Sustainability can be defined as the practice of maintaining
world processes of productivity indefinitely—natural or human-made—by replacing
resources used with resources of equal or greater value without degrading or
endangering natural biotic systems. Sustainable development ties together
concern for the carrying capacity of natural systems with the social,
political, and economic challenges faced by humanity (Kahle and Gurel-Atay
2014). In 1980 the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)
published a world conservation strategy that included one of the first
references to sustainable development as a global priority and introduced the
term "sustainable development" (Sachs 2015). Two years later, the
United Nations World Charter for Nature raised five principles of conservation
by which human conduct affecting nature is to be guided and judged. In 1987 the
United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development released the
report Our Common Future, commonly called the Brundtland Report. The report
included what is now one of the most widely recognised definitions of
sustainable development.
Alternatively Sustainable development is defined as a
development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the
ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it
two key concepts:
·The concept of 'needs', in particular, the
essential needs of the world's poor, to which overriding priority should be
given; and
·The idea of limitations imposed by the state of
technology and social organization on the environment's ability to meet present
and future needs.
[World Commission on Environment and Development, Our
Common Future (1987)]
Sustainable development can be achieved if we follow the
following points,
·Restricting human being from over-exploitation
of the environmental resources both at individual level and as a corporate.
·Technological development should be input
effective and not input utilizing. Therefore, ensuring technology that minimises
the use of finite resources and maximises the output.
·The rate of consumption should not surpass the
rate of salvation.
·For renewable resources, the rate of consumption
should not surpass the rate of production of renewable substitutes.
·Minimisation of all kinds of pollutants and
safer disposal of waste.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also known as the
Global Goals, were adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015 as a
universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all
people enjoy peace and prosperity by 2030.
The SDGs are:
1.Complete eradication of poverty
2.No hunger
3.Good health and well-being
4.Quality education and life-long learning
opportunity for all
5.Achieve gender equality and empower all women
and girl
6.Ensure availability and sustainable management
of water for all
7.Ensure the availability of reliable, affordable,
sustainable and modern energy for all.
8.Promote sustained inclusive and sustainable
economic growth. Full and productive and descent work for all.
9.Build resilient infrastructure, promote
inclusive and sustainable industrialisation and foster innovation
10.Reduce inequality within and among countries
11.Make cities and human settlement inclusive,
safe, resilient and sustainable for all
12.Ensure sustainable production and consumption
pattern
13.Take urgent action to combat climate change and its
impact
14.Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas, and
marine resources for sustainable development
15.Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of
terrestrial eco-systems, sustainably mange forest, combat desertification, halt
reverse land degradation and halt bio-diversity loss.
16.Promote inclusive and peaceful societies for sustainable
development, provide access to justice for all, and build effective,
accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.
17.Strengthen the means of implementation and
revitalise the global partnership for sustainable development.
The 17 SDGs are integrated—that is, they recognize that
action in one area will affect outcomes in others, and that development must
balance social, economic and environmental sustainability.
Through the pledge to Leave No One Behind, countries have
committed to fast-track progress for those furthest behind first. That is why
the SDGs are designed to bring the world to several life-changing ‘zeros’,
including zero poverty, hunger, AIDS and discrimination against women and
girls.
Everyone is needed to reach these ambitious targets. The
creativity, knowhow, technology and financial resources from all of society is
necessary to achieve the SDGs in every context.
Sustainable development is based on environmental theories
of economic development. Based on them the policies and programmes of the
development of a state is often decided. These theories range from welfare
statemodels of economic activity to
radical approach that suggests to overthrow the capitalist system and live life
according to ecological principles. There are several trends, here we will
discuss broadly three major categories of development approach that address the
issues of sustainability. These are:
Proponents of the free market believe that trade is not the
cause of environmental degradation and that capitalism encourages the rational
use of resources under conditions of free market competition and the
specialisation of production through comparative advantage (Ricardo 1973). For
free-marketers, economic globalisation is an opportunity to rationalise the use
of resources. Restrictions on trade would merely lead to economic decline,
which would in turn devastate environment and human societies. Because,
degradation of economic growth would mean that people will less care about
environment and will try to meet their immediate need without thinking about
the environmental sustainability. As scholars like Gouldson and Murphy (1997)
show, free-market principle suggest that trade and environment conservation is
in a win-win situation, as profit generated can be channelized into environmental
conservation.
They believe in converting common properties like sea to be
converted into the concept of private properties so that over-exploitation can
be stopped.
Reformist approach provides incentives or penalties for
consumers and producers to move towards environmentally friendly economic
behaviour. This may be in the form of financial instruments such as subsidies
(reward) or taxation (punishment). Interventionist approaches attempt to achieve
environmentally friendly development by making legislation changes. Taxes and
subsidies are used to alter the economic behaviour and development approaches by
manipulating markets. It is a strict form of control involving legal penalties
for ‘dirty’ producers.
Radical approaches like ‘deep green’, eco-centric’ and ‘deep
ecology’ suggest that western consumption patterns are environmentally
unsustainable and undesirable. Driven by capitalism’s imperative for
continuously expanding demand rather than any relation to meeting human needs, ‘consumptive
growth doesn’t make people happier […] people would actually be better off,
Greens argue, if they consumed less and concentrated more on genuine
well-being: on personal development, on relationships with others and social
belonging’ (Jacobs 1997: 50).
Development has been seen as a mechanism of social
change which is a) associated with postwar reconstruction ofunderdeveloped areas of the world, b) a
mechanism ofdomination of south by
north, i.e. neo colonialism, and c) something that has a close link with
capitalism’s need for new markets. Famous anthropologist Arturo Escobar (1991)
attacked anthropologists working in development for failing to react to changes
taking place within anthropology, for questionable methodological practices and
–most damningly – for reproducing discourses of modernisation and development.
In a later work Escobar (1995) suggests that development makes anthropological
encounters with third world others possible – just as colonialism once did. Rather
than challenging it, anthropologists overlook the ways in which development
operates as an arena of cultural contestation and identity construction.
Escobar has been one of the major effects in
the development linked discourses of anthropology which then divided into two
major approaches. One approach has been development anthropology, and
the other became anthropology of development.
Development
anthropology: Anthropologists working in development field
Development
anthropology refers to the role played by the anthropologists in the field of executing
development projects. The role anthropologists play in facilitating economic
growth, designing and implementation of specific policies and plans whether at
the level of the state, donor agencies or indigenous social movements. These
can have either positive or negative or both on the people who experience them.
Development is a series of events and actions, as well as a particular disxourse
or ideological construct.
Anthropologists
are now employed in growing numbers by development agencies, organisations and
private consultancy firms. A discussion of applied anthropology does not
therefore simply raise questions of what a professional anthropologist might
do. The type of work which professional anthropologists are asked to undertake
can vary considerably. They may include applied research to produce supporting
data for planned interventions; contributions to the appraisal and evaluation
planning of development projects; or attempting to build local participation
into the project. Assignments can vary from a short consultancy job lasting a
few weeks, to a placement on a project for several years as one of the
full-time staff.
Some of the
important positions that anthropologists are occupying in development agencies
are:
1.Social Development Advisors (SDA).
2.Consultants
3.Research officers
4.Counsellors
5.Advocacy role
Apart from
the strict routine duties of anthropologists in development agencies, they are
increasingly becoming a mediator between the developers and those to be
‘developed.’ Anthropologists are trained sceptics: they tend to argue that
situations and ideas are usually more complicated than is immediately apparent;
they believe that no fact or detail is too trivial to be considered; they may
prefer quality to quantity; they are rarely ready to offer conclusions or
advice in terms of straightforward course of action.
Anthropologists
are well equipped to monitor the process of project implementation, which in
effect is the task of monitoring social change. To do this, a combination of
national and expatriate anthropologists, with boith men and women involved,
will be able to draw on their different skills and perspectives in order to
present different, though mutually reinforcing, analyses of events.
Anthropologists
are involved in project design, appraisal and evaluation by national and
international NGOs and aid agencies. Since the second world war the notion of
the project has become central to mainstream development activity, whether centred
on large scale infrastructural work such as building of a dam or bridge or
softer areas such as health or education provision. Projects tend to pass
through a series of staged activities, often known as the project cycle.
By the 1960s
and 1970s, the World Bank and United Nations were promoting what they termed
“Integrated Rural Development”, in which conventional planning methods were
cast aside in favour of a measure of community participation in setting needs
and a more comprehensive approach to tackling problems on a number of sectoral
fronts simultaneously.
In
consequence, a number of anthropologists were employed in carrying out impact
studies among the local community to whether or not prohect’s objectives have
been met.
The
appearance of what has been termed ‘advocacy anthropology’ by its practitioners
(Miller 1995) has involved itself with the efforts of indigenous people to gain
more control over their lives (Escober 1992).
Anthropologists have long made practical contributions to
planned change and policy. However, many have also studied development as a
field of academic enquiry in itself. These studies have challenged the dominant
development discourses, its key assumptions, representations, and paved for
alternative ways for development. This is known as the anthropology of
development. It sees development linked policies as cultural constructs and
aims to explore their impact both theoretically and empirically. Major issues
which call for an anthropology of development include:
The social and cultural effects of economic change
The social and cultural effects of development projects
Although the study of economic
change has not always been academically fashionable, individual anthropologists
have long been grappling with it. There are several works anthropological in
nature which focus on the social and cultural effects of economic change.
There are several anthropological
studies in Africa focusing on the influence of urbanism over rural life. Wilson
(1941, 1942) argues that while Central African society was normally in a state
of equilibrium, destabilising changes in African society was brought by
increasing influence of capitalist production within the region, and growing
rural to urban migration. Richards (1939), Schapera (1947) focus on many
villages which lost their male labour force, most migrants could not sent
enough resource for their families, and there was a large scale ‘cultural
decay.’ Murray (1981) focus on oscillating migration resulting in marital
disharmony, in other words the capital accumulated at the urban core was at the
expense of rural periphery.
Clifford Geertz (1963a) focus on
the Indonesian agriculture change in Agriculture
Involution. With a historical reference of Indonesian agriculture, Geertz
shows that colonial policies encouraged the development of a partial cash
economy in which peasant farmers were forced to pay taxes to support plantation
production for export. In consequence, majority of farmers could not produce
surplus.
Epstein (1962) in Economic Development and Social Change in
South India and in 1973 South India:
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow discusses the effects of the introduction of
new irrigation techniques and the growing importance of cash cropping. In the
village of Wangala, where farmers were increasingly producing for and profiting
from local sugar refinery, the changes had not led to major social
readjustment. The village continued to have limited link to outside economy and
social structure remained unaltered. In contrast in the second village Dalena,
which had remained a dry land enclave in the midst of an irrigated belt, male
farmers were encouraged to move away from the relatively unprofitable
agricultural pursuits and participate in other ways in the burgeoning economy
which surrounded them. Some became traders, or worked in white-collar jobs in
the local town. These multiple economic changes led to the breakdown of the
hereditary political, social and ritual obligations, the changing status of
local caste groups and the rise of new forms of hierarchy.
With increasing integration among
the worlds, researchers increasing focus on relationship of local communities
and cultures to the global political economy. This can be linked to the growing
dominance during the 1970s of theories of dependency, and especially to
Wallerstein’s World Systems Theory (Wallerstein, 1974), as well as the use of
Marxism in the 1970s and 1980s by some anthropologists, for example Bloch,
1983. The emphasis is now on the ways in which societies on the periphery had
long been integrated into capitalism, and on the cultural expressions of
economic and political dependency and/or resistance.
A classic attempt to fuse
neo-Marxist political economy with anthropological perspectives is Eric Wolf’s
(1982) Europe and people without history.
This is an ambitious attempt to place the history of the world’s peoples
within the context of global capitalism, showing how the history of capitalism
has tied even the most apparently remote areas and social groups into the
system.
Drawing more directly from
Neo-Marxist theories of dependency, an important study by anthropologist
working in Latin America is by Michael Taussig’s (1980) The devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. This is an
account of the cultural as well as economic integration of Columbian peasants
and of Bolivian tin miners in the money economy and proletarian wage labour.
The Columbian peasants who seasonally sell their labour to plantations present
the plantation economy and profits made from it as tied to the capitalist system
and thus to the devil. Plantations are conceptualised as quite separate from
the peasants’ own land; in the former, profit making requires deals to be made
with the devil, whereas in the latter it does not. In the Bolivian tin mines,
workers worship Tio (the devil), who Taussig argues is a spiritual embodiment
of capitalism and a way of mediating pre-capitalist beliefs with the
introduction of wage labour and industrialisation.
During 1970s a new generation of feminist minded
anthropologists like Sachs (1975), Leacock (1972) started working on what
became known as GAD (Gender and Development). Some feminist anthropologists
focus on the restudy of the subjects of ethnographic classics from a feminist
perspective. The feminisation of subsistence has been one of the major
arguments of these anthropologists. Moore (1988) for example showed that:
Since women have reproductive as well are productive
duties they are less free to produce cash crops. Thus while men could
experiment with new technologies and production for exchange, women must
first and foremost produce the subsistence foods on which their household
depend.
Male labour migration leaves women behind to carry the
burden of supporting the subsistence sector.
One of the most common criticisms
made by anthropologists of development planning is that it is done in a
‘top-down’ manner. Planning is done at a distant office, and hence, often the
plan does not match the local requirements. Robert Chamber’s (1983) Rural Development: Putting the Last First is
a seminal statement of this position and draws heavily upon the insights of
anthropology. Chambers attacks the biased preconceptions of development
planners, most of whom have only a very shaky understanding of rural life in
so-called developing societies (Chambers, 1983, 1993). The only solution as
Chambers argues is to ‘put the poor first’ and, most importantly, enable them
to participate in projects of their own design and appraisal.
Tony Barnett’s (1977) The Gezira Scheme: An Illusion of
Development is a classic critique of top-down development. Gezira scheme
was a massive project of developing irrigation facility for cotton production
in Sudan. Despite of apparent well being of Sudanese people the project failed,
stagnated, and became dependent. Barnett argues that the workers were not allowed
to have more land or sell it. The Gezira board was paternalistic and
authoritarian, based on British effort to control ‘black’ labourers. This meant
that cultivators had few incentives to be innovative, and the entire cotton
product was dependent on foreign markets.
Barbara Rogers (1980) in The Domestication of Women argues that
Western development planners make a range of Western and thus patriarchal,
assumptions about gender relations in developing countries. It is often
assumed, for example that farmers are male, that women do not do heavy
productive work and that nuclear families are the norm. Through andocentric and
biased research such as the use of national accounting procedures and surveys
which assume that men are household heads, women become invisible. Women are
thus systematically discriminated against, not least because there is
discrimination within the development agencies themselves. The answer Rogers
argues, is not simply more projects for women, for these often produce a ‘new
segregation’ in which women are simply trained in domestic science or given
sewing machines for income generation. Instead, gender awareness must be build
into planning procedures, a process which will necessarily involve reform of
the development institutions involved.
Day (1981) in a work on
irrigation projects in the Gambia shows that by assuming that men controlled
land, labour and income, the projects failed to increase national rice
production and increased women’s dependency on men. Within the farming system
of Mandinka, crop production is traditionally dominated by collective
production for household consumption (maruo),
but also involves separate cultivation by men and women on land they are
allocated by the household head in return for their maruo labour (Kamanyango).
Crops from this land are the property of the male or female cultivators.
However, under rice irrigation projects sponsored by Taiwan (1966 – 74), Taiwan
(1973 – 76), and China (1975 – 79), only men were given Kamanyango rights to irrigated land. In other irrigated plots
designated as maruo, men increasingly
used women’s skilled collective labour, but were able to pay them low wages
because of the lack of other income generating opportunities available to
women. Women’s traditional rights were thus systematically undermined by the
projects, a process which had started during the colonial period, when once
more the reciprocal rights and duties of farming were undermined by policies
which encouraged male farmers to produce cash crops and failed to recognise the
central role of female producers.
Closely related to
anthropological critiques of top-down planning is the criticism that planners
fail to acknowledge adequately the importance, and potential of local knowledge.
Instead, projects often involve the assumption that western or urban knowledge
is superior to the knowledge of the people to be developed. They are regarded
as ignorant, although the anthropologists have repeatedly shown, they have
their own areas of appropriate expertise. Development projects often fail
because of the ignorance of planners rather than the ignorance of the
beneficiaries. This might inolve a range of factors, such as local ecological
conditions, the availability of particular resources, physical and climatic
conditions and so on. Mamdani’s classic analysis of the failure of the Khanna
study, an attempt to introduce birth control to the Indian village of Manupur,
is a fascinating account of developmental to-downism and ignorance (Mamdani,
1972). Because of cultural and economic value of having as many children as
possible, Mamdani argues that population programmes are unlikely to have much
success in rural India. The programme planners in the Khanna study, however,
assumed that villagers’ rejection of contraception was due to ‘ignorance’, thus
completely ignoring the social and economic realities of the village. Similarly
Abhijit V Banerjee and Easther Duflo (2011) report the rural Indian villagers’
sense of insecurity to be one of the reasons for bigger families. They argue
the children in rural India is seen as investment for old age pension, i.e. the
more you have children the more the chance that you will be taken care of in
old age. Once again, anthropological methods and questions, rather than
bureaucratic planning, reveal the true constraints on successful development.
Considering development as a
discourse much in the manner Foucault argues in his Order of things (1970) that fields of knowledge, their
classification and hierarchic presentation in different periods is socially,
historically and politically constructed and are therefore neither objective
nor neutral. Considering development as discourse raises important questions
about the nature of developmental knowledge and its interface with other
representations of reality. Anthropology can have an important role here;
first, in demonstrating that there are many other ways of knowing, and second,
in showing what happens when different knowledges meet. In another contribution
to the growing postmodern anthropology of development, for example, the
relationship between scientific and local knowledge within development practice
is explored.
Different words like French
Tribu, English Tribe and Latin Tribus were used to designate social divisions
among the Roman population. Similarly the Greek word Phule also represented Indo-European
Social Organisations. The word "tribe" has a long and ignoble history
and remains one of the most variably used terms within and outside of
anthropology (Helm 1968). Anthropologists often use it as a catch-all
substitute for "primitive," avoiding the invidious comparison of
"nonstate." But most who use the term analytically narrow it to mean
some form of political unit, as distinct from "ethnie" or
"nation," which suggest a cultural identity.
The foundation structure of the
tribe is Kinship. The smaller Kinship unites were known as Genos in Greek and
Gens in Latin. Scottish people used to call them Clan. One can only be a member
of a clan if s/he is connected through kinship relationships. A person is a
member of a tribe by birth. Each of these clans had a separate name and a tribe
constituted a number of clans. Since, tribal system is pre-state condition,
there is no centralised administration among the tribal societies. The social
order is maintained by the kinship organisations. Kin rules framed primarily on
the basis of systems of affinity and consanguinity were used to determine the right
over a geographical location or selection of the headman.
Tribe as a Pre-political and
pre-contractual society and in the evolutionary schema
It was L.H. Morgan’s Ancient
Society (1861) and Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human
Family (1871) that made investigation on Tribal society a systematic
enterprise. Morgan emphasised that even though there is a general absence of
state system, yet, tribes are quite organised and disciplined society. He noted
that there is a general absence of hierarchical division between Clans and
Lineages. Emile Durkheim has termed such solidarity as between clans as
Mechanical solidarity.
About a century later than what
was written by Morgan, Marhshal Sahalins and Elman Service have tried to
classify pre-industrial societies. Service (1962) followed a long tradition in
positing tribe as a stage in political evolution falling between more
independent BANDS and more centralized and hierarchical CHIEFDOMS. Sahlins
(1968b) also saw tribes as evolutionary predecessors of states but was more
concerned with mechanisms of integration than boundaries. Here tribes were seen
as unified and bounded by kinship or other ties and constituted the broadest
level of cooperation in a segmented hierarchy of functions.
They have classified societies
according to the relative socio-political complexity into four major
categories. These are a) Band, b) tribe, c) chiefdom, and d) state.
Band is the simplest form
of social organisation. Its simple amalgamation of a number of families. The
population of a band is quite small, usually range between 10 to 50. The
concept of a single leader or headman is absent. The leadership is rather
situational and it is never transmitted from one generation to the next. A band
collects food from a designated locale. Since, band societies are always
foragers, they are most often than not seen as roaming from one to place to
another to collect their resources. Because of such movement, there is a
general lack of the concept of private property system among the bands. Every
member of a band has the equal usufructuary rights over every resources of the
region where they inhabit. The kinship ties are usually patriarchal, but there
is a relative prevalence of gender equality. In India we have Onge, Jaroa,
Cholanakan, Birhar as bands. Africa has !Kung (bushmen), Mubti Pygmy. The
patriarchal nature of band suggests that the contention that early men had
matriarchy may not be true.
Tribe is relatively more
complex. Tribe system is also pre-state and pre-inustrial entity. Tribes have
team-leaders of headmen but they do not have institutional mechanism to maintain
power relations within the society. Their economy is based on animal husbandry
or farming. The primary difference between band and tribe lie in the existence
of social segments. The presence of social segments and their integration is
what characterises a tribe. It should be remembered that state system has
developed about 4000 years ago, but human society survived without them for
thousands of years. Even today, there are tribal and band societies which is
surviving alongside the state. Therefore, it is important to understand what
inner system has enabled these people to keep their social system intact for so
many years. E.E. Evans-Pritchard has tried to explain this puzzle by his study
of Nuer in Sudan, Africa. Prichard shows that Nuer are divided into different
lineages. These lineages do not have hierarchy in terms of economy, politics,
ideology or economy. They do not have much of interdependence, yet, together
they form the tribe Nuer. Using classical Participant Observation method,
following Malinowskian method Evans-Pritchard argued that there are conflicts
between these lineages but then by some unwritten agreement and rules the
conflicts are resolved. Sahalins in 1960s have argued that Nuers could beat
Dinkas because of their effective lineage systems.
In india the Nagas, in Africa the
Zulus and Asantis represents typical tribal system.
Chiefdom system is formed
if one of the lineages among a tribe claims supremacy. For a variety of reasons
ranging from natural to technological, it is seen that often among many
lineages one becomes more powerful. They can achieve it by acquiring a
relatively higher social prestige and position or by winning a war with others.
In this way a new family system can be developed. After a few generations this family/lineage
can become the king’s family. This is a system of state formation which is
evidenced in Peru the Inca family. This has been studied by Robert Leonard
Carneiro. Similarly Romila Thapar has studied the formation of state in
Ganga-Yamuna valley and argued along this line.
By contrast, Fried (1967, 1975)
disputed the evolutionary existence of such bounded groups, arguing instead
that tribes arose from interactions with existing states. Despite their
differences, all three agreed that boundedness of tribes was a result of
external conflict, or WAR.
Youtube class lectures on Anthropological notions of Tribe:
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.
"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.
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.
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 Eastthus 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
Period
Sub-period
Characteristics
Savagery: Natural Subsistence,
at least 60,000 years.
Lower
First distinction of man from the other animals. Fruits
and Roots, tropical or subtropical habitats, at least partial tree-dwelling, gesture
language, intelligence, Consanguine Family.
Middle
Fish Subsistence, Use of Fire, spread of man worldwide along
shorelines, monosyllabic language, Punaluan Family.
Upper
Weapons: bow and arrow, club, spear; addition of game to
diet, cannibalism, syllabical language, Syndyasmian Family,
organization into gentes, phratries and tribes, worship of the elements.
Horticulture: maize, bean, squash, tobacco; art of pottery,
tribal confederacy, finger weaving, blow-gun, village stockade,
tribal games, element worship, Great Spirit, formation of Aryan
and Semitic families.
Middle
Domestication of animals among the Semitic and Aryan families:
goat, sheep, horse, ass, cow, dog; milk, making bronze,
irrigation, great joint tenement houses in the nature of
fortresses.
Upper
Cultivation of cereals and plants by the Aryans, smelting iron
ore, poetry, mythology, walled cities, wheeled vehicles, metallic armor
and weapons (bronze and iron), the forge, potter's wheel, grain mill, loom
weaving, forging, monogamian family, individual
property, municipal life, popular assembly.
Civilization: Field Agriculture,
5000 years.
Ancient
Plow with an iron point, iron implements, animal power, unlimited
subsistence, phonetic alphabet, writing, Arabic numerals,
the military art, the city, commerce, coinage, the state, founded
upon territory and upon property, the bridge, arch, crane, water-wheel,
sewer.
Mediaeval
Gothic architecture, feudal aristocracy with hereditary
titles of rank, hierarchy under the headship of a pope.
Modern
Telegraph, coal gas, spinning-jenny, power loom, steam
engine, telescope, printing, canal lock, compass, gunpowder, photography,
modern science, religious freedom, public schools, representative
democracy, classes, different types of law.
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.
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.
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.