By Sabrina Fay
The above thumbnail image is from the City College of New York
As long as people have been around, there have been others eager to study their behavior. This is the origin of anthropology, which has sought for hundreds of years to understand the evolution of human societies, and why some are successful while others are not. One key question in anthropology, still hotly debated today, has been how to look at culture and its role in societal development.
For a long time, Western civilizations were the pedestal from which anthropologists looked down on other, "lesser" societies. In the 1800's, anthropologists like L.H. Morgan (1818-1881) described society as evolving from savagery to barbarism to civilization, while others saw law as liberating individuals from the binds of kinship and rank. Problems began to arise when this way of thinking developed the unspoken assumption that European/Western civilizations are the peak of social evolution, with supposedly inferior societies being unable to evolve simply because they are not capable. This began to change with the work of Franz Boas (1858-1942), who introduced the revolutionary concept of cultural relativism.
Franz Boas via Skepchick.org. Boas taught Anthropology at Columbia University for many years, and his students went on to be very prominent in the field.
Boas introduced relativism on the basis that individuals take on the cultural traits of the community in which they are raised (no matter their ethnicity). He and his most prominent students (Robert Lowie, Alfred Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead) rejected the ethnocentric view of social evolution for a perspective viewing each culture as a unique body that does not change with any discernable upward trajectory. This new view dominated anthropology throughout a great deal of the 20th century, but still had its shortcomings.
Though Boas seemed to have successfully eliminated race from the anthropological equation, he dismissed any kind of definable social progress taking place in various civilizations at all. There are in fact patterns of similarities and differences between different societies that can't be ignored when trying to define the development of said societies. As such, since the 1950's, a couple different socio-evolutionary ideas that try to tread the middle ground have appeared:
- Unilinear evolution: posits that cultural evolution is a property attainable by all human communities through mastery over nature by means of culture (technological knowledge). As technology evolves (from stone tools to ceramics to metals and more), so does culture. Leslie White (1900-1975) was one of the anthropologists to spearhead this theory, observing that human history involves increased harnessing of energy, from hunting and gathering to crops, livestock, and steam/fossil fuel engines.
- Multilinear evolution: posits that all evolution is local and driven by people actively solving their day-to-day problem. Their decisions to maintain or change their behavior defines social evolution (or "adaptation" as deemed by anthropologist Julian Steward). Each society must adapt to its own geographical, political, and economic climates as well as those of its neighboring societies; once a community has achieved a working solution to an issue, it may not be inclined to change and so may appear as "less evolved" even though it has evolved as much as it has needed to.
To figure out the evolution of human societies, anthropology has had to evolve too, and new theories and typologies to describe how people assemble and develop as units emerge every day. Anthropologists must use history and real-life case studies to craft their claims; from studying the development of older civilizations we can potentially predict the evolution of our own, and gain a deeper insight into both the commonality and diversity of human nature.
Anthropologist Richard Lee with the !Kung San people of the Kalahari, whom he lived amongst and studied for many years. Image via Anthrophoto