
Carneiro's ideas have inspired great number of subsequent research into the role of war in the process of political, social, or cultural evolution. An example of this is Ian Morris who argues that given the right geographic conditions, war not only drove much of human culture by integrating societies and increasing material well-being, but paradoxically also made the world much less violent. Large-scale states, says Morris, evolved because only they provided enough stability both internally and externally to survive the constant conflicts which characterise the early history of smaller states, and the possibility of war will continue to force humans to invent and evolve.[94] War drove human societies to adapt in a step-wise process, and each development in military technology either requires or leads to comparable developments in politics and society.[95]
Many of the underlying assumptions of Morris's thinking can be traced back in some form or another not only to Carneiro but also to Jared Diamond, and particularly his 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond, who explicitly opposes racist evolutionary tales,[96] argues that the ultimate explanation of why different human development on different continents is the presence or absence of domesticable plants and animals as well as the fact that the east-west orientation of Eurasia made migration within similar climates much easier than the south-north orientation of Africa and the Americas.[97] Nevertheless, he also stresses the importance of conflict and warfare as a proximate explanation for how Europeans managed to conquer much of the world,[98] given how societies who fail to innovate will "tend to be eliminated by competing societies".[99]
Similarly, Charles Tilly argues that what drove the political, social, and technological change which, after centuries of great variation with regard to states, lead to the European states ultimately all converging on the national state was coercion and warfare: "War wove the European network of national states, and preparation for war created the internal structures of states within it."[100] He describes how war became more expensive and complex due to the introduction of gunpowder and large armies and thus required significantly large states in order to provide the capital and manpower to sustain these, which at the same time were forced to develop new means of extraction and administration.[101]
However, Norman Yoffee has criticised such theorists who, based on general evolutionary frameworks, came to formulate theories of the origins of states and their evolution. He claimed that in no small part due to the prominence of neoevolutionary explanations which group different societies into groups in order to compare them and their progress both to themselves and to modern ethnographic examples, while focusing mostly on political systems and a despotic élite who held together a territorial state by force, "much of what has been said of the earliest states, both in the professional literature as well as in popular writings, is not only factually wrong but also is implausible in the logic of social evolutionary theory".[102]
See also
- Accelerating change
- Biocultural evolution
- Clash of Civilizations
- Critical juncture theory
- Cultural diversity
- Cultural evolution
- Cultural materialism
- Cultural neuroscience
- Cultural selection theory
- Diffusion of innovations
- Dual inheritance theory
- Economic determinism
- Edward Burnett Tylor
- Evolutionary anthropology
- Environmental racism
- Extended order
- Franz Boas
- Futures studies
- Historicism
- Institutional memory
- Julian Steward
- Leslie White
- Lewis Henry Morgan
- Memetics
- Moral progress
- Neoevolutionism
- Neuroculture
- Origin of language
- Origin of speech
- Origins of society
- Population dynamics
- Punctuated equilibrium
- Rationalization (sociology)
- Raciolinguistics
- Reformism
- Social Darwinism
- Social cycle theory
- Social dynamics
- Social implications of the theory of evolution
- Societal collapse
- Sociocultural system
- Social progress
- Symbolic culture
- Technological evolution
References
- ISBN 978-0-7734-6310-3.
- ^
Compare:
Tivel, David E. (2012). "3: Evolution: Cultures and Ethnicity". Evolution: The Universe, Life, Cultures, Ethnicity, Religion, Science, and Technology. Pittsburgh: Dorrance Publishing. p. 89. ISBN 9781434918161.
Cultural evolution as a theory in anthropology was developed in the nineteenth century as an outgrowth of Darwinian evolution. It is the process by which structural reorganization is affected through time, eventually producing a form or structure which is qualitatively different from the ancestral form.
- OCLC 426118505.
- ^
Dawkins, Richard (1976). ISBN 0-19-857519-X
- ^ Sztompka, p. 491
- OCLC 426118505.
- OCLC 426118505.
- OCLC 426118505.
- OCLC 18559462.
- OCLC 18559462.
- OCLC 18559462.
- OCLC 1091034107.
- OCLC 35638169.
- ^ a b Priestman, Martin (2013). Victor Gourevitch (ed.). The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin. Ashgate Publishing. p. 184.
- OCLC 426118505.
- ^ a b Priestman, Martin (2013). Victor Gourevitch (ed.). The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin. Ashgate Publishing. p. 188.
- ^ Priestman, Martin (2013). Victor Gourevitch (ed.). The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin. Ashgate Publishing. p. 191.
- ^ Priestman, Martin (2013). Victor Gourevitch (ed.). The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin. Ashgate Publishing. p. 189.
- ^ This is from James Secord's introduction to Chambers, Robert (1994). James Secord (ed.). Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and Other Evolutionary Writings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 1–3.
- OCLC 426118505.
- ^ OCLC 426118505.
- OCLC 426118505.
- OCLC 426118505.
- OCLC 426118505.
- ^ a b Sztompka, p. 495
- .
- JSTOR 2708202. p. 296.
- JSTOR 2708202. p. 296-7.
- ^ JSTOR 2708202. p. 297-8.
- ^ Boyd; Richerson. "Built for Speed, Not for Comfort: Darwinian Theory of Human Laws". History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences. 23.pp.423-463
- JSTOR 2708202..
- OCLC 426118505.
- ISSN 0021-3624.
- OCLC 426118505.
- OCLC 7811517.
- OCLC 426118505.
- ^ Bluemle, Gerold. "200 Jahre Darwin und 250 Jahre Theory of Moral Sentiments von Adam Smith. Zur Aktualität eines vergessenen Werkes". International Journal of Economic Sciences and Applied Research. 2: 89–110.
- OCLC 1020319147.)
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link - OCLC 426118505.
- ^ a b c d e f g Sztompka, pp. 498-499
- ^ "The Philosophy Of Positivism Archived 10 March 2005 at the Wayback Machine". Adventures in Philosophy.
- ^ "Modern History Sourcebook: Herbert Spencer: Social Darwinism, 1857". fordham.edu.
- S2CID 143884335.
- )
- ^ "Herbert Spencer Archived 24 November 2005 at the Wayback Machine". Sociological Theorists Page.
- OCLC 426118505.
- S2CID 170478166.
- ^ a b c d Sztompka, pp. 499-500
- ^ Morgan, Lewis H. (1877) "Chapter III: Ratio of Human Progress". Ancient Society.
- ^ ISBN 9780300000467.
- ^ a b c d Sztompka, pp. 500–501
- ^ ISBN 9780198025825.
- ^ Ibid. p 166, https://archive.org/details/racehistoryofide0000goss_r1r7/page/166/mode/2up?q=lester&view=theater
- ^ Cape, E.P. (1922). Lester F. Ward; a Personal Sketch. G. P. Putnam's sons.
- ^ a b c d e f Sztompka, p. 500
- ^ a b c d Sztompka, p. 501
- ^ a b Hodgson; Knudsen (2010). Darwin's Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Biological Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 6.
- ^ a b c Hodgson; Knudsen (2010). Darwin's Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Biological Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 7.
- ^ Boyd; Richerson. "Built for Speed, Not for Comfort: Darwinian Theory of Human Laws". History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences. 23: 433.
- ^ Hodgson; Knudsen (2010). Darwin's Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Biological Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 8.
- ^ Hodgson; Knudsen (2010). Darwin's Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Biological Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 9.
- ^ Hodgson; Knudsen (2010). Darwin's Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Biological Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 10.
- ^ Hodgson; Knudsen (2010). Darwin's Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Biological Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 12.
- ^ Hodgson; Knudsen (2010). Darwin's Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Biological Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 12–13.
- ISBN 978-0-7456-0830-3.
- OCLC 123371323.
- ^ Sahlins, Marshall David; Service, Elman, eds. (1960). Evolution and culture. Ann Arbor, MI: Univ. of Michigan Press.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Sztompka, pp. 502–503
- ISBN 0-07-069682-9
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Sztompka, p. 504
- ^ Sztompka, p. 505
- PMID 21199848.
- ^ van de Ven,W.T.H. (2012) The Social Reality of Truth. Foucault, Searle and the role of truth within social reality.
- ^ Foucault, Michel (1975) Discipline and Punish
- ^ CRS Report For Congress Federal Prison Industries 2007
- ^ a b Kantorowicz, Ernst (1956) The Kings Two Bodies
- ^ Michel Foucault Bio‐history and bio‐politics Originally published in Le Monde, no. 9869 (17‐18 October 1976) Review of Jacques Ruffié From Biology to Culture and republished in Foucault Studies 18 October 2014
- ^ Foucault, Michel (1977–1978) Security, Territory, Population. pp. 135–163, 311–332.
- ^ Foucault, Michel (1977–1978) Security, Territory, Population. pp. 1–23, 54–86
- ^ a b c d Sztompka, p. 506
- OCLC 1076449679.)
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link - OCLC 929995587.
- )
- OCLC 755704999.
- ISBN 978-0-226-06933-3.
- ISBN 978-0316230032.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j Sztompka, pp. 507–508
- OCLC 1603671.
- ^ S2CID 3561873.
- PMID 21237011.
- PMID 25838283.
- S2CID 11536431.
- S2CID 11536431.
- )
- ^ Morris, Ian (2012). "The Evolutioin of War". Cliodynamics. 3: 9–37.
- OCLC 35792200.
- OCLC 35792200.
- OCLC 35792200.
- OCLC 35792200.
- OCLC 20170025. (see 20-28)
- OCLC 20170025.
- OCLC 252514212.
Cited sources
- ISBN 83-240-0218-9.
Bibliography
- The Philosophy of Positivism
- Robert Carneiro, Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology: A Critical History. Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 2003.
- ISBN 978-0-141-02448-6).
- Evans-Pritchard, Sir Edward, A History of Anthropological Thought, 1981, Basic Books, Inc., New York.
- Graber, Robert B., A Scientific Model of Social and Cultural Evolution, 1995, Thomas Jefferson University Press, Kirksville, MO.
- Harris, Marvin, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture, 1968, Thomas Y. Crowell, New York.
- Hatch, Elvin, Theories of Man and Culture, 1973, Columbia University Press, New York.
- Hays, H. R., From Ape to Angel: An Informal History of Social Anthropology, 1965, Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
- Johnson, Allen W. and Earle, Timothy, The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State, 1987, Stanford University Press.
- Kaplan, David and Manners, Robert, Culture Theory, 1972, Waveland Press, Inc., Prospect Heights, Illinois.
- Kuklick, Henrika, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945, 1991, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
- McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009, Yale University Press, US and London.
- Mesoudi, A. (2007). Using the methods of experimental social psychology to study cultural evolution. Journal of Social, Evolutionary & Cultural Psychology, 1(2), 35–58. Full text
- Mesoudi, A. Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences, 2011, University of Chicago Press, ISBN 978-0-226-52044-5
- ISBN 978-1-929569-41-0
- Raoul Naroll and William T. Divale. 1976. Natural Selection in Cultural Evolution: Warfare versus Peaceful Diffusion. American Ethnologist 3: 97–128.
- Segal, Daniel (2000) Western Civ" and the Staging of History in American Higher Education doi:10.2307/2651809
- Seymour-Smith, Charlotte, Macmillan Dictionary of Anthropology, 1986, Macmillan, New York.
- Stocking Jr., George W., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology, 1968, The Free Press, New York.
- Stocking Jr., George W., After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888–1951, 1995, The University of Wisconsin Press.
- ISBN 0-02-931551-4
- ISBN 0-631-18206-3
- ISBN 1-55786-977-4
- Winthrop, Robert H., Dictionary of Concepts in Cultural Anthropology, 1991, Greenwood Press, New York.
Readings from an evolutionary anthropological perspective
- Two special issues on the evolution of culture:
- Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews Volume 12, Issue 2, Pages 57–108 (April 2003)
- The evolution of culture: New perspectives and evidence (p 57–60) Charles H. Janson, Eric A. Smith
- Making space for traditions (p 61–70) Dorothy Fragaszy
- Traditions in monkeys (p 71–81) Susan Perry, Joseph H. Manson
- Is culture a golden barrier between human and chimpanzee? (p 82–91) Christophe Boesch
- Cultural panthropology (p 92–105) Andrew Whiten, Victoria Horner, Sarah Marshall-Pescini
- The fossil record – Human and nonhuman (p 106–108) Eric Delson
- Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews Volume 12, Issue 3, Pages 109–159 (2003)
- On stony ground: Lithic technology, human evolution, and the emergence of culture (p 109–122) Robert Foley, Marta Mirazón Lahr
- The evolution of cultural evolution (p 123–135) Joseph Henrich, Richard McElreath
- The adaptive nature of culture (p 136–149) Michael S. Alvard
- Do animals have culture? (p 150–159) Kevin N. Laland, William Hoppitt
- Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews Volume 12, Issue 2, Pages 57–108 (April 2003)