Философия/4. Философия культуры

Старший преподаватель Черниговская А.И.

Гродненский государственный университет им. Я. Купалы, Беларусь

White’s Neoevolutionism: the Revival of Evolutionary Theory

The theory of Neoevolutionism explained how culture develops by giving general principles of its evolutionary process. The theory of cultural evolution was originally established in the 19^th century. However, this Nineteenth-century Evolutionism was dismissed by the Historical Particularists as unscientific in the early 20^th century. Therefore, the topic of cultural evolution had been avoided by many anthropologists until Neoevolutionism emerged in the 1930s. In other words, it was the Neoevolutionary thinkers who brought back evolutionary thought and developed it to be acceptable to contemporary anthropology.

Leslie White (1900-1972) developed the theory of cultural evolution. White’s attempts to restore the evolutionary topic started in the 1920s. His evolutionary theory was essentially that proposed by L.H. Morgan, E.B. Tylor, H. Spencer, K. Marx, and E. Durkheim in the 19^th century but benefited from the additional anthropological data that accumulated since.

White gave his own definition of culture. “By culture we mean an extrasomatic, temporal continuum of things and events dependent upon symboling. Specifically and concretely, culture consists of tools, implements, utensils, clothing, ornaments, customs, institutions, beliefs, rituals, games, works of art, language, etc… We call the ability freely and arbitrarily to originate and bestow meaning upon a thing or event, and, correspondingly, the ability to grasp and appreciate such meaning, the ability to symbol [1, p. 3].

The cultural system can be divided into three subsystems. The most basic one is technology, the two other subsystems are the social structural and the ideological or philosophical. All three are in mutually influencing interrelationship, but technology dominates by operating through social structure upon ideology [1, p.18].

The technological subsystem controls the amount of energy captured and utilized by the cultural system; as the technology becomes more efficient, more energy is captured and utilized, which leads to development in the culture as a whole. He stated this formally as the “law of cultural development”: “culture advances as the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year increases, or as the efficiency or economy of the means of controlling energy is increased, or both” [1, p. 56].

The environment, White noted, is an important factor in the development of any given culture. But its influence must be carefully traced, because the relationship between a culture and its natural setting changes as the culture develops. As shown in his theory of cultural evolution, White believed that culture has general laws of its own. Based on these universal principles, culture evolves by itself. Therefore, an anthropologist’s task is to discover those principles and explain the particular phenomena of culture. He called this approach culturology, which attempts to define and predict cultural phenomena by understanding general patterns of culture.

Like Morgan and Marx, White emphasized the basic importance of the shift from the primitive emphasis on kinship and on sharing of scarce resources to the emphasis on property accumulation and nonkinship connections of the state – Morgan’s distinction between societas and civitas, respectively. And White’s stages of evolution, rephrased in his more materialistic term, are essentially those of savagery, barbarism, and civilization, although the atomic revolution was a wrinkle that Morgan or Tylor could not have added. White recognized that his approach representing nothing essentially new. All these notions – the focus on the highest levels of abstraction (i.e., “culture”); the search for “laws of development”; the materialism, with the pivotal role of energy; the tripartite segmentation of the cultural system into technology, social structure, and ideology – and others were to be found in the work of Morgan, Tylor, Marx, and Spencer [2, p. 125]. The main difference between Neoevolutionism and Nineteenth-century Evolutionism is whether they are empirical or not. While Nineteenth-century Evolutionism used value judgment and assumptions for interpreting data, the new one relied on measurable information for analyzing the process of cultural evolution.

White helped reawaken an interest in evolution as an approach to the study of sociocultural change, although he was aided considerably by the work of his near contemporary the late V. Gordon Childe, in the 1930’s and 1940’s. He also reintroduced technological determinism as an integral part of the over-all evolutionary approach. Shorn of its dogmatic trappings and removed from its all-encompassing level of abstraction, White’s perspective provided a stimulus for a broadening of anthropological interest in evolutionary studies. The Neoevolutionary thoughts also gave some kind of common ground for cross-cultural analysis. Functionalists, even the synchronic ones like Radcliffe-Brown, on the other hand, provided increasingly sophisticated insights into how elements of a social system are interrelated. And, as he has pointed out such analysis is a necessary prelude to any attempt to understand how social systems change. Largely through White’s efforts, evolutionary theory was again generally accepted among anthropologists by the late 1960s.

Литература:

1. White L. The Evolution of Culture. L. / White – N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, 1959.

2. Bee R.L. Patterns and Processes / R.L. Bee. – N.Y.: The Free Press, 1974. – 260 p.

3. Harding T.G., Kaplan D., Sahlins M.D., Service E.R. Evolution and Culture / T.G. Harding, D. Kaplan, M.D. Sahlins, E.R. Service. – The University of Michigan Press, 1970. – 131 p.

4. White L. Diffusion Versus Evolution: An Anti-Evolutionist Fallacy / L. White – American Anthropologist 47, 1945. – p. 339-356.

5. White L. The Science of Culture / L. White – N.Y.: Grove Press, 1949.

6. White L. History, Evolutionism, and Functionalism; Three Types of Interpretation of Culture / L. White. – Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 1, 1945. – p. 221 – 248.