Socio-cultural evolution
Sociocultural evolution (from Latin evolvere: "to develop") is an umbrella term for theories of cultural and social development that describe how cultures and societies have developed over the course of human history . While the theories provide developmental models for understanding the relationship between technology , social structure and values of a society and how they change over time, they differ in describing specific mechanisms of variation and social and cultural change .
Most approaches in the 19th century and some in the 20th century aimed to provide a model for the evolution of mankind as a whole, arguing that different societies are at different stages of social development. Many recent theories focus on changes in individual societies and reject the idea of purposeful change or social progress . Most archaeologists and ethnologists work within the framework of such modern theories or disciplinary approaches. These include neoevolutionism , sociobiology , modernization theories , and theories of post-industrial society.
overview
Almost all anthropologists and sociologists assume that people have natural social tendencies and that especially human social behavior can also be traced back to non- genetic causes; it is learned to a large extent in a social setting and through social interaction . Societies exist in complex social (in interaction with other societies) and biotic environments (in interaction with natural resources and constraints) and adapt to them. Therefore it is i. a. required that societies change.
Special theories of social or cultural evolution usually serve to explain differences between contemporary societies by arguing that different societies are at different stages of development. Although such theories typically provide models for understanding the relationship between technological development, social structure, or values of a society, they differ in the extent to which they describe specific mechanisms of variation and change.
Early sociocultural theories of evolution such as those of Auguste Comte , Herbert Spencer, and Lewis Henry Morgan emerged simultaneously, but independently of the work of Charles Darwin, and were popular from the late 19th century to the end of the First World War . These evolutionism theories state that societies begin in a "primitive" state and become more and more "civilized" over time, and equate the culture and technology of Western society with progress. Some forms of such theories have led to social Darwinism and "scientific" racism (see also racial theories ); this justified the policy of colonialism and slavery in the past, and more recently eugenics .
Most of the approaches of the 19th and some of the 20th centuries aimed to provide models for the evolution of mankind as a whole. Most theories of the 20th century, such as multilinear evolution , however, focus on changes in individual societies. In addition, they reject a specific change (e.g. orthogenesis , teleology or progress). Most archaeologists work within this framework. Other modern theories of social change are neoevolutionism , sociobiology , modernization, and post-industrial society.
"Evolution" of the models
The variety of sociocultural models of evolution can be reduced to three main types based on the postulated lines of development, the role of complexity and the ideological evaluation, as the German religious scholar Ina Wunn, among others, did for the evolution of religions .
Unilinear evolutionism
(Classical) evolutionist theories assume a predetermined development towards ever more highly developed, unchangeable and complex stages.
It follows that in many models the oldest stages are equated with recent phenomena: This applies, for example, to the so-called “ natural religions ” or the original way of human self-preservation, hunting and gathering . It is assumed that these cultural levels did not develop further after the separation of the next higher level, so that one can exactly reconstruct the respective "original forms" from today's counterparts. The higher complexity of each of the younger levels is considered an improvement, so that the older levels are viewed as more primitive and underdeveloped. Evolutionist approaches of this kind clearly reflect the worldview, which was still strongly influenced by Christianity at that time, which saw man as the crown of creation and the species (and cultural phenomena) that exist today as unchangeable.
Multilinear Neoevolutionism
The majority of neoevolutionist models presuppose a targeted development towards more highly developed, more complex, but not predetermined stages.
With these theories, too, the assumption of a higher development from more primitive to more modern forms applies as a rule, which is reflected in the general increase in complexity. In contrast to the older evolutionist models, however, there is a multi-line development that is clearly differentiated. It is often assumed that a "primordial culture" can be reconstructed. Ina Wunn complains that the evaluative classification from underdeveloped to highly developed cultural forms is still assumed unreflectively by a large number of scientists, despite findings to the contrary.
Cultural relativistic models of evolution
State of the art are those models that require an undirected development to not predetermined stages with increasing complexity of the overall system.
Similar to biological evolution, the cultural phenomena are no longer evaluated; Even the highly developed technology is not “better” than “primitive” technology, but only “different”. The different forms of cultural change also flow into this , which also allow cross-connections in the lines of development and "regressions". The reconstruction of one or more original states is also mostly viewed with skepticism or is considered highly speculative.
Classic social evolutionism
development
The Islamic scholar Ibn Chaldūn said in the 14th century that societies are living organisms that for universal reasons go through a cycle of birth, growth, maturity, decay and death.
Before the 18th century, Europeans predominantly believed that societies on earth were in a state of decline. European society viewed classical antiquity as a standard to strive for, and ancient Greece and Rome provided technical feats that medieval Europeans sought to emulate. At the same time, Christianity taught that people live in a depraved world far inferior to the Garden of Eden and Heaven . However, during the Age of Enlightenment , European confidence grew and the notion of progress became increasingly popular. It was during this time that what would later be called “social and cultural evolution” had its roots.
The Enlightenment thinkers assumed often that companies go through a progressive development with several stages, and searched for the logic , order and scientific truths that the course of human history determined. Against this background, it was assumed that society began on a “primitive” level - for example in the state of nature described by Thomas Hobbes - and then naturally developed to the highest stage, as was assumed for contemporary Europe. While previous writers like Michel de Montaigne discussed how societies change over time, the Scottish Enlightenment proved to be key in the development of socio-cultural evolution. After Scotland's unification with England in 1707, some Scottish scholars pondered the relationship between progress and decadence which, in their opinion, was due to increased trade with England and subsequent wealth. The result was a series of "alleged stories". Authors such as Adam Ferguson , John Millar, and Adam Smith argued that all societies pass through four stages of development: hunter-gatherers , ranching and nomadism , agriculture, and finally trade . These thinkers interpreted the changes Scotland was undergoing as a transition from an agricultural to a mercantile society.
In France, writers like Claude Adrien Helvétius were influenced by the Scottish tradition. Henri de Saint-Simon and others later developed these ideas further. Auguste Comte presented a coherent analysis of social progress and a new discipline to study: sociology . Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's theory of progress also emerged at this time. Hegel postulated that social development is an inescapable and fixed process, comparable to an acorn that inevitably becomes an oak .
These developments took place in a larger context. The first process was colonialism . Although the occupying powers resolved most of the conflicts with the populations of the conquered areas by force, the increasing awareness of non-Western people raised new questions about society and culture among European scholars. Similarly, the effective administration of the colonial territories required some understanding of the foreign cultures. The emerging theories of sociocultural evolution allowed Europeans to organize their knowledge in a way that reflected and justified their increasing political and economic dominance over others: the colonized peoples were less, the ruling peoples more developed. When the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes described primeval man in the 17th century, in whose “lonely, poor, ugly, bestial and short” life there was “no art, no writing and no society”, he advocated a popular concept of the “savage” ". Everything that was good and civilized resulted from slow development away from this low state. Even rationalist philosophers like Voltaire implicitly assumed that the Enlightenment arose out of the ascending evolution of humanity.
The second process was the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism , which allowed and encouraged constant revolutions in the means of production . The emerging theories of socio-cultural evolution reflected the belief that the changes in Europe were obvious improvements. The industrialization in conjunction with an intense political change in which the French Revolution , the Constitution of the United States and the Polish Constitution of May 3 the way for the supremacy of democracy paved, forced European thinkers, some of their assumptions about the organization of the Rethink society.
In the 19th century, three great classical theories of social and historical change emerged: “socio-cultural evolutionism”, the “ social cycle ” and “ historical materialism ” according to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels . These theories had one thing in common: they all agree that human history follows a fixed path, probably that of social progress. Thus, every event in the past is not only chronologically but also causally linked to the present and the future. By reconstructing this sequence of events, science can discover the laws of history.
Sociocultural Evolution and the Idea of Progress
While the proponents of socio-cultural evolution agree that the evolution-like process leads to social progress , classical social evolutionists have developed many different theories and models of development ( evolutionism ). Sociocultural evolution is the predominant theory of early sociocultural anthropology and social commentary, associated with scholars such as Auguste Comte , Edward Burnett Tylor , Lewis Henry Morgan , Benjamin Kidd , Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse, and Herbert Spencer . It was an attempt to scientifically formalize social thinking that was later influenced by the biological theory of evolution . If organisms could develop according to recognizable, deterministic laws over time, so should societies. The researchers drew analogies between human society and the biological organism and introduced biological concepts such as biodiversity , natural selection, and heredity into sociological theory, evolutionary factors that determine the progress of society through stages of savagery and barbarism to civilization through survival of the fittest ". Along with the idea of progress also grew the notion of fixed stages of development through which human societies go; mostly one counts three levels (savagery, barbarism and civilization), but sometimes much more. The Marquis de Condorcet counted ten stages or epochs, the last of which had started with the French Revolution , which in his opinion was destined to bring forth human rights and the perfection of the human race. Some authors recognized a repetition of the social stages in the stages of growth of each individual. Strange habits were seen as a step backwards from earlier practices and so-called primitive peoples were seen as living representatives of the early forms of European cultures. This also meant the beginning of anthropology as a scientific discipline and the departure from traditional religious views of “primitive” cultures.
The term “classical social evolution” is primarily associated with the works of Auguste Comte , Herbert Spencer (who coined the expression “survival of the fittest”) and William Graham Sumner from the 19th century. In many ways, Spencer's theory of " cosmic evolution " has much more in common with the work of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and August Comte than with the contemporary work of Charles Darwin . Spencer also developed and published his theories a few years earlier than Darwin. With regard to social institutions, however, there are some arguments in favor of classifying Spencer's works as social evolutionism. Although he wrote that societies evolve over time and progress is achieved through competition, he stressed that the individual rather than the collective is the entity to be analyzed, that evolution occurs through natural selection, and that it is both social and biological Phenomena concerns. Still, the publication of Darwin's works proved beneficial to proponents of sociocultural evolution. The world of social sciences viewed the ideas of biological evolution as an attractive solution to similar questions regarding the origin and evolution of social behavior, and the idea of society as a nascent organism was a biological analogy that is still taken up by many anthropologists and sociologists today.
Both Spencer and Comte see society as an organism that is subject to the process of growth - from the simple to the complex, from chaos to order, from the general to the particular, from flexibility to organization. Both agree that the process of social growth can be broken down into certain stages and that this growth means social progress - any newer, more developed society is better. Thus progressivism became a fundamental idea of sociocultural evolution.
Auguste Comte, known as the father of sociology, formulated the law of three levels: Human development runs from the theological level, on which nature is mythically perceived and man explains natural phenomena with traditional myths, via a metaphysical level, in which the Nature is influenced by immaterial as well as supernatural beings, ultimately by God , up to positivism , in which all transcendent forces are "eliminated" and natural phenomena are explained by purely inner-worldly (and empirically testable) relationships. This advancement is fueled by the development of the human mind and the increasing use of thought, inference, and logic to understand the world.
Herbert Spencer believed that society should evolve towards greater freedom for individuals and that government should interfere as little as possible in social and political life. He distinguished two phases of development with a focus on the type of internal regulation of societies. So there are military and industrial societies. The earlier, more primitive military society aims at conquest and defense, is centralized, economically self-sufficient, collectivist, puts the well-being of the individual below that of society, uses coercion, violence and oppression and rewards loyalty, obedience and discipline. The industrial society aims at production and trade, is organized in a decentralized way, connected to other societies through economic relationships, achieves its goals through voluntary cooperation and individual self-restraint, treats the well-being of the individual as the highest value, regulates social life on a voluntary basis and values initiative Independence and innovation.
Regardless of how scholars rate his relationship with Darwin, Spencer proved to be a very popular figure, especially in the United States, in the 1870s. Authors such as Edward Youmans , William Graham Sumner , John Fiske , John W. Burgess , Lester Frank Ward , Lewis Henry Morgan, and other Gilded Age thinkers developed similar theories of social evolutionism.
Lewis Henry Morgan, an anthropologist with great influence on sociology, distinguished three ages in his classic Ancient Societies from 1877: savagery, barbarism and civilization, which he separated through technical innovations: fire , arches and pottery in the first, domestication , agriculture and Metalworking in the second and alphabet and writing in the third era. Morgan thus established a link between social and technological progress. He saw the latter as a force behind all social change - social institutions, organizations and ideologies are all based on technical change. Morgan's theories were popularized by Friedrich Engels , whose works Dialectics of Nature , including Part of the Work in the Incarnation of the Ape , and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State are based in part on them. For Engels and other Marxists , the theory was so important because it supported their conviction that materialistic factors (economic and technical) are decisive for the fate of mankind, as Marx and Engels opposed to it as early as 1845 in their "basic superstructure model" the speculative philosophy (especially Hegel's) had formulated. Instead, positive science and its processual (dialectical) interpretation should describe social change.
Another father of sociology, Émile Durkheim , takes a similar dichotomous view of social progress. His central concept was social solidarity , as he defined social evolution as progressing from mechanical to organic solidarity. In mechanical solidarity, people are independent, there is hardly any integration, and there is no need for violence or oppression to keep society together. In organic solidarity, people are much more integrated and mutually dependent; there is extensive specialization and cooperation. The progress from mechanical to organic solidarity is based firstly on population growth and increasing population density , secondly on increasing “moral density” (development of more complex social interaction) and thirdly on increasing specialization in the workplace. For Durkheim, the division of labor is the most important factor in social progress.
The anthropologists Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (England) and Lewis Henry Morgan (USA) worked with data from indigenous peoples that allegedly represented earlier stages of cultural evolution and thus enabled an insight into the progressive development of culture. Morgan later confirmed, like Darwin, the theory of social change by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels , who developed the theory of socio-cultural evolution in 1845, in which internal contradictions in society created a series of ascending stages, at the end of which a socialist society can stand, but by no means must (as is usually the case in the varieties of Marxism ). Tylor and Morgan expanded the theory of evolutionism by establishing criteria by which one could categorize culture according to its level in a fixed system of growth for all of mankind, and examine the forms and mechanisms of that growth. They were often concerned with culture in general rather than individual cultures.
Their analysis of intercultural data was based on three assumptions:
- Contemporary societies can be classified as more “primitive” or more “civilized”.
- There are a certain number of levels between “primitive” and “civilized” (e.g. band , tribe , state ).
- All societies go through these stages in the same order, but at different speeds.
Progress (i.e. the difference between two levels) was usually described in terms of increasing social complexity (including class differentiation and complex division of labor) or an increase in intellectual, theological or aesthetic perfection. These nineteenth-century ethnologists mainly used the principles to explain differences in religious beliefs or kinship terminology in different societies.
Lester Frank Ward developed Spencer's theory further, but unlike Spencer, who viewed evolution as a general process that could be applied to the whole world (physical as well as sociological), Ward separated sociological and biological evolution. He emphasized that people create goals for themselves and strive to achieve them, while in the non-human world, which is more likely to evolve by chance, there is no such intelligence and awareness . He established a hierarchy of evolutionary processes. In the beginning there is cosmogenesis , the creation and evolution of the world. This is followed by biogenesis . The development of mankind leads to anthropogenesis , which is influenced by the human spirit . Ultimately, sociogenesis arises with society , with which society is adapted to various political, cultural and ideological goals.
Sir Edward Burnett Tylor , a pioneer of anthropology , focused on the worldwide evolution of culture and noted that culture is an important part of every society and therefore also subject to evolution. He believed that societies are at different stages of cultural development and that anthropology must reconstruct this evolution from the primitive beginnings to the modern state.
Ferdinand Tönnies described evolution as a development from an informal society in which people have a lot of freedoms and there are few laws and obligations, to a modern, formally rational society that is determined by traditions and laws and in which people in their Freedom of action are restricted. He also emphasized the tendency towards standardization and unification, in which smaller societies are absorbed into a single large, modern society. Thus, Tönnies described part of what is known today as globalization . He was also one of the first sociologists to point out that the evolution of society is not necessarily going in the right direction, that social progress is not perfect and can even be called regression, as the newer, more developed societies have high Costs are associated with it, resulting in lower individual satisfaction. Tönnie's work founded neoevolutionism .
Although he is not usually considered a representative of socio-cultural evolution, Max Weber's theory of the three-part classification of authority can be viewed as an evolutionary theory. He differentiates between three ideal types of political leadership, dominance and authority: charismatic rule (family and religious), traditional rule ( patriarchy , feudal system ) and legal rule (modern law and state, bureaucracy ). Legal dominance is the most developed form and societies are evolving from traditional and charismatic authorities to rational and legal ones.
Criticism and influence on modern theories
As early as the end of the 19th century, diffusionism set itself apart from evolutionists, who saw contact between cultures as the main cause of social change. In the early twentieth century began a period of systematic critical inquiry and the rejection of generalizations of such evolutionism theories of sociocultural evolution. Ethnologists like Franz Boas, as well as his students Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead , who are seen as leading exponents of this negative attitude, used refined ethnography and more rigorous empirical methods to show that the theories of Spencer, Tylor, and Morgan are speculative and systematic the ethnographic data misinterpret. The stages of evolution have been criticized as illusions. They also rejected the distinction between “primitive” and “civilized” (or “modern”) and stressed that so-called primitive societies have as much a history and are just as developed as so-called civilized societies. Any attempt to use such a theory to reconstruct the histories of non- written peoples (without historical documents) is thus completely speculative and unscientific. The alleged development, which usually ends at a level of civilization identical to that of modern Europe, is ethnocentric . The theory also falsely assumes that societies are clearly delineated and distinguishable, while in reality cultural traces and forms often cross social boundaries and mix with many other societies (an important mechanism for change). Boas introduced the concept of cultural history, which focuses on field work among indigenous peoples to identify actual cultural and historical processes rather than speculative stages of growth. This approach dominated American anthropology in the first half of the 20th century and influenced anthropology everywhere, so that generalizations and system formations became much rarer than in the past.
Later critics noted that the assumption of tightly-bound societies arose precisely at the time when the European powers were colonizing non-Western societies, thus serving self-interest. Many anthropologists and social theorists now view evolutionism as a Western political myth seldom based on solid empirical foundations. Critical theorists point out that the assumptions of social evolution are simply justifications for the power of the social elite. Ultimately, the devastating world wars between 1914 and 1945 destroyed European self-confidence. After millions of deaths, genocide and the destruction of Europe's industrial infrastructure, the idea of progress seemed very dubious.
The modern proponents of socio-cultural evolution reject most of the classical assumptions because of various theoretical problems.
- The theory was very ethnocentric. She makes serious value judgments about various societies, with western civilization being considered the most valuable.
- It assumes that all cultures go through the same development and have the same goals.
- It equates civilization with material culture (technology, cities, etc.).
- Based on serious misunderstandings in the theory of evolution , it equates evolution with progress or the “survival of the fittest”.
- It is refuted by evidence. Many (but not all) supposedly primitive societies are more peaceful and democratic than many modern societies and tend to be more healthy, for example with regard to nutrition and ecology .
Since social evolution was presented as scientific theories, it was used to support illegal and often racist social practices - most notably colonialism , slavery, and the unbalanced economic conditions in industrial Europe. The Social Darwinism is especially criticized because it has some of the Nazis led used "philosophies".
Modern theories
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When the criticism of the classical theories was generally accepted, modern anthropological and sociological approaches changed accordingly. In modern theories, care is taken to avoid unsubstantiated, ethnocentric speculation, comparisons, or value judgments, and individual societies are viewed in their own historical context. These conditions provided the framework for new theories such as cultural relativism and multilinear evolution.
In the 1940s, cultural anthropologists like Leslie White and Julian Steward tried to create a scientifically based evolutionary model, creating neoevolutionism in the process . White rejected the subdivision of “primitive” and “civilized” societies, but emphasized that societies can be distinguished according to the energy they use and that increased energy allows greater social differentiation. Steward rejected the notion of progress and instead drew attention to Darwin's notion of " adaptation, " according to which all societies must in some way adapt to their environment. The anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service tried in their work Evolution and Culture to unite the approaches of White and Steward. Other anthropologists developed theories of cultural ecology and ecological anthropology on this basis. The most famous names are Peter Vayda and Roy Rappaport .
In the late 1950s, Steward's students Eric Wolf and Sidney Mintz turned from cultural ecology to Marxism , world system theory , dependency theory , and Marvin Harris ' cultural materialism . Today, most anthropologists continue to reject 19th century ideas and, like stewards, deal with the relationship between a culture and its environment when trying to explain different aspects of the culture. Most modern researchers, however, use a systematic approach in which they examine cultures as emerging systems, taking into account the entire social environment, including political and economic relationships. Other scholars reject all evolutionary thinking and instead look at historical possibilities, contacts with other cultures, and the functioning of systems of cultural symbols. As a result, the simple concept of cultural evolution is no longer useful; it has been superseded by a series of more precise theories regarding the relationship between culture and environment. In the field of development studies, authors like Amartya Sen have developed an understanding of “development” and “human prosperity” that challenges simple notions of progress but retains much of the original inspiration.
In sociology, Norbert Elias has been developing the building blocks of a theory of the long-term civilization process since the 1930s, based on his main work On the Process of Civilization . Essential features include: a. a strong empirical orientation, normative restraint and a model of the interaction between the development of social structure and personality structure.
In historical studies, the trend of world history has developed in the USA since the 1960s , which transcends Eurocentric historiography and aims to work out extensive interrelationships (e.g. the spread of innovations) as well as patterns and mechanisms of history. The Big History approach , which embeds sociocultural evolution into the evolution of inanimate nature and biological evolution, goes one step further . Models of the increase in complexity and the interaction (co-evolution) of these development processes are central.
Neoevolutionism
Neoevolutionism is the first in a series of modern theories on multilinear evolution. It originated in the 1930s, was significantly further developed after the Second World War and anchored in both ethnology / anthropology and sociology in the 1960s . It is based on empirical material from archeology , palaeontology and historiography , avoids any reference to value systems (moral and cultural) and instead strives for objectivity and simple descriptions.
The historical particularists of the early twentieth century rejected the explanations of classical evolutionism, which described the development of culture with general principles of an evolutionary process, as unscientific. The thinkers of neoevolutionism reintroduced evolutionary ideas and edited them so that they were acceptable to contemporary anthropology.
Neoevolutionism rejected many of the ideas of classical social evolutionism, especially that of social progress that was so dominant in the earlier theories. He replaces determinism with probability and emphasizes that chance and free will have a great influence on the process of social evolution. He also supports the counterfactual story with the question of "what if" and the consideration of possible paths that social evolution could take or have taken. So different cultures can develop differently, with some of them skipping entire stages of development that others have gone through. Neoevolutionism emphasizes the importance of empirical evidence and does not rely on value judgments and guesswork for analysis, but on measurable information.
Leslie White presented in his work The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome (1959) a theory with which he wanted to explain all of human history. The most important factor is the technology. “Social systems are determined by technical systems,” he wrote, recalling the earlier theory of Lewis Henry Morgan . He measured the progress of a society by its energy consumption and distinguished between five stages of development:
- Energy from human muscle power
- Energy from domesticated animals
- Energy from plants (agriculture)
- Energy from natural resources such as coal, oil and gas
- Atomic energy
White introduced the formula P = E · T , where E denotes the energy consumed and T the efficiency of the technical factors that use the energy. His theory was later taken up by the Russian astronomer Nikolai Semjonowitsch Kardaschow , who designed a scale named after him .
Julian Steward founded in his book Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution (1955) the theory of multilinear evolutions, according to which societies adapt to their environment. In his theory, refined over White, he drew attention to Darwin's concept of adaptation. In his opinion, one can study various adaptations by examining the specific resources a society consumes, the technology used for them, and the organization of human labor . Different environments and forms of technology lead to different types of adaptation and with a change in resources or technology, the culture also changes. Cultures do not change through an internal logic, but through the changed relationship to the environment and thus do not develop through the same stages, but in very different directions. Multilinear evolution cannot encompass all of human history, but it is also not limited to a single culture. It analyzes a typical common culture that represents a particular era or region. According to Steward, the decisive factors for development are technology and economics, while the political system, ideologies and religion are secondary factors. These factors promote evolution, which runs simultaneously in several directions, i.e. multilinear.
Marshall Sahlins ( Evolution and Culture , 1960) divided the evolution of societies into “general” and “specific”. He describes the general evolution as the tendency of cultural and social systems to improve in terms of complexity, organization and adaptation to the environment. However, the cultures are not isolated; there is interaction and mixing of their qualities (e.g. technological innovations). This leads to different developments in individual cultures (special evolution), as various elements are introduced in different combinations and at different times.
Gerhard Lenski , the author of Power and Prestige (1966) and Human Societies: An Introduction to Macrosociology (1974), extends the work of Leslie White and Lewis Henry Morgan. He regards technological progress as the most important factor in the evolution of societies and cultures. In contrast to White, who defined technology as the ability to generate and use energy, Lenski focuses on the amount and use of information . The more information and knowledge (especially with regard to the formation of the natural environment) a society has, the more developed it is. He distinguishes four stages of human development, based on the progress in the history of communication :
- Information is passed on through the genes .
- When people became conscious, they could learn and pass on information through experience.
- People use signs and develop logic.
- People create symbols, language and writing.
Advances in communication also have implications for the economic and political system, the distribution of goods, social inequality and other spheres of social life. Lenski also distinguishes societies according to their state of the art, communication and economy: hunters and gatherers, simple agriculture, advanced agriculture, industry and special forms (e.g. fishing).
In his works Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (1966) and The System of Modern Societies (1971), Talcott Parsons distinguishes four sub-processes of evolution:
- Division - creates functional subsystems
- Adaptation - the systems become more efficient
- Inclusion of new elements
- Generalization of values to justify an increasingly complex system
He illustrates these processes using three stages of evolution (primitive, archaic and modern). Archaic societies have knowledge of writing, modern ones knowledge of laws. Parsons regards Western civilization as the pinnacle of modern societies and the United States as the most dynamically developed.
Sociobiology
Sociobiology probably deviates most from classical social evolutionism. Edward O. Wilson introduced it in his 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, following his adaptation of the biological theory of neo-Darwinism to the social sciences. He was the first to try to explain the evolutionary mechanisms behind social behavior patterns such as altruism , aggression, and caring, and in doing so sparked one of the greatest scientific controversies of the 20th century.
Sociobiologists advocate a theory of double inheritance, according to which humans are a product of both biological and socio-cultural evolution. Everyone is subject to their own selective mechanisms and forms of transmission (e.g. genes in biology and perhaps memes in culture ). This approach focuses on the cultural transmission and selective pressures that influence cultural change and has little in common with the tiered models of the early and mid-20th centuries. He was greeted by many psychologists and some ethnologists , but only a few anthropologists .
A basis of sociobiology is the synthetic theory of evolution (formerly also: neo-Darwinism), a combination of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution through variation and natural selection , Gregor Mendel's genetics as the basis for biological inheritance and mathematical population genetics . She introduced the link between two important discoveries: the units (genes) and the mechanisms of evolution (variation and natural selection).
Because of its close relationship with biology, sociobiology is considered a branch of biology and sociology, although they use techniques from a plethora of sciences including ethology , evolution, zoology , archeology, population genetics, and many others. In the study of human societies, sociology is closely related to human ecology and evolutionary psychology .
Sociobiology is still very controversial as it assumes that genes play a role in human behavior, although researchers describe this role as a very complex and often unpredictable interaction between nature and culture. The most famous critics of such a view were Franz Boas , Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould .
Theory of modernization
Theories of modernization were developed in the 1950s and 1960s and were closely related to the dependency theory . They combined earlier theories of sociocultural evolution with practical experience and empirical research, especially from the period of decolonization . The most important statements are as follows:
- Western states are the most developed; the rest of the world (mostly former colonies) is at earlier stages of development and will eventually reach the level of the western world.
- The development is from traditional to developed societies.
- Third world countries have fallen behind in social progress and need to be steered on the right track.
Starting from the classical theories, the factor of modernization is emphasized here: Many societies try (or have to) follow the most successful societies and cultures. With social engineering and the help of developed countries, this is also possible.
Walt Whitman Rostov contributed quite a bit to the theory. In The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960) he concentrates on the economic aspects of modernization and shows in his take-off model factors that a society needs to modernize. David Apter dealt with the political system and history of democracy, examining the connection between democracy, good government, efficiency and modernization. David McClelland ( The Achieving Society , 1967) looked at the matter from a psychological perspective and said in his theory of motivation that modernization cannot happen without innovation, success and capitalism . Alex Inkeles ( Becoming Modern , 1974) created a model of the “modern personality” who must be independent, active, interested in public politics and cultural affairs, open to new experiences, rational and ready for long-term planning. Some works by Jürgen Habermas also belong in this context.
The theory of modernization was faced with the same reproaches as classical evolutionism; it is too ethnocentric, one-sided and focused on the western world and culture.
Theory of the post-industrial society
The concept of evolution has led some scientists to try to analyze trends and predict the future development of society. You created the theories of post-industrial society. Accordingly, the current era of industrial society is coming to an end, while services and information are becoming more important than industry and goods.
Daniel Bell described the concept in 1974 in his book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society . Like many classical evolutionists, he divided human history into three ages: pre-industrial, industrial, and post-industrial. He predicted that the US, Japan and Western Europe would reach the final era at the end of the 20th century. This can be seen from the following factors:
- Dominance of the service sector (administration, banking, commerce, transport, healthcare, education, science, mass media, culture) over the traditional industrial sector (the manufacture that replaced more traditional agriculture after the industrial revolution in the 19th century)
- increasing importance of information technology
- greater importance of long-term planning and the creation of future trends
- Dominance of technocracy and pragmatism over traditional ethics and ideologies
- more frequent use of technique and intellect
- Changes in the traditional hierarchy of social classes in which highly educated specialists and scholars surpass the traditional bourgeoisie
Since the 1970s, many other sociologists and anthropologists, such as Alvin Toffler and John Naisbitt, have followed Bell and put forward similar theories. Naisbitt introduced the concept of megatrends , powerful global trends that are changing societies around the world. This also includes globalization . Megatrends also include improved computer performance and the development of the World Wide Web . Marshall McLuhan presented in his work The Gutenberg Galaxy the idea of the global village , a term that was soon taken up by globalization researchers and on the Internet. Naisbitt and other proponents of the theory of post-industrial society say that the megatrends towards decentralization , the weakening of the government, the greater importance of local initiatives and direct democracy , changes in the hierarchy of the traditional social classes, the emergence of new social movements and more power for consumers and a larger selection (Toffler even speaks of “overchoice”) for them.
A more extreme vision of post-industrial society is the theory of technological singularity . This refers to a predicted point in the history of a civilization at which, due to technological progress, social, scientific and economic change takes place so quickly that nothing beyond time can be reliably understood or predicted by people from the pre-singularity era can. Such a singularity was first discussed in the 1950s and popularized by Vernor Vinge in the 1980s. Yet many conservative social scientists are very skeptical of this extreme view.
Critics of the theory of post-industrial society stress that it is very vague and, as with any prediction, there is no guarantee that any of the trends seen today will actually exist in the future or develop in the direction predicted by contemporary researchers. No serious sociologist would say, however, that it is possible to predict the future, but that such theories at best allow us to better understand the changes that are happening in the modern world.
Current moral and political debates on socio-cultural evolution
The Cold War era was dominated by rivalry between two superpowers, both of whom believed they were the most developed cultures on the planet. The Soviet Union presented itself as a socialist society that emerged from a class struggle and was destined to attain the utopian state of communism , while sociologists in the US (like Talcott Parsons ) presented the freedom and prosperity of their state as evidence of saw the higher level of socio-cultural evolution in their culture and society. At the same time, decolonization created new independent states aspiring to higher development - a model of progress and industrialization that was itself a form of socio-cultural evolution.
However, there is a tradition in European social theory, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Max Weber , that equates this progress with a loss of human freedom and dignity. At the height of the Cold War, this tradition mixed with an ecological concern and influenced an activist culture in the 1960s. This movement produced a variety of political and philosophical programs that emphasized the need to harmonize society with the environment. Current political theories of the ideology of (radical) neutralism consciously imitate the ecologically harmless way of life of the last traditional “ecosystem people” and expand them with modern knowledge.
Today representatives of postmodernism ask whether the concepts of evolution and society have an inherent meaning and whether they reveal more about the people involved than the object described. The observation and observed cultures may lack cultural similarities (such as a common ontology ) making it difficult to communicate their respective priorities. One could also impose such a system of belief and judgment on another through conquest or colonization. For example, observing different ideas about mathematics and physics among indigenous peoples has indirectly led to ideas such as George Lakoff's "cognitive science of mathematics", which questions the objectivity of systems of measurement.
See also
- Hominization (anthropogenesis: the biological and cultural development of humans)
- Historicism (approaches of the materialistic philosophy of history)
literature
- Edward E. Evans-Pritchard : A History of Anthropological Thought. Basic Books, New York 1981.
- Marvin Harris : The Rise of Anthropological Theory. A History of Theories of Culture. Crowell, New York 1968.
- Elvin Hatch: Theories of Man and Culture. Columbia University Press, New York 1973.
- HR Hays: From Ape to Angel: An Informal History of Social Anthropology , Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1965
- David Kaplan, Robert A. Manners: Culture Theory , Waveland Press Inc., Prospect Heights, Illinois 1972
- Henrika Kuklick: The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945 , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1991
- Jürgen Kumbartzki: The internal evolution of organizations , Wiesbaden 2002, ISBN 3-8244-7604-5 .
- Jakob Lempp , Werner J. Patzelt: General evolution theory. Sources and previous applications. In: Werner J. Patzelt (Ed.): Evolutorischer Institutionalismus. Ergon-Verlag, Würzburg 2007.
- Tim Lewens: Cultural Evolution. In: Edward N. Zalta (Ed.): Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . .
- Werner J. Patzelt (Ed.): Evolutorischer Institutionalismus , Ergon-Verlag, Würzburg 2007
- Marshall David Sahlins: Evolution and culture , University of Michigan Press, 1970
- Charlotte Seymour-Smith, Charlotte: Macmillan Dictionary of Anthropology , Macmillan, New York 1986
- George Stocking: Victorian Anthropology , Free Press, 1991, ISBN 0-02-931551-4
- George W. Stocking Jr .: After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888-1951 , The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995
- George W. Stocking Jr .: Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology , The Free Press, New York 1968
- Piotr Sztompka : Socjologia , Znak, 2002, ISBN 83-240-0218-9
- Piotr Sztompka: The Sociology of Social Change , Blackwell Publishers, 1994, ISBN 0-631-18206-3
- Bruce Trigger: Sociocultural Evolution: Calculation and Contingency (New Perspectives on the Past) , Blackwell Publishers, 1998, ISBN 1-55786-977-4
- Leslie White: The Evolution of Culture; The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome , Mcgraw-Hill, 1959, ISBN 0-07-069682-9
- Robert H. Winthrop: Dictionary of Concepts in Cultural Anthropology , Greenwood Press, New York 1991
Web links
- Heather Long, Kelly Chakov: Social Evolutionism. Department of Anthropology, University of Alabama, 2009, accessed July 18, 2014 (Introduction to Social Evolutionism).
- Daniel Speich Chassé : Progress and Development. Version 1.0. In: Docupedia contemporary history . September 21, 2012
Individual evidence
- ↑ Marvin Harris: Cultural Anthropology - A Textbook. From the American by Sylvia M. Schomburg-Scherff, Campus, Frankfurt / New York 1989, ISBN 3-593-33976-5 . Pp. 436-451.
- ↑ Marshall Sahlins et al. Elman Service: Evolution and Culture. Foreword by Leslie White. University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor 1988 ISBN 0-472-08776-2
- ^ Walter Hirschberg (founder), Wolfgang Müller (editor): Dictionary of Ethnology. New edition, 2nd edition, Reimer, Berlin 2005. S. 114 (evolutionism), 270 (neo-evolutionism), 226 (cultural relativism).
- ↑ Luigi Cavalli-Sforza: Genes, Peoples and Languages - The biological foundations of our civilization. From the Italian by Günter Memmert (original edition 1996), dtv, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-423-33061-9 . Pp. 188-210.
- ↑ Ina Wunn: The evolution of religions. Habilitation thesis, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hanover, 2004. pdf version ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Pp. 7, 9-11, 299-304, (308ff), (387ff), 420, (424ff), 438-439.
- ↑ Robert Spaemann, Reinhard Löw a. Peter Koslowski (Ed.): Evolutionism and Christianity. Volume 9 of Civitas Results, Civitas, Acta humaniora, VCH, 1986, ISBN 978-3-527-17573-4 .
- ↑ a b Fernand Kreff, Eva-Maria Knoll, Andre Gingrich (ed.): Lexicon of Globalization. transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2011, ISBN 978-3-8376-1822-8 , keyword: “Kulturwandel” pp. 220–223.
- ↑ The Philosophy of Positivism theradicalacademy.org
- ↑ Herbert Spencer . Sociological Theorists Page .
- ^ Morgan, Lewis H. (1877) Chapter III: Ratio of Human Progress . Ancient Society.
- ^ Evolution and culture , Marshall David Sahlins
- ↑ The Evolution of Culture , Leslie White
