Leslie White

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Leslie Alvin White (born January 19, 1900 in Salida , Colorado , † March 31, 1975 in Lone Pine , California ) was an American anthropologist . He was best known for his theories of cultural evolution, social evolutionism, and especially neoevolutionism, as well as his role in establishing the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan .

biography

White was the son of a peripatetic civil engineer . He lived first in Kansas and then in Louisiana . He enlisted for military service in World War I , but only saw the end by spending a year in the US Navy before enrolling at Louisiana State University in 1919 .

In 1921 he moved to Columbia University , where he studied psychology and received his BA in 1923 and his MA in 1924 . Although he was at the same university as Franz Boas and also took courses in anthropology at the New School of Social Research, he did not meet the founder of American anthropology in class. Already at this point in his career his interests were diverse and he attended courses in various other disciplines and institutions, including philosophy at UCLA and clinical psychiatry , before finally discovering anthropology through Alexander Goldenweiser's courses at the New School for Social Research. In 1925 he began studying for the Ph.D. in Sociology and Anthropology from the University of Chicago (the two subjects were combined in the Chicago Institute) and had the opportunity to spend a few weeks in Wisconsin with the Menominee and Winnebago . After proposing his first thesis - a liberal thesis that gave a glimpse into his later work - he conducted fieldwork among the Acoma in New Mexico . With the Ph.D. in hand, White began in 1927 at the University at Buffalo , reflecting on the anti- evolutionary views that the Franz Boas training had given him. In 1930 he moved to Ann Arbor , where he spent the remainder of his playing career.

The three years in Buffalo marked a turning point in White's biography. During this time he developed an anthropological, political and ethical view of the world, which he actively represented until his death. The students' response to the anti-evolutionary and anti- racist doctrines presented by White helped him formulate his own views on the evolution of human social life . In 1929 he visited the Soviet Union and on his return he joined the Socialist Labor Party, for whose newspaper he wrote articles under the pseudonym John Steele .

1930 White came to the University of Michigan to where Julian Steward to replace. Although the university housed a museum that had much to do with anthropological affairs throughout its long history, White was the only professor in the anthropological department. In 1932 he ran a field school in the southwest, in which Fred Eggan and Mischa Titiev, among others, participated.

White brought the latter to Michigan in 1936 as the second professor. As his student - and perhaps because of his status as a Russian immigrant - he was a perfect fit. However, during World War II , Titiev got involved in the wartime by studying Japan . This was probably why White broke up with Titiev. The two-man department was only expanded after the war. The expansion, along with Titiev's establishment of the East Asian Study Program and the admission of scholars such as Richard Beardsley, separated the professors.

As a professor at Ann Arbor, White trained a generation of influential students. While authors such as Robert Carneiro, Beth Dillingham, and Gertrude Dole White's program continued in the orthodox form, scholars such as Eric Wolf , Elman Service, and Marshall Sahlins developed their own forms of anthropology on this basis.

White's anthropology

White's views were specifically formulated against the school of Franz Boas, with whom he was institutionally and intellectually in conflict. This antagonism often took on very personal traits: White described Boas' style of prose in the American Journal of Sociology as "cheesy," while Robert Lowie White's work described it as "a mishmash of immature metaphysical views" borrowed from "the obsessive power of fanaticism [which ] unconsciously distorted a vision ”.

The most obvious departure from Boas' orthodoxy was White's view of anthropology and its relationship to other sciences. White classified the world into cultural, biological and physical phenomena, seeing this division not as a mere heuristic means, but as a description of real facts. In contrast to Alfred Kroeber , Kluckhohn or Edward Sapir , White saw the description of the object of investigation not as a cognitive achievement of the anthropologist, but as a knowledge of the facts that make up the world. The distinction between natural and social sciences is therefore not based on the method, but on the nature of the object of study - physicists study physical phenomena, biologists biological and “ culturologists ” (White's term) cultural.

So while the subject of study is not influenced by the researcher's point of view or interests, the method does. White believed that phenomena could be explored from three points of view: the historical, the formal-functional, and the evolutionary (or formal-temporal). The historical path essentially corresponds to that of Boas; he is dedicated to the investigation of certain diachronic cultural processes and "tries lovingly to penetrate into the secrets until every feature is open and clear". The formal-functional approach corresponds to the diachronic approach represented by Alfred Radcliffe-Brown and Bronisław Malinowski , which tries to reveal the formal structure of a society and the functional relationships between its components. His own evolutionary approach is generalizing like the formal one, but also diachronic in that he regards individual events as general examples of larger trends.

While Boa's science, in his own view, promised loving penetration, White feared that it would "emasculate" anthropology if it achieved a dominant position. White saw his approach as a synthesis of the historical and the functional, as it combined the diachronic view with the generalizing eye for formal relationships. As such, it could show "the course of cultural development in the past and its likely course in the future," a task that was considered to be the "most valuable function" of anthropology.

White repeatedly defended the evolutionists of the 19th century in search of intellectual precursors that the Boazians did not claim or even denounce. This can be seen in his views on evolution based on the works of Herbert Spencer , Charles Darwin, and Lewis Henry Morgan . Although White's portrayal of Morgan and Spencer was tendentious, his concepts of science and evolution were firmly anchored in their work. Advances in population biology and evolutionary theory passed White, whose concepts of evolution and progress remained closely linked to the 19th century.

For White, culture was a super-organic entity that exists sui generis and can only be explained by itself. It consists of three levels, the technological, the social-organizational and the ideological. Each level is based on the previous one and although they all interact, the technological level is ultimately the determining one, which White describes as "the hero of our play" and "the leading character of our game". The most important factor in his theory is technology : "Social systems are determined by technological systems," he wrote in his book, thus building on the earlier theory of Lewis Henry Morgan.

White spoke of culture as a general human phenomenon and emphasized that he did not speak of cultures in the plural. His theory, published in 1959 in The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome , revived interest in social evolutionism and is considered outstanding by neoevolutionists . He believed that culture - the sum total of all human cultural activities on the planet - evolves, with the technological component playing the most important role. His materialistic approach becomes evident in the following quote: "Man as an animal species - and consequently culture as a whole - is dependent on the material, mechanical adaptation to the environment." The technological component consists of material, mechanical, physical and chemical instruments and the way people use these techniques. White justifies the importance of the technology as follows:

  1. Technology is an attempt to solve the problems of survival.
  2. Ultimately, this attempt means gaining enough energy and using it for human needs.
  3. Societies that generate more energy and use it more effectively have an advantage over other societies.
  4. Therefore, these societies are more progressive in an evolutionary sense.
The Earth at night (image from NASA and NOAA). The brightest areas are the most urbanized, but not necessarily the most densely populated. Even 100 years after the invention of electric light, some regions are still sparsely populated and not illuminated.

For White, "the primary function of culture" that determines the degree of its progress is its ability to "harness and control energy." "White's Law" is a widely accepted rule in human ecology and states that the most important measure of a society's level of economic development is the per capita energy consumption.

White distinguishes five levels of human development:

  1. Energy from your own muscle power
  2. Energy through domestication of animals
  3. Energy from plants (agriculture)
  4. Energy from natural resources (coal, oil, gas)
  5. Atomic energy

He introduced the formula C = E * T, in which E denotes the annual energy consumption per capita, T the degree of efficiency with which the technologies use the energy and C denotes the level of cultural development. In his own words, "the basic law of cultural evolution" is that "culture develops as annual per capita energy consumption increases or the efficiency of the instruments used to process energy improves". Therefore, "we see that progress and development are influenced by improving the mechanical means by which energy is harnessed and increasing the amounts of energy used." Although White does not promise that technology is the magic bullet for all human problems , his theory treats the technological factor as the most important in the evolution of society. It is comparable to the later work of Gerhard Lenski , the theory of the Kardaschow scale by the Russian astronomer Nikolai Semjonowitsch Kardaschow and some ideas of technological singularity .

Works

  • Ethnological Essays: Selected Essays of Leslie A. White . University of New Mexico Press. 1987.
  • The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome , 1959 (see above)
  • The Science of Culture: A Study of Man and Civilization . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1949.
  • The Pueblo of Santa Ana, New Mexico . American Anthropological Association Memoir 60, 1942.
  • The Pueblo of Santo Domingo . American Anthropological Association Memoir 60, 1934.
  • The Pueblo of San Felipe . American Anthropological Association Memoir No. 38, 1932.
  • The Acoma Indians . Bureau of American Ethnology, 47th annual report, pp. 1-192. Smithsonian Institution, 1932.

literature

biography

  • William Peace: Leslie A. White: Evolution and Revolution in Anthropology , University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Authoritative biography.

ethnology

  • Richard Beardsley: An Appraisal of Leslie A. White's Scholarly Influence. In: American Anthropologist , Vol. 78, pp. 617-620, 1976.
  • Jerry D. Moore: Leslie White: Evolution Emergent . in: JM: Visions of Culture , Chapter 13, pp. 169-180. AltaMira, 1997.
  • Elman Service: Leslie Alvin White, 1900-1975 . in: American Anthropologist , Vol. 78, pp. 612-617, 1976.

German literature

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ^ A b The University of Alabama: ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORIES
  2. ↑ a b e-Museum of Minnesota State University (English). Archived from the original on May 31, 2010 ; accessed on January 24, 2014 .
  3. ↑ See John Michael Greer: "White's law, a widely accepted rule in human ecology that takes energy use per capita as the primary measure of economic development"; in: "The Long Descent", New Society Publishers 2008, p. 28
personal data
SURNAME White, Leslie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES White, Leslie Alvin (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American anthropologist
DATE OF BIRTH January 19, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Salida , Colorado
DATE OF DEATH March 31, 1975
Place of death Lone Pine California