Cultural Evolutionism

he main protagonists of the theory evolution are Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin. In general, the term evolution represents the process of gradual development. This is the process through which simple things, over the time, become complex. The English naturalist Charles Darwin, in his extraordinary classic titled ‘On the Origin of Species’ depicted the evolution of the biological organisms existing in the world. This work was published in 1859. This landmark work immensely influenced the then scientificcommunity of that time. Another scholar Herbert Spencer (also known as an evolutionist and his works had huge influence in the American and the British Sociology) applied this theory to his explanation of the development of the society. According to Munch (1994; 35): “He combined the philosophical utilitarianism of his British compatriots Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill with the organicism and evolutionism blossoming in his own days because of striking success of Darwin’s evolutionary theory in biology”. Though Spencer’s theory had a huge influence during his lifetime, just after his death, these theories faced huge criticisms from the scholars of the new age. But the idea of evolutionism dominated for many years. Other than Darwin and Spencer, scholars like Tylor, Morgan, Bastain, Rrazer and some others are also considered as evolutionists.

International Journal of Humanities and Social ScienceVol. 4,No. 10(1); August 2014157The protagonist, Darwin is mainly considered as a naturalist. Herbert Spencer is more renowned as a sociologist. The two evolutionists who were regarded as anthropologists are the British anthropologist E. B. Tylor and the American anthropologist L. H. Morgan. They are considered as the founders of the nineteenth century evolutionism. E. B. Tylor’s famous contribution titled ‘Primitive Culture’ was published in 1871. He got influenced by the revolutionary philosophical development of the nineteenth century. He was influenced by the works of Charles Darwin also. If we concentrate on the world history of that point of time, we shall find out that in that particularera, English people were mainly concentrating on expanding their political territory through massive colonialism. As a result, many people like the travelers, explorers, businessmen, missionaries and several officials of the Government were visiting the different parts of the world. Tylor took the help of these people in preparing his thoughts and writings. Tylor (1903; 1) gave an innovative all-embracing definition of culture: “Culture, or civilization, taken in its wide 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 the society”.Tylor proposed the idea of unilineal evolution. According to him, a society’s evolution is unidirectional and it passes through three different stages one after another: the savagery, the barbarism and the civilization. According to Scupin and DeCorse (2012; 281):“.....Tylor assumed that hunter gatherers and other non-Western societies were living at a lower level of existence than the ‘civilized’ societies in Europe”. Tylor also proposed an evolutionary theory of the origin of religion. He defined religion as the belief in spiritual beings (Langness, 1974; 23). Langness (1974) commented that Tylor has shown the different stages of evolution of religion. From a state of non-religious condition, it moves towards the belief in souls and phantoms. Then people started to believe in ghosts-souls. After that they set their beliefs on the spirits. Then they started to believe in individual’s guardian spirits and species deities. After that the idea of polytheism came. The last stage in the evolution of religion, according to Tylor, is the belief in the supreme deity (Langness, 1974; 27). The other important proponent of evolutionism is Lewis Henry Morgan. His most prominent work titled ‘Ancient Society’ was published in the year of 1877. Langness (1974; 17) mentioned that: “Morgan was interested in the evolution of a number of specific things. He listed them asfollows: Subsistence, Government, Language, the Family, Religion, House Life and Architecture, and Property”. For example, in terms of the evolution of the family, by examining the Hawaiian society, Morgan anticipated that human beings of the past used to live in the ‘primitive hoards’ where they used to practice unregulated sexual behavior and as a result, peoplecould not identify their own fathers (Scupin and DeCorse, 2012; 282). After that there came brother-sister marriage and group marriage in a chronological order. Then there came the matriarchal society and the last form of family is the patriarchal one where men took the charge of economy and politics (Scupin and DeCorse, 2012). Morgan also talked about the development of arts of subsistence. According to him, this development went through five successive stages. In a chronological order, they are (Langness, 1974): Natural subsistence (fruit), Fish subsistence, Farinaceous subsistence (cultivation), Meat and milk subsistence and the last one is unlimited subsistence (through field agriculture). On the evolution of the social institutions, Morgan speculated that at first there was kinship based societies and then there came the territorial or politically based societies (Langness, 1974). There is no doubt that in its time, evolutionism got huge appreciation as a school of thought and as a result, we get a good number of thinkers following this school. But later, with the entry of new thinkers in the field of anthropology, this school faced huge criticisms. Firstly, it was established by the critics that the evolutionists like Spencer, Tylor and Morgan didnot go for extensive systematic fieldwork rather their works are mostly the results of secondary data and philosophical speculations. Scupin and DeCorse (2012; 283) commented that their evidence is ‘second hand, based on accounts of biased Europeans’. These scholars were mainly considered as the ‘armchair anthropologists’. Secondly, evolutionism was criticized for its ethnocentric view. It considers the primitive societies as less developed, less intelligent and less sophisticated in comparison to the civilized Europeans.

In fact, the origin of ‘race theory’1in anthropology can be traced back to this evolutionism school. Race theorists were influenced by evolutionism (Ember, Ember and Peregrine, 2011; 18). Thirdly, this unilineal evolution was also criticized for its simplistic nature. It talks about a one directional single-lined development. All the societies in the world may not follow this unilineal developmental pattern. This is an oversimplification of the realities. Even after these criticisms, evolutionists can be credited for introducing systematic thinking in the field of anthropology and these thinking helped the next generation anthropologists to get advanced in their endeavors.

http://www.ijhssnet.com/journals/Vol_4_No_10_1_August_2014/19.pdf