Cultural evolution

Cultural evolution, the development of one or more cultures from simpler to more complex forms. In the 18th and 19th centuries the subject was viewed as a unilinear phenomenon that describes the evolution of human behaviour as a whole. It has since been understood as a multilinear phenomenon that describes the evolution of individual cultures or societies (or of given parts of a culture or society).

Unilinear cultural evolution was an important concept in the emerging field of anthropology during the 18th and 19th centuries but fell out of favour in the early 20th century. Scholars began to propagate theories of multilinear cultural evolution in the 1930s, and these neoevolutionist perspectives continue, in various forms, to frame much of the research undertaken in physical anthropology and archaeology, the branches of anthropology that focus on change over time.

Unilinear theory

The Age of Discovery introduced 15th- and 16th-century Europeans to a wide variety of “primitive” cultures. Almost immediately, European intellectuals began efforts to explain how and why the human condition had come to be so diverse. Although the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes was very much mistaken when he described indigenous peoples as living in conditions in which there were “no arts, no letters, no society” and experiencing life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” his description encapsulates the era’s popular conception of the “savage.” Ignoring or unaware of a variety of facts—many indigenous peoples enjoyed a much better standard of living than European peasants, for instance—Hobbes and other scholars posited that everything that was good and civilized resulted from the slow development away from this “lowly” state and toward the “higher” state represented by the cultures of Europe. Even rationalistic philosophers such as Voltaire implicitly assumed that the “upward” progress of humankind was part of the natural order.

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This Enlightenment notion that there was, in fact, a “natural order” derived from the philosophers of ancient Greece, who had described the world as comprising a Great Chain of Being—a view in which the world is seen as complete, orderly, and susceptible to systematic analysis. As a result, scholarship during the Enlightenment emphasized categorization and soon produced various typologies that described a series of fixed stages of cultural evolution.

Most focused on three major stages, but some posited many more categories. For instance, in his Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1795; Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind), the Marquis de Condorcet listed 10 stages, or “epochs,” of cultural evolution. He posited that the final epoch had begun with the French Revolution and was destined to usher in universal human rights and the perfection of the human race. The Danish archaeologist Christian Jürgenson Thomsen is widely acknowledged as the first scholar to have based such a typology on firm data rather than speculation. In Ledetraad til nordisk Oldkyndighed (1836; A Guide to Northern Antiquities), he categorized ancient European societies on the basis of their tools, calling the developmental stages the Stone, Bronze, and Iron ages.

In the later 19th century, theories of cultural evolution were enormously influenced by the wide acceptance of the theory of biological evolution put forward by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species (1859). Social scientists found that the framework suggested by biological evolution offered an attractive solution to their questions regarding the origins and development of social behaviour. Indeed, the idea of a society as an evolving organism was a biological analogy that was taken up by many anthropologists and sociologists and that persisted in some quarters even into the 20th century.

The English philosopher Herbert Spencer was among the first to work out a general evolutionary scheme that included human societies from across the globe. He held that human cultures evolved from less-complex “species” to those that were more so: people at first lived in undifferentiated hordes; then developed social hierarchies with priests, kings, scholars, workers, and so forth; and later accumulated knowledge that was differentiated into the various sciences. In short, human societies evolved, by means of an increasing division of labour, into complex civilizations.

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The anthropologists E.B. Tylor in England and Lewis H. Morgan in the United States were the chief exponents of cultural stages in the evolution of humankind. They emphasized the analysis of culture in general, not that of individual cultures, except as the latter might illustrate their theories of the overall evolution of humanity and civilization. Morgan summed up the precepts of the unilineal approach quite well:

Since mankind were one in origin, their career has been essentially one, running in different but uniform channels upon all continents, and very similarly in all the tribes and nations of mankind down to the same status of advancement. It follows that the history and experience of the American Indian tribes represent, more or less nearly, the history and experience of our own remote ancestors when in corresponding conditions.

This passage is from Morgan’s masterwork Ancient Society (1877), in which he also described seven stages of cultural evolution: lower, middle, and upper savagery; lower, middle, and upper barbarism; and civilization. He supported his ideas by citing contemporary societies characteristic of each stage except lower savagery, of which there were no extant examples.

Morgan’s work was very widely read and became the basis for further developments in anthropology, perhaps most notably its emphasis on cross-cultural comparison and its preoccupation with the mechanisms of change. His work underlay debates on matters, such as the relative importance of technological innovation (versus diffusion), that were of serious concern for the remainder of the 19th century and persisted well into the 20th. However, although it is considered important in the history of anthropology, Morgan’s work, and indeed unilineal cultural evolution as a whole, no longer hold credence in the field.