The concept of social evolution is one of
the most important in the history of the social sciences. In the nineteenth
century the disciplines of sociology and anthropology were greatly devoted to
studying the evolution of human societies from their earliest and simplest forms
to the present day. Social evolution is today only one among many issues
pursued by sociologists and anthropologists, but it remains an important
concern nonetheless.
Definition:
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"social evolution" refers to
social changes that exhibit some sort of directionality or linear sequence.
In addition, it is usually thought to involve transformations in the form or
type of society or one of its subunits (qualitative change), and not just changes
in degree or extent (quantitative change). Theories of social evolution are
thus theories that concentrate on identifying and explaining directional
sequences of qualitative social change. Many scholars have claimed that an
evolutionary theory assumes some sort of teleological unfolding of
potentialities that are latent in social life, but this is not so. Many
evolutionary theories including most of the recent ones have not rested on
this assumption. It has also frequently been assumed that evolutionary
theories postulate a rigid sequence of stages through which all societies
must move, and that evolutionary theories deny the possibility of regression,
or even of long-term steady states, in social life. But these, too, are
misconceptions. Most evolutionary theories propose flexible typologies that
give to history a certain open-ended quality, and most likewise see social
continuity and regression as important social phenomena that, like evolution,
cry out for explanation.
L.H.
Morgan:
Shorter:
Morgan developed a different conception
of social evolution, which was set forth in his Ancient
society (1877). He traced out three major "ethnical periods" in human
history. Savagery, Barbarism, and Civilization. These are essentially stages
of technological development in which humans moved from primitive
hunter gatherers to societies based on complex agriculture and writing.
Morgan also examined the evolution of government the family, and property. In
his analysis of governmental institutions, to which he devoted great
attention, he conceived of two main evolutionary plans of government: societas
consists of
relatively democratic and egalitarian societies that are organized around
kinship relations; civitas, by contrast, is characterized by property and
territory as the integrating principles of society. Social and economic
inequalities are widespread, and the state has come into existence.
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Morgan's first book, on the Iroquois, grew out of a secret
society he and his friends formed in Aurora called the Grand Order of the
Iroquois (GOI). The GOI patterned itself upon the Iroquois League, which was
a confederacy uniting the five nations of the Iroquois (Mohawk, Oneida,
Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca; a sixth, Tuscarora, was added later). As
constitutionalist for the GOI Morgan made researches into the Iroquois
League, including fieldwork assisted by Ely S. Parker, a Seneca. This became
the basis of his book. At bottom, he found that the Iroquois League rested
upon kinship relations in the form of matrilineal clans; that the eight clans
(Wolf, Bear, etc.) were found in each of the Iroquois nations; and that the
50 chiefships that made up the deliberating body of the League were owned by
particular matrilineal clan segments, so that they passed not from father to
son but from mother's brother to sister's son. Furthermore, the Iroquois
LONGHOUSE brought members of a clan segment together into a single household.
These matters of Iroquois sociopolitical structure, plus his study of
Iroquois material culture based on items he commissioned and collected for
the state Cabinet of Natural History, form the substance of League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois, which remains the best
single book on Iroquois culture. Morgan came to hypothesize that the Iroquois pattern of social
organization would be found among all Indian groups and would prove their
common origin. But when he tested his ideas out on the Ojibwa of Michigan's
Upper Peninsula he found that they had clans but were decidedly patrilineal,
not matrilineal. There was another feature of Iroquois kinship, however, that
he also found among the Ojibwa: Classificatory
Kinship. Thus among the Iroquois the father's brother was called
"father," and the mother's sister was called "mother."
Finding the same pattern in Ojibwa, which falls in a different language
family, Morgan concluded that he had come across a method of demonstrating
historical relationships among American Indian groups beyond the powers of
linguistics to do so.
Using this "new instrument for
ethnology" to give scientific proof of the unity and Asiatic origin of
the American Indians was the object of a big book on Kinship, the Systems of
consanguinity. In a series of field trips to the west during the period 1859-62
he amassed information making up a table of kinship terms for over 200
genealogical positions for 80 Indian groups. He extended the comparison to
other parts of the world by sending his printed questionnaire to
missionaries, scholars, and US consuls in many places. In the book he showed
that the "classificatory" pattern of kinship is not only common
among American Indians but is found among Tamils and other groups of India
and, more generally, of Asia and Oceania, and that it is different from the
"descriptive" pattern of Europe and the Middle East thus proving unity and Asiatic origin of
the Indians. Although Morgan's proof is no longer considered valid, he
identified the major types of kinship system and devised methods to describe
and analyze kinship systems that remain widely in use today.
The third book, Ancient society, is Morgan's summing up of the results of his
anthropological research and thought on the broadest canvas of time and
space. It is a work of high Victorian social Evolutionism that traces the
progress of the human family from savagery through barbarism to civilization,
in respect of technology, political organization, kinship, and ideas of
property. Like comparable works of his British contemporaries it is the story
of progress on a grand scale; as a class these works are responses to the
dramatic backward lengthening of human history with the discovery, at Brixham
Cave and other sites, of human remains with the bones of extinct animals
(Trautmann 1992). Society
had progressed from a hunting-and-gathering stage (which he denoted by the
term “savagery”) to a stage of settled agriculture (“barbarism”) and then on
to an urban society possessing a more advanced agriculture (“civilization”).
He illustrated these developmental stages with examples drawn from various
cultures.
His scheme is roughly as the following
Morgan's book was closely read by Karl
Marx, whose notes (Marx 1972) show that he was interested in the most
technical aspects of Morgan's kinship work; after Marx's death Friedrich
Engels wrote up the marxist reading of Morgan's social evolutionism (Engels
1902). Morgan's book was attractive to Marx because it held out the promise
of a scientific history and seemed to prove that bourgeois norms of property
and family had been preceded by the "communism in living"
exemplified by the Iroquois longhouse. And the proof had come from someone
who was not a socialist but a Presbyterian and a Republican, and so was
disinterested. In this way Morgan became authoritative in the anthropology of
countries with marxist regimes.
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E. B. Tylor:
Shorter:
Tylor (1871) is famous for his use of
"survivals" as a basis for demonstrating evolutionary sequences.
These are aspects of culture that have been carried into stages of social
evolution beyond the one in which they originated. For Tylor, they proved that
contemporary stages of culture had evolved from earlier ones. Tylor's
evolutionism, much more than Spencer's or Morgan's, concentrated on the
evolution of the mental and ideational aspects of social life, especially on
religion.
Longer:
E.
B. Tylor was responsible for developing a theory of social EVOLUTION that laid
the basis for treating anthropology as a science in the nineteenth century. The
theory, outlined in his two-volume Primitive culture (1871), laid out an idea
of progress in which human societies evolved and improved through time.
Tylor
was well exposed to the discovery of archaeological evidences all documented in
his travel book Anahuac which is
published in 1861. His primary interest in anthropology was in linguistics,
mythology, and folklore. He was influenced by discoveries in geology,
archaeology and palaeonotology as well as the dominant paradigm of Evolusionism. Meanwhile in 1865, Darwin’s
neighbor, anthropologist John Lubbock invented the word Neolithic. Accordingly the progress of humans from palaeolithic, Mesolithic
and Neolithic stanges of the stone age was established and the afterwards
copper, bronze and iron followed.
In
his two volume masterpiece Primitive Culture
(1871) Tylor traced the
development of religious thoughts from Animism
through polytheism to monotheism, from religious forms which depended non
anthropomorphism and concrete rituals to the more refined and abstracted religious
practice of Victorian Protestatns. Tylor used comparative method, producing
hundreds of examples from every part of the world to demonstrate the existence
of Psychic Unity of Mankind as it
manifested in each stage of religious and cultural evolution.
Tylor
argued that all human beings had similar intellectual potential. He rejected
the notion, common at the time, that contemporary primitive societies had
degenerated after a common Biblical origin. As a basis for demonstrating his
evolutionary sequences, Tylor employed what he called the "doctrine of
survivals." Survivals were obsolete or archaic aspects of culture
preserved from one stage of social evolution into another. Living cultural
fossils, they could provide clues to the past and proved that contemporary
stages of culture must have evolved from earlier ones.
Tylor's
evolutionism differed from that of Spencer and Morgan by concentrating more on
such humanist topics as the evolution of Religion, particularly Animism, and
less on material culture. He defined animism as the belief in spiritual beings
and argued it was the basis of all religions, developing an elaborate
evolutionary sequence that ran from a multiplicity of spirits to monotheism.