Evolutionary, Adaptionist,
and Materials Theories
•Julian Steward’s Cultural Ecology and
Multilinear Evolution
•Marvin Harris’s Cultural Materialism
Birth of Modern Cultural
Anthropology
1930s
Evolution re-emerges in American Anthropology
Anti-Boasian (historical particularism)
Implicitly Marxist
20th Century Evolutionists
20th Century Evolutionists
Leslie White
Julian Steward
Marvin Harris
Eleanor Burke Locke
20th Century Evolution
20th Century Evolution
Scientific laws linking culture change to material
Reconnection to the work of Morgan and Tylor
Anthropology within
American Culture
The Red Scare
Because of anti-communist fervor in the US, 20th
Century evolutionists had to avoid explicit reference
to Marxism
Reprisals by federal government (McCarthyism)
and university presidents
“red-baiting” in anthropology journals
Anthropology during the
Red Scare
Morris Opler accused Leslie White of “Stalinistic
Anthropological Analysis”
Those practicing materialist research strategies were
marginalized
Used Tylor and Morgan as facades for Marx and
Engels
Red Scare lasted to 1970s in the academy but 1980
is Anthropology
20th Century Evolution
Main focus: “Concern with the causes of change”
Causal explanations are materialist, in contract to
historical or idealist
Changes in the modes of production set in motion
changes in cultural processes
Monolineal to Multilineal
Evolution
Morgan & Tylor: Evolutionary stages are smooth and
monolineal
Steward & Harris: Evolution is multilineal
Similar cultural patterns equate to similar
environmental situations
Cultures have evolved to their own, particular
environments
Cultural Materialism
Cultural materialism can explain cultural practices
“Broad evolutionary trends”
Explanations for cultural processes in terms of
material rather than in ideology.
Julian Steward
Cultural Ecology and Multilinear Evolution
Father of Human Biological Ecology (HBE)
Education:
UC Berkeley
Cornell 1925 (BA)
Berkeley 1929 (PhD): N. American Indian Groups
Julian Steward
Early Career
During Great Depression
University of Michigan, then U of Utah
UC Berkeley 1334-36 research on Shoshone
“fundamental pattern of Shoshonean society was
derived from the fact that ‘pursuits concerned
with the problems of daily existence dominated
their activities to and extraordinary degree and
limited and conditioned their [social] institutions’”
Julian Steward
Materialist
Influential in the 1950s and 1960s
Search for causal relationships
Considered the bridge between Boas’s historical
particularism and White’s cultural evolution
Impact on Anthropology
Development of area studies
Anthropology should concern itself with changes in
culture and development in ‘3rd World’
Large research projects with teams of investigators
Impact on Archaeology
Moved the field from cultural history to cultural
evolution
“New Archaeology” --relationship between society
and the environment
Society changes through time
Parallel Patterns
Early research on band society and drew parallels
between distant groups: Shoshone, Australian
Aborigines, the San in Kalahari, and the Semang of
Malaysia
Stewart was
Unconventional
Focused on understanding a single problem in
culture, not seeking to understand the entire culture
as a complete system (problem-orientated fieldwork)
Concerned with “adaptive relationships between
humans and their environments” and not with the
culture traits, styles, and norms
Emphasized parallels between cultures based on
adaptation instead of on historical diffusion/migration
3-Steps for CulturalEcological Investigation
1. Analyze relationships between
exploitative/productive technology and the
environment (material culture)
2. Analyze the behavior pattern involved in the
exploration of a specific area by means of a specific
technology
3. Analyze how the method used to exploit the
environment affects other aspects of culture.
Material Conditions
The structure and ideology of a group is influence by
“classes of material conditions”--of the environmental
situation AND economic arrangements
Multilinear Evolution
Core Tenants of Multilinear Evolution
Humans are adaptive
Human groups relate varyingly with the
environments
Multilinear Evolution
2 Key Concepts
parallel cultural forms and functions do occur in
independent/discrete cultures
These common forms/functions have identical causality
In order to find regularities cross-culturally:
1. Define and apply typography of social phenomenon
2. Specify the causal relationships and identify parallel causal
relationships through time
3. Propose and test hypothesis against case studies
Marvin Harris: Cultural
Materialism
1953 PhD from Columbia
Taught 1953 -1981
University of Florida from 19891 - 2000
Latin America (Brazil, Angola, Mozambique)
Ethnography on a mining town
Brazil cannot be classified as a rural “developing”
nation because it has many urban nuclei
Cultural Materialism
“Human Social Life is a response to the practical
problems of earthly existence”
Marx & Engels
Techno Determinist:
Infrastructure
1956: Town and Country in Brazil
Foundational concept of infrastructure
“technological, economic, demographic, and
environmental activities and conditions directly
related to sustaining health and well-being
through the social control of production and
reproduction”
Techno Determinist:
Infrastructure
Techno Determinist
Documented: Economic pursuits, public economy,
class, and race
“Urban Ethos”: Complex of interconnected values,
emphasizing a preference for living in town rather
than in the country
Seems idealistic, but this is a social arrangement
that is defined and reinforced by infrastructure
Anthropology within
American Culture
1958: Minorities in the New World (1958) coauthored
with Charles Wagley
1964: Patterns of Race in the Americas
Roots of racism in the Americas
Economic origins of racism
Latin America and USA
Racism as part of the infrastructure
Magnum Opus
1968: The Rise of Anthropological Theory
Critique of Western thinking about nature, culture,
and evolution
1. Anthropologic thought has been a failed
scientific effort of the Enlightenment that
reproduced ideology as absolute fact
2. Cultural materialism is more logical
Magnum Opus
1968: The Rise of Anthropological Theory
Critique of Western thinking about nature, culture,
and evolution
1. Anthropologic thought has been a failed
scientific effort of the Enlightenment that
reproduced ideology as absolute fact
2. Cultural materialism is more logical
Harris is sexy
Epistemology and anthropological thought:
1968 The Rise of Anthropological Theory
“from Plato to Montesquieu to Hegel--and
anthropological schools--from culture and
personality to structuralism to cultural evolution.”
1. Boas as atheoretical: historical particularism
misinterpreted cultures through ethnocentric values
of the Enlightenment
2. Cultural Materialism
Cultural Materialism
Cultural Materialism
Philosophical materialism: Supernatural does not
exist / irrelevant; decisions are made based on the
physical world, not on ideology
Dialectical materialism: unending ebb and flow of
material in shape and meaning
Cultural Materialism
Principle of techno-environmental and technoeconomic determinism as a research strategy
Requires analysis of the epistemological nature of the
acquisition of scientific knowledge: false binary of the
observed and the observer
Mental -v- behavioral events
Emic -v- Etic events
The 2 Distinctions
Mental: Thoughts and feelings
Behavioral: Physical Actions and the effects on the
environment --cumulative affects of all humans who
have ever lived
Emic: View from the participant’s perspective (the
native informant)
Etic: View from observer’s perspective (the observer)
Tripartite scheme of Etic
Behavior
1. Infrastructure: the interface between nature and
culture in human’s effort to overcome limitations at
the boundary between humans and the ecological
world
2. Structure: Social relations and arrangements
3. Superstructure: Symbolic importance
Infrastructure
The most opportunities for research and funding for
research occur when one investigates at the
infrastructure
It is a contested boundary
Cultural values are made apparent when one
observes how the process is negotiated
Innovation reverberates into the structure and
superstructure
Process to Understand
Cultural Patterns
1. Explain
phenomena in terms
of infrastructure
2. Explain how the
innovation at the
infrastructure affects
the shape of the
structure and
superstructure
Infrastructure is
determinant
Infrastructure innovation affects structural and
symbolic-ideational systems
Structural and symbolic-ideational innovation reduce
efficiency in the infrastructure (but less so)
Heart of Harris’s argument is the assumption that
anthropology is a science and should focus its efforts
on generating law-like generalizations about human
infrastructure (HBE??)