Философия/4. Философия культуры

Старший преподаватель Черниговская А.И.

Гродненский государственный университет им. Я. Купалы, Беларусь

Cultural Evolution: Specific and General

While Leslie White was at work on his updating of nineteenth-century evolution, Julian Steward had already published several articles dealing with another evolutionary approach to change – like White’s, playing up materialistic factors but being much narrower in scope and much more involved with local environmental factors. To some extent, Steward’s scheme was a reaction against the historicist explanations of dynamics that slighted internal systemic and local environmental factors. Steward received early theoretical stimulation from K.A. Wittfogel and from V. Gordon Childe. In his own work he chose to focus on “cultural ecology” and “multilinear evolution”. Steward and White recognized each other’s works to be important contributions but seemed always to be drawing distinctions between them rather than emphasizing their commonality.

Between the early 1940’s and the late 1950’s, Steward, White, and the writings of Childe and Wittfogel were virtually the sole representatives of evolutionary approaches, in part because of the tremendous impact of historicist and functionalist thinking on anthropological theory. By about 1960, however, it was apparent that evolution was no longer a social anthropological anathema. Steward and White had by then both published extended statements of their approaches, and their work had in part stimulated others: Sahlins, Goldschmidt, Dole and Carniero.

In 1960 Marshal Sahlins made explicit the simple but fundamental distinction between specific and general evolution that clarified Leslie White’s approach considerably. The evolution of culture is “general” evolution, a development of successive forms (hunting-and-gathering bands, agriculturalist, industrial revolution, Atomic Age) through long periods of time. “Specific” evolution, on the other hand, is the development of local cultures or groups of cultures through relatively short periods of time. The keynote of specific evolution is cultural diversity, brought about by a wide variety of localized factors: environment, diffusion, invention, and the like. In the general evolutionary perspective, all the diversity becomes merged into larger patterns that unfold in progressive fashion – “progress”, as objectively measured, is the keynote of general evolution. Specific cultures arise, diffuse, proliferate, perhaps retrograde, or become extinct – leaving a very complex entanglement of specific evolutionary paths. But in the vinelike tangle can be detected a general course. This, Sahlins concluded, is what L. White’s approach is designed to describe.

The same sort of general-specific distinction can be applied to the study of cultural subunits as well as cultures. One could trace the general evolution of religion (Tylor) or kinship structure (Tylor and Morgan) or focus on specific diversity of kinship or religion as influenced by numerous local factors. However, scholars have disagreed on the point at which specific evolutionary studies become general, and vice-versa, as the analyses shift through several different levels of abstraction [1, p.23].

Steward helped to stimulate a major scholarly focus on the relations between man and his local habitat, or cultural ecology, although he was not the first to articulate the basic principles of the important relationship. He suggested a systematic way to study the dynamics of man-habitat interaction so as to get at processes and, at the same time, to provide cross-cultural generalizations. His method was based on a simple assumption: not all features of a given habitat are relevant to a given sociocultural system, nor all systemic elements (e.g., religion, politics, technology, and kinship) equally affected by the man-habitat interaction. The analytical task is to determine what features of the habitat “bear upon the productive patterns” of the system by focusing on those systemic features “which empirical analysis shows to be most closely involved in the utilization of [habitat] in culturally prescribed ways” [2, p. 123]. The idea is to strip away all “irrelevant” aspects of both the environment and the sociocultural system so as to clarify the ecological relationship and its changes through time. This stripping away of all but those features most directly involved with exploiting the habitat leaves only the evolutionary important portion of the sociocultural system, which Steward called the culture core [2, p. 37]. The system’s technology must always be analyzed in terms of the conditions of the local habitat.

Walter Goldschmidt wrote: “The brute fact of the matter is that the policing of evolutionary development ultimately rests in the external selective process: the fact that each society lives in a context of other societies which offer an immediate or potential threat to the society, against which the society must rally its forces [3, p.128]. Few contemporary evolutionists would argue with the implication of the statement that the effect of this “external” factor must be investigated, and many have stated as much in public. But the brute fact of the matter is that few evolutionists have practiced what they have been preaching. Even when the influence of alien systems is expanded to include not only military threat but the influence of diffusion of ideas and artifacts, as a class of factors it has played second fiddle to man-habitat in many cases.

Steward pointed out that diffusion processes were not relevant to his own studies of multilinear evolution: “If people borrow domesticated plants and agricultural patterns, it is evident that population will increase in favorable areas. How shall dense, stable populations organize their sociopolitical relations? Obviously, they will not remain inchoate mobs until diffused patterns have taught them how to live together. (And even diffused patterns had to originate somewhere for good and sufficient reasons) [2, p. 208]. The diffused traits in any sociocultural system give it its distinct character, its “local color”; but these are “secondary features”, “which cannot per se produce the underlying condition of, or the need for, greater social and political organization” [2, p. 209]. The major stimuli come from the man-habitat relationship, in his view. Steward frequently re-emphasized the secondary nature of diffusion as a causal process and thus, as White, revealed a real disaffection with much of the “dynamic” approach forged by his historicist mentors. Steward’s ignoring of the “local color” made it relatively simpler to trace the man-habitat relations, even at the cost of slighting the possibly crucial factor of culture contact.

Литература:

1. Erasmus C.J. Explanation and Reconstruction in Cultural Evolution / C.J. Erasmus – Sociologus 19 (1): 20-38, 1969.

2. Steward J.H. Theory of Culture Change / J.H. Steward – Univ. of Illinois Press, 1955.

3. Goldschmidt W.R. Man’s Way / W.R. Goldschmidt – New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1959.