Leslie White, Julian Steward and Marshall Sahlins

Neo-evolutionism emerged in the mid-20th century to revive the study of cultural evolution. It departed from the speculative linear models of the 19th century. Instead, it utilized empirical data to explain how cultures grow in complexity. This framework focuses on energy capture, environmental adaptation, and the relationship between technological advancement and social organization.

Leslie White: Energy and Cultural Evolution

Leslie White championed a materialist perspective on cultural development. He argued that culture evolves as a measurable physical system. He believed that the primary function of culture is to harness energy from the environment to meet human needs.

Energy Theory of Culture

White proposed that cultural evolution is driven by the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year. He summarized this in the formula E × T = C.

• E represents energy harnessed.
• T represents the efficiency of technological tools used to harness that energy.
• C represents the degree of cultural development or complexity.

Technological Determinism

White maintained that technology is the driving force of cultural change. When a society discovers a new way to tap into energy, its social and ideological structures must change to support that technology. He identified three distinct stages based on energy sources:

• Human muscle power.
• Domestication of plants and animals.
• Utilization of inanimate energy sources like steam, electricity, and nuclear power.

Julian Steward: Multilinear Evolution

Julian Steward criticized White’s approach as being too broad and universal. He proposed multilinear evolution, which focuses on the specific ways societies adapt to their unique environments.

Cultural Ecology

Steward founded the field of cultural ecology. He argued that there is no single path for all cultures. Instead, cultures evolve along different lines depending on their environment and available technology.

The Cultural Core

Steward introduced the concept of the cultural core, which consists of the social, political, and religious patterns most closely related to subsistence activities. He believed that if two societies occupy similar environments and use similar technologies, they will develop similar features in their cultural core.

• Example: His study of the Shoshone people in the American Great Basin showed that their nomadic band organization was a direct response to the sparse resource availability in the desert.

Marshall Sahlins: General and Specific Evolution

Marshall Sahlins, a student of White and Steward, synthesized their views by distinguishing between two types of evolution. His work provided a way to understand both the overall progress of humanity and the adaptation of individual cultures.

General Evolution

This refers to the overall trend of cultural development toward higher levels of energy capture, differentiation, and structural complexity. General evolution is cumulative. New technologies that increase energy efficiency are passed down and spread across human populations.

Specific Evolution

This focuses on the historical path of a single culture or a group of related cultures. Specific evolution is concerned with adaptation to a local environment. A society may be highly adapted to its environment but not necessarily high on the scale of general complexity.

• Example: A small-scale foraging society might be perfectly adapted to its specific ecological niche (high specific evolution) even if it lacks the complex energy-capturing technologies of a state-level society (low general evolution).

Comparative Overview of Perspectives

Analytical Facts

• White’s focus on energy capture provided a quantitative method to compare different cultures, a significant departure from the qualitative descriptions of earlier anthropologists.
• Steward’s focus on the cultural core emphasized that not all aspects of a culture are equally shaped by the environment; only those related to survival are core features. Sahlins identified the tension between the global trend of technological progress and the local necessity of environmental adaptation.
• White was a professor at the University of Michigan, where he exerted a lasting influence on American anthropology. Steward’s field research among the Shoshone is regarded as a hallmark of rigorous ecological analysis in the social sciences.

Sahlins is widely recognized for his work on the original affluent society, where he argued that many hunter-gatherer societies are not constantly struggling for resources but often have high levels of leisure time. These three thinkers together established the foundation for modern ecological and evolutionary anthropology. They shifted the focus from merely describing cultures to explaining the material and environmental drivers of human history.