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Unilineal evolution, also referred to as classical social evolution, is a 19th-century social theory about the evolution of societies and cultures. It was composed of many competing theories by various anthropologists and sociologists , who believed that Western culture is the contemporary pinnacle of social evolution.
Cultural evolution is an ... including anthropology, ... In the 19th century cultural evolution was thought to follow a unilineal pattern whereby all cultures ...
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. ... In the unilineal evolution model at left, ...
In his works Primitive Culture (1871) and Anthropology (1881), he defined the context of the scientific study of anthropology, based on the evolutionary theories of Charles Lyell. He believed that there was a functional basis for the development of society and religion, which he determined was universal.
It was the neo-evolutionary thinkers who brought back evolutionary thought and developed it to be acceptable to contemporary anthropology. Neo-evolutionism discards many ideas of classical social evolutionism, namely that of social progress, so dominant in previous sociology evolution-related theories. [ 68 ]
Ethnoecology is a field of environmental anthropology, and has derived much of its characteristics from classic as well as more modern theorists. Franz Boas was one of the first anthropologists to question unilineal evolution, the belief that all societies follow the same, unavoidable path towards Western civilization.
Lewis Henry Morgan (November 21, 1818 – December 17, 1881) was a pioneering American anthropologist and social theorist who worked as a railroad lawyer. He is best known for his work on kinship and social structure, his theories of social evolution, and his ethnography of the Iroquois.
Early anthropology carried into the 19th century assumptions about the search for origins of civilisation, and unilineal evolution, as appropriate tools for investigating societies. It was widely assumed, further, that current "peoples" were a window into the past. These approaches were seen in Lewis Henry Morgan.