NEO-EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH

NEO-EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH

• Neoevolutionism is a social theory that rejects some of the dogmas of earlier theories of social evolutionism in an effort to explain the evolution of societies by drawing on Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
• In the 1930s, sociological neo-evolutionism first appeared. It had significant development in the years following World War II, and in the 1960s, both sociology and anthropology adopted it.
• Neo-evolutionary hypotheses are supported by data from disciplines including archaeology, paleontology, and history. Neo-evolutionism is said to be objective and only descriptive, excluding all allusions to a moral or cultural system of values, according to its proponents.
• While historical particularism regarded cultural evolutionism as unscientific in the early 20th century, it had sought to explain how culture evolves by articulating broad principles of its evolutionary process in the 19th century.
• Neoevolutionary theorists revived and improved evolutionary concepts, which led to their acceptance by modern anthropology.
• Neoevolutionism rejects many of the tenets of traditional social evolutionism, most notably the emphasis on social advancement that predominated earlier conceptions of sociological evolution.
• Whether or not they are empirical is the primary distinction between Neoevolutionism and Nineteenth-Century Evolutionism. The new evolutionism focused on quantifiable evidence to analyze the process of cultural evolution, unlike the evolutionism of the nineteenth century, which depended on value judgment and assumptions. Neoevolutionary ideas provided some sort of unifying framework for cross-cultural study. By the late 1960s, anthropologists were once again in full accord with evolutionary theory, largely due to their work.

THEORY OF NEOEVOLUTION: PARABOLIC CURVE

V. GORDON CHILDE

Trained archaeologist and philologist

Specialized in the study of European prehistory

Accepted socio economic theory of Marxism

In his book ‘Social Evolution’ he explained

Evolution of culture -- Three major events

1                    Invention of food production

2                    Urbanization

3                    Industrialization

Schemes of archaeological periods and cultural development

Archaeological period	Cultural development
Paleolithic	Savagery
Neolithic	Barbarism
Copper age	Higher Barbarism
Early bronze age	Civilization

Much influenced by E.B Taylor and Morgan

Julian Steward.

 

v  Neoevolutionist Julian Steward concentrated on how societies and the environment interact. Steward's interests eventually shifted to environmental impacts on societies and cultural development, despite the fact that he had studied Historical Particularism as a graduate student in anthropology. He suggested that similar characteristics in the evolution of various civilizations may be explained as parallel adaptations to comparable environmental conditions.

v  The Shoshone are a Native American tribe in the Great Basin of the Western United States, where Steward started his anthropological career. He developed a theory that described social systems in terms of their adaptation to technical and environmental conditions via his research of the Shoshone civilization in the hard, arid climate. Cultural ecology is Steward's evolutionary theory. The foundation of Julian Steward's evolutionary theory, cultural ecology, is the notion that an environment's resources shape a social structure. For a cultural-ecological research, Steward suggested three fundamental approaches.

v  First, the relationship between subsistence strategies and natural resources must be analyzed.

v  Second, the behavior patterns involved in a particular subsistence strategy must be analyzed. For example, certain game is best hunted by individuals while other game can be captured in communal hunts. These patterns of activities reveal that different social behaviors are involved in the utilization of different resources.

v  The third step is to determine how these behavior patterns affect other aspects of the society. This strategy showed that environment determines the forms of labor in a society, which affects the entire culture of the group.

The principal concern of cultural ecology is to determine whether cultural adaptations toward the natural environment initiate social transformations of evolutionary change.

Steward asserted that many civilizations can independently develop parallel traits even if he did not believe in a single universal path of cultural progress. He uncovered numerous shared characteristics of cultural development that are present in several civilizations living in comparable situations by applying cultural ecology. He avoided making generalizations about culture; instead, he dealt with similarities in a small number of cultures and provided detailed justifications for why they exist.

Because Steward's evolutionary theory is predicated on the notion that there are several patterns of development toward cultural complexity, the theory is also known as multilinear evolution. Steward did not presume that all cultures are in the same level of evolution, to put it another way. He examined the evolutionary connections between, for instance, Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Mesoamerica, and the Andes. Because all of these civilizations emerged in arid and semi-arid regions where irrigation and flood-water agriculture formed the economic backbone, they all had similarities in the evolution of form and function. He suggested that these commonalities result from comparable natural settings rather than common phases of cultural development or the spread of civilization between these places.

Leslie White (The United States, 1900-1975)

• The notion of cultural evolution was created by Leslie White, although most anthropologists at the time ignored it. When Morgan's model and evolutionary theory fascinated White in the 1920s, he began making attempts to revive the subject. White came to the conclusion that the theory, despite its flaws, could not be abandoned. His primary contribution was the scientific understanding he gave to the development of culture. He came up with an approach for assessing the level of cultural advancement.
• White first distinguished between the three components of culture—technological, sociological, and ideological—and asserted that the technological aspect is what drives cultural development. The material, mechanical, physical, and chemical instruments, as well as how humans employ these methods, make up the technical aspect. Following is White's justification for the significance of technology:

1. Technology is an endeavor to find solutions to survival issues.

2.  In the end, this effort entails gathering enough energy and switching it for human requirements.

3.  Societies that capture more energy and use it more efficiently have an advantage over other societies.

4.  These various communities are therefore more developed in an evolutionary sense.

Based on the logics above, White expressed the degree of cultural development by the formula: E x T = C. In this method, E is the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year, T shows the efficiency of the tools used for exploiting the energy, and C represents the degree of cultural development. Presenting this measurement, White asserted that developing effective control over energy is the prime cause of cultural evolution.

White believed that culture has general laws of its own. Based on these universal principles, culture evolves by itself.