Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
Much of the criticism aimed at cultural evolution is focused on the unilinear approach to social change. Broadly speaking in the second half of the 20th century the criticisms of cultural evolution have been answered by the multilinear theory. Ethnocentricity, for example, is more prevalent under the unilinear theory. [33] [29] [34]
Julian Steward, author of Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution (1955, reprinted 1979), created the theory of "multilinear" evolution which examined the way in which societies adapted to their environment. This approach was more nuanced than White's theory of "unilinear evolution."
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.
Multilineal evolution is a 20th-century social theory about the evolution of societies and cultures. It is composed of many competing theories by various sociologists and anthropologists. This theory has replaced the older 19th century set of theories of unilineal evolution, where evolutionists were deeply interested in making generalizations. [1]
Historical particularism (coined by Marvin Harris in 1968) [1] is widely considered the first American anthropological school of thought.. Closely associated with Franz Boas and the Boasian approach to anthropology, historical particularism rejected the cultural evolutionary model that had dominated anthropology until Boas.
The word evolution is forever associated in the popular mind with Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution, which professes, among other things, that man as a species developed diachronically from some ancestor among the Primates who was also ancestor to the Great Apes, as they are popularly termed, and yet this term was not a neologism of Darwin's ...
In evolutionary terms, he described cultural ecology as "multi-linear", in contrast to the unilinear typological models popular during the 19th century, and Leslie White's "universal" model. Steward's most important theoretical contributions happened during his teaching years at Columbia (1946–53).