| Physical description |
xiii, 322 pages ; 24 cm |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 289-312) and index. |
| Contents |
1 Early History of Evolutionism 1 -- Herbert Spencer and the Concept of Evolution 3 -- Evolutionary Views of Tylor and Morgan 5 -- 2 Reconstruction of Cultural Evolution 9 -- Comparative Method 10 -- Possibility of a Social Science 11 -- Uniformity of Nature 13 -- Principle of Continuity 14 -- From Simplicity to Complexity 14 -- Objective Rating of Cultures 15 -- Evolution Not an Inherent Tendency 16 -- Psychic Unity of Man 17 -- Differential Evolution 18 -- Contemporary Primitives and Ancestral Cultures 19 -- Modern Primitives Not Primeval 22 -- Primal Human Society 23 -- Survivals 24 -- 3 Characteristics of Cultural Evolution 27 -- Rectilinearity 27 -- Unilinearity 28 -- Skipping of Stages 31 -- Law of Evolutionary Potential 32 -- Rates of Evolution 32 -- Diffusion and Evolution 33 -- 4 Determinants of Cultural Evolution 39 -- Inherent versus External Determinants 40 -- Psychic Unity as an Active Agent 42 -- Racial Determinism 44 -- Human Perfectibility 48 -- Individuals as Determinants 49 -- Influence of Great Men 50 -- Ideas as Prime Movers 53 -- Historical Materialism 58 -- Environmental Factors 61 -- Subsistence as a Determinant 62 -- Economic Determinants 64 -- Social Determinants 65 -- War as a Determinant 66 -- Natural Selection 68 -- 5 Anti-Evolutionism in the Ascendancy 75 -- Boasian Backlash 75 -- Diffusionism in British Anthropology 78 -- Functionalist Reaction 80 -- Malinowski 81 -- Radcliffe-Brown 82 -- Anti-Evolutionism in Later British Social Anthropology 85 -- Remaining Islands of Cultural Evolutionism: James G. Frazer 87 -- Hobhouse, Wheeler, and Ginsberg 89 -- Sumner and Keller 91 -- George P. Murdock 94 -- Barren Landscape 96 -- Theorizing Disavowed 97 -- Historical Particularism 98 -- 6 Early Stages in the Reemergence of Evolutionism 99 -- Leslie A. White 99 -- Diffusion versus Evolution 102 -- Derivation of Evolutionary Formulas 104 -- Cultural Relativism and the Rating of Cultures 107 -- In Spite of Themselves 108 -- Julian H. Steward 110 -- V. Gordon Childe 115 -- Evolutionism in Ethnology in the 1950s 118 -- Darwin Centennial 122 -- 7 Issues in Late Midcentury Evolutionism 127 -- New Steps Forward 127 -- General and Specific Evolution 127 -- History versus Evolution 130 -- Archaeology and Evolution 132 -- Service's Sequence of Stages 137 -- Processual Archaeology 141 -- Lewis Binford and Middle Range Theory 142 -- Ethnographic Analogy and Parallels 144 -- Ethnoarchaeology 145 -- General Systems Theory 146 -- Respectability Regained 148 -- "Neo-Evolutionism" 149 -- 8 Features of the Evolutionary Process 151 -- Developmental Stages 151 -- Process versus Stages 155 -- Scale Analysis and the Refinement of Sequences 157 -- Verifying Inferred Sequences of Development 159 -- Directionality in Evolution 159 -- Complexity as the Hallmark of Evolution 161 -- Is Evolution Irreversible? 163 -- Objective Rating of Cultures 165 -- Rates of Cultural Evolution 169 -- Mechanisms of Cultural Evolution 171 -- Darwinian Model 173 -- Adaptation Considered Further 179 -- Typological versus Populational Concepts 181 -- 9 What Drives the Evolution of Culture? 185 -- Elman Service versus Marvin Harris 185 -- Cultural Causality Examined 187 -- Determinants: White and Steward Considered Separately 191 -- Steward and White Compared 194 -- Ecological Approaches: Limitations and Pitfalls 196 -- Functionalism and Evolutionism Join Forces 198 -- Population Pressure as a Determinant of Evolution 200 -- Warfare as a Determinant 208 -- Trade as a Determinant 211 -- 10 Other Perspectives on Cultural Evolution 213 -- Ideology and Evolution 213 -- Marxist Anthropology and Cultural Evolution 218 -- Microevolution and Agency Theory 223 -- 11 Elements of Evolutionary Formulations 229 -- Evolution: Unilinear or Multilinear? 229 -- Laws of Cultural Development 238 -- British Social Anthropology and Cultural Laws 242 -- American Anthropologists and Cultural Laws 243 -- Comparative Method and Its Application 250 -- Problem of Sampling 254 -- 12 Current Issues and Attitudes in the Study of Cultural Evolution 263 -- New and Lingering Opposition to Cultural Evolutionism 263 -- Attitude of British Social Anthropologists 266 -- American Archaeologists Resist "Neo-Evolutionism" 273 -- Archaeologists Accept and Apply Evolutionism 276 -- Quantification of Cultural Evolution 285 -- Cultural Evolutionism and the Sociologists 286. |
| Summary |
Evolutionism and Cultural Anthropology traces the interaction of evolutionary thought and anthropological theory from Herbert Spencer to the twenty-first century. It is a focused examination of how the idea of evolution has continued to provide anthropology with a master principle around which a vast body of data can be organized and synthesized. Erudite and readable, and quoting extensively from early theorists (such as Edward Tylor, Louis Henry Morgan, John McLennan, Henry Maine, and James Frazer) so that the reader might judge them on the basis of their own words, Evolutionism and Cultural Anthropology is useful reading for courses in anthropological theory and the history of anthropology. |
| Subject |
Social evolution.
|
|
Ethnology -- Philosophy.
|
| ISBN |
0813337658 (hardcover) |
|
0813337666 (paperback) |
|
