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Topic: Cultural evolutionism

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	Sociocultural evolution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Cultural anthropologists such as Franz Boas, and his students like Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, typically regarded as the leader of anthropology's rejection of classical social evolutionism, used sophisticated ethnography and more rigorous empirical methods to argue that Spencer, Tylor, and Morgan's theories were speculative and systematically misrepresented ethnographic data.
		While 19th-century evolutionism explained how culture develops by giving general principles of its evolutionary process, it was dismissed by the Historical Particularists as unscientific in the early 20th century.
		Observing and observed cultures may lack sufficient cultural similarities (such as a common foundation ontology) to be able to communicate their respective priorities easily.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Cultural_evolution (7014 words)

	Evolutionism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Evolutionism, from the Latin evolutio, unrolling, refers to theories that certain things develop or change as natural (unplanned) outgrowths of those that existed before, in contrast to beliefs that these things are fixed and immutable.
		In anthropology and biology, the term Evolutionism is nowadays used specifically for historical theories or beliefs of early sociocultural evolutionism developed in the 18th and 19th century that organisms are intrinsically bound to improve themselves through progressive changes which are heritable.
		Furthermore, Young Earth creationists sometimes use the term evolutionism to attack the empirical methods of science generally, such as attacking geology and astronomy which have concluded that the Earth and the Universe are billions of years older than the young-earth creationists believe.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Evolutionism (3191 words)

	Social Evolutionism
		The sources of culture change were generally assumed to be embedded within the culture from the beginning, and therefore the ultimate course of development was thought to be internally determined.
		Middle savagery was marked by the acquisition of a fish diet and the discovery of fire; upper savagery by the bow and arrow; lower barbarism by pottery; middle barbarism by animal domestication and irrigated agriculture; upper barbarism by the manufacture of iron; and civilization by the phonetic alphabet (Morgan 1877: chapter 1).
		Tylor formulated a definition of culture: “Culture or civilization is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society,”; and also developed the idea of survivals.
	www.as.ua.edu /ant/Faculty/murphy/evol.htm (3602 words)

	The Torch: Cultural Relativism
		Cultural evolutionism is not of a quite recent date.
		An evolutionism that ideologically justified the western exploitation of their colonies all over the world as well as the mass extermination of the Jews during World War 2.
		That goes without saying, hopefully, that any form of cultural evolutionism is a result of a random selection of phenomena.
	www.faklen.dk /en/the_torch/cultrel.shtml (1194 words)

	Cultural selection. Chapter 2: The history of cultural selection theory
		Since cultural phenomena, as opposed to genes, can be transmitted from one individual to another or from one society to another, then wars should not be necessary for the process of cultural evolution, according to Malinowski.
		Williams analyzes both cultural innovation, reproduction, and selection, but oddly enough, he never combines these three concepts to a coherent evolutionary theory, and he omits any reference to evolutionary scientists (Williams, R. This omission is probably due to a resistance against overstated generalizations and, quite likely, a fear of being associated with social darwinism.
		In Sperber's model, cultural representations are generally transformed each time they are copied, and this transformation is mostly in the direction of the representation that is most psychologically attractive, most compatible with the rest of the culture, or most easy to remember.
	www.agner.org /cultsel/chapt2 (14704 words)

	Leslie A. White
		In White's view culture was evolving, according to rules inherent only to itself, in the direction of greater complexity and the ability to harness and direct greater and greater amounts of energy.
		For example, besides his support for cultural evolutionism, White's open support for socialism and his disdain for theism and organized religion made him a lightning rod for criticism and ridicule.
		That is, while he believed that Culture developed generally toward states of higher complexity and greater harnessing of energy, he acknowledged that individual cultures developed in response to a variety of particular factors.
	www.nndb.com /people/327/000099030 (1404 words)

	Homepage of Khaled Hakami
		The fact that Cultural Materialism, as developed by Leslie A. White and elaborated by Marvin Harris, is the strategy that I have found to be "the most effective in my attempt to understand the causes of differences and similarities among societies and cultures" does not mean that this paradigm has no shortcomings.
		To most people, the indicators of human culture are still the same as for the backward humanists and their notions of social evolution, more often than not, fail to go beyond the notions of the 18th century.
		Law of Cultural Development" says, that "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." (White 1959:56).
	homepage.univie.ac.at /khaled.hakami (7414 words)

	issue 6 template
		A cultural scholar of the humanities or arts might prefer a model where tigers originally had no patterns on their fur, but developed a pattern - that of stripes - because they lived in a context where stripes would be useful in their survival.
		This dichotomy in the way cultural evolution and biological evolution are theorised by their respective practitioners means that what is termed “cultural evolution” has actually little to do with the process of biological evolution as Darwin or subsequent neoDarwinians have described it.
		Just like viruses, cultural structures have a genealogy of their own, independent from the host, and must find new minds to colonise prior to the death of the mind or minds currently sustaining them.
	www.assemblage.group.shef.ac.uk /issue6/cvt_web.htm (2579 words)

	CULTURAL EVOLUTIONISM
		“Culture, or civilization, taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”
		The nobler tendency of advancing culture, and above all of scientific culture, is to honour the dead without groveling before them, to profit by the past without sacrificing the present to it.
		Now in dealing with hurtful superstitions, the proof that they are things which it is the tendency of savagery to produce, and of higher culture to destroy, is accepted as a fair controversial argument.
	faculty.fullerton.edu /bstarr/TYLOR.OUTLINE.htm (376 words)

	Iran Paper
		On the other hand, if we prioritize cultural identity we would be able to justify any mistreatment of human beings by declaring this to be part of the cultural specificity of the respective country.
		The contemporary advance in scientific disciplines such as cultural anthropology, intercultural communication and hermeneutics shows the limitations of naïve liberalism expounded in the spirit of Locke and the French Enlightenment, as well as of cultural evolutionism.
		Even though two or more cultural communities may pursue one and the same end by different means, each community’s progress at a particular point in time may be evaluated and compared with the other’s.
	www.policy.hu /makariev/IranPaper.html (5270 words)

	AE book review search
		In Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology: A Critical History, the person who is arguably, its current leading exponent presents a historical overview and exposition of that school from its foundational figures until the present.
		Carneiro’s treatment is unabashedly partisan—a strong defense of evolutionism and a criticism of those with contrary opinions.
		As the old automobile ad said, the best way to find out about a car is to “ask the man who owns one”; Carneiro clearly “owns” cultural evolutionism, in that the evolutionary paradigm is totally central to his thinking.
	www.aaanet.org /aes/bkreviews/result_print.cfm?bk_id=3050 (670 words)

	University of Chicago: Department of Anthropology: About the Department
		Although clearly an ideological affirmation of the power and values of Victorian culture, cultural evolutionism may be viewed also as a solution to problems posed by Darwin's doctrine of natural selection, the simultaneous realization of the great antiquity of man, and the consequent abandonment of biblical views of human history.
		As the leading American evolutionary anthropologist, Lewis Henry Morgan, described it in the early 1870s, human cultural evolution was on the one hand a regular sequence of subsistence modes and on the other a regular growth of a series of universal ideas: the idea of government, the idea of language, etc.
		Human cultures are conceived not simply as utilitarian responses to the pressures of environment, but in pluralistic relativistic terms as different worlds of thought in terms of which the external world is interpreted.
	anthropology.uchicago.edu /about/cases/australians.shtml (723 words)

	[No title]
		Shoshone Indians - common European supremacism - cultural evolutionism - One premise of cultural evolutionism is "the psychic unity of humankind"-the idea that people everywhere are genetically endowed with the same mental equipment, that there is a universal human nature.
		The psychic unity of humankind is the reason that around the world, on every continent, cultural evolution has moved in the same direction.
		Charles S. Peirce, founder of the philosophy known as pragmatism, believed that the "meaning" of a message is the behavior it induces, behavior appropriate to the information the message carries about the state of the environment.
	www.uboeschenstein.ch /boe/themes/wright.html (277 words)

	Globalisation - an introduction
		While it would be unwise to use techniques devised for measuring energy exchange in studies of people and their cultural production, some of the general methodological guidelines of systems theory, such as the need to ‘follow the loops’ of repetitive interaction and redundancy in information, should be useful in studies of transnationalism as well.
		Studies of identity politics or the politics of culture, for example, tend to concentrate on the externalising social manipulation and appropriation of cultural symbols and identity markers, rather than exploring the life-world meanings of them.
		The battle to escape the straitjacket of a reified concept of culture, along with its concomitant reified ideas of identity, seems to have been won for now, and besides, the processual notion of culture is not the exclusive property of globalisation studies (see e.g.
	folk.uio.no /geirthe/Globalisation.html (5755 words)

	Recent Theories (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-08-10)
		Such great cultural evolutionists as Lewis Henry Morgan, Herbert Spencer, and Edward B. Tylor were disparaged as "armchair speculators"; what was needed, it was asserted, was actual fieldwork in order to learn first-hand about the history and functioning of small-scale societies before they disappeared from the face of the earth forever.
		The emphasis on fieldwork produced mountains of new and better information about the cultures of the world; yet the urge to make systematic sense of all this new, chiefly descriptive material soon gave rise to a resurgence of cultural evolutionism.
		White's work (e.g., 1949) offered more ambitious generalizations about the course of human culture as a whole; he was impressed especially by the relationship between cultural evolution and how--and how much--energy was used by human societies.
	www2.truman.edu /~rgraber/cultev/intro2.html (429 words)

	Current Trends in Rock Art Theory (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-08-10)
		The New Archaeology in the 1960’s with its emphasis on technology and environment did embrace the view that ideas and society were part of cultural processes but the study of processes over time and evolutionary process needed the control of chronology.
		In Scotland and northern England where the symbolism of Neolithic and early bronze age rock art consists mostly of variations on the geometric themes of cup and rings and radial grooves, a primarily descriptive and almost culture- historical focus on recording, describing, and producing distribution maps was maintained (Morris 1977, 1979; Beckensall 1983).
		Morris was understandably concerned that there had been one hundred and fifty years of speculation about the meaning or function of this ambiguous rock art style and a plethora of suggestions had been made.
	www.geocities.com /Athens/Acropolis/5579/chapter2.html (4902 words)

	NONZERO
		To be sure, most archaeologists don't espouse as strong a version of cultural evolutionism as will be espoused in this book; they don't believe that the progression toward more complex society was essentially inevitable, from the Stone Age right up to globalization.
		For events of this century, and especially of the last few decades, suggest that the arrow of history identified by some social scientists of the nineteenth century is roughly on target.
		To say that history has a direction is not to endorse all the tenets of early cultural evolutionism or of nineteenth-century progressivist history.
	www.nonzero.org /chap1.htm (1431 words)

	Amazon.ca: Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology: A Critical History: Books (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-08-10)
		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.
	www.amazon.ca /exec/obidos/ASIN/0813337666 (254 words)

	NONZERO
		And if cultural evolutionism seems to imply that Europeans are biologically superior to native Americans, then it is a handy tool.
		One premise of cultural evolutionism is "the psychic unity of humankind"—the idea that people everywhere are genetically endowed with the same mental equipment, that there is a universal human nature.
		The ancestral cultures of all modern societies were hunter-gatherer cultures.
	www.nonzero.org /chap2.htm (757 words)

	ACT Home (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-08-10)
		Goals: To understand the rich cultural diversity of systems of marriage, kinship and social organization, with an emphasis on household organization as the foundation of culture and society.
		Goals: To understand the social division of labor on the basis of age and gender, the role of ethnicity and race, and the diverse ways groups are organized along lines of caste, class, ethnicity, and national identities—and the often serious conflicts that arise from these divisions.
		Goals: To understand the concept of religion and the sacred, the cultural diverse ways in which human communities “believe”, the role of religion in societies—as mechanism for coping with unexplainable events, for societal integration, for reducing conflict, for redistributing resources, and as a supporter of social movements (and its inverse).
	www.indiana.edu /~act/e105/syllabus.htm (926 words)

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