Nineteenth
Evolutionary
Theories
Their Context
The middle classes,
individualism, and
evolution
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As a result of the industrial revolution, a new industrial segment of
the middle class assumed a position of cultural, intellectual and moral
leadership in northern Europe and North America.
Came to view itself as a major force in world history.
Growing class divisions between the middle and working classes.
Social evolution came to signify general processes that had shaped
the whole of human history and for which the middle classes of
northern Europe were the current ‘leaders’.
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Also sometimes attributed to individual initiative, e.g. in the work of Herbert
Spencer. He argued that all life had evolved from ‘simple’ to ‘complex’
forms. Coined the term ‘survival of the fittest’, a doctrine which held that
both individuals and societies that could adapt better to changing
circumstances were bound to survive and prosper over those who could
not. By praising individualsm and free enterprise, Spencer popularized
evolutionary ideas amongst the middle classes.
The Influence of
Darwin
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1859: Origin of the Species
Provided an acceptable explanation of how natural selection
occurred, accounting for range of variation and changes that had
occurred.
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Main idea was that because animals tend to outstrip their food supply,
those individuals who survived were those best adapted to a particular
environment.
In his presentation of individual cases, Darwin portrayed biological
evolution as an essentially directionless process.
Majority of Victorian intellectuals ascribed a general, universal purpose to
evolution that came to replace religious purpose, turning evolution into a
god-surrogate.
Provided comfort that the upheavals and exploitation of the industrial
revolution were serving a higher purpose.
Also provided a moral imperative to colonialism.
Also marked a victory of mongeneism over polygeneism.
Lubbock:
Social=Biological
Evolution
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As a result of natural selection, human beings had become different from each other
biologically as well as culturally; these differences influenced the ability of groups to
utilize culture.
As a result of the differential operation of natural selection, women, the lower classes and
the criminally inclined were intellectually and morally inferior to middle-class males.
He selectively used ethnographic information to portray small-scale societies as poor,
wretched and depraved.
Wallace: questioned the links Lubbock made between biological and social evolution.
Small-scale societies were doomed to be perish as a result of the spread of ‘higher’
levels of civilization.
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This view obviously justified imperialism, absolving European settles of moral responsibility for the
rapid decline of aboriginal peoples in North America, Australia and the Pacific. ‘Natural selection’
had failed to equip such peoples with the ability to survive as civilization expanded.
Social darwinism more generally transferred responsibility for human inequality from the political
to the natural realm by attributing it to biological differences that could be altered only very slowly,
if at all.
Often led to some rather bizarre correlations, e.g. between anatomical descriptions of similarities
between European prostitutes and African, ‘Hottentot’ women. Infamous case of Sarah Bartmann.
Born in the late 18th century in
eastern Cape province of South
Africa. Became a servant for an
English family there.
Persuaded by her employer to go to
England, where she was exhibited
nude in a cage in Picadilly circus.
Later, she was ‘exhibited’ nude before a group of zoologists and
physiologists, and was painted in the nude.
Died in 1816 at 27 of pneumonia.
George Cuvier, a noted anatomist, dissected her remains, paying
special attention to her buttocks, ears and sexual organs.
Her genitalia and buttocks were described as much larger than those
of middle-class European women, and Cuvier hypothesized that they
were ‘typical’ of all African women.
European prostitutes, i.e. deviant women, often from poor families,
were also thought to be genetically ‘hypersexual’ and to possess the
same anatomical characteristics as Sarah Bartmann.
Her remains lay in the Musee de L’Homme in Paris until 1995, when
the post-Apartheid government protested to the French government.
Her remains were finally returned to South Africa in 2002.
sPAce, tIMe and
evolution
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Later on, evolutionary thought was criticized for the fact that it lacked fieldwork
and was highly speculative and ethnocentric.
However, what we have to deal with today is the thought processes at work in
creating schemes of unilineal evolution.
– With colonialism, Europeans and Euro-North Americans encountered societies
that were quite different than their own, in terms of kinship relations, family
forms, technologies. All these societies co-existed in space, but in relations of
power between them.
– Evolutionary thought ‘ordered’ this diversity through plotting differences in
space and translated them into differences in time.
– Provided a secular form of unilineal time that derived from Judeo-Christian
theories of time and added to it the concept of progress.
– Unilineal schemes of evolution also provided reassurance to the powerful
middle-classes of Europe and America that their territorial conquests were for a
larger, global purpose of human progress.
• Question for further thought: is there anything to be saved from
this approach, or should be consign it to a deserved dust-bin of
anthropological history?