|In the early 20th century anthropology turned away from cultural evolutionism. Though the 19th-century evolutionists had been among the most enlightened people of their time, their work inevitably was tainted by the prevailing interpretations of reality, including assumptions of racial and cultural superiority. Such great cultural evolutionists as Lewis Henry Morgan, Herbert Spencer, and Edward B. Tylor were disparaged as “armchair speculators”; what was needed, it was asserted, was actual fieldwork in order to learn first-hand about the history and functioning of small-scale societies before they disappeared from the face of the earth forever.The emphasis on fieldwork produced mountains of new and better information about the cultures of the world; yet the urge to make systematic sense of all this new, chiefly descriptive material soon gave rise to a resurgence of cultural evolutionism. The “Founding Figures” were resuscitated, their more promising ideas reconsidered, reformulated, and extended. This movement, sometimes termed neoevolutionism, was led by two American anthropologists, Julian Steward and Leslie A. White. Most of Steward’s work (e.g., 1955) had the modest goal of elucidating the effects of specific environments on the cultures of the people inhabiting them (cultural ecology). White’s work (e.g., 1949) offered more ambitious generalizations about the course of human culture as a whole; he was impressed especially by the relationship between cultural evolution and how–and how much–energy was used by human societies.Steward and White–and their followers–engaged in vigorous debates that eventually seemed to be generating more heat than light. A student of White’s finally wrote an influential essay suggesting that the approaches of Steward and White were better seen as complementary than as opposed (Sahlins 1960). Though this cleared the air, it pointed no new direction. What were cultural evolutionists to do now?In 1965 a new path was opened. An article by American anthropologist Don E. Dumond, and a book by Danish economist Ester Boserup, independently proposed that population growth, under certain conditions, could be an important cause of certain kinds of culture change. (This very possibility had been pointed out as early as 1798 by Thomas Robert Malthus; but the scholarly world had long ago forgotten it, probably in part because it had not been stressed by Malthus.) Impressive theories soon were proposed for the major transformations of cultural evolution. “Population-pressure theory,” as it came to be called, though now past its heyday of popularity, continues to be a significant and promising specialty within cultural evolutionism.
1965 The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure. Chicago: Aldine.
Dumond, Don E.
1965 Population Growth and Cultural Change. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 21:302-324.
Malthus, Thomas Robert
1976 [orig. 1798] An Essay on the Principle of Population. New York: Norton.
Sahlins, Marshall D.
1960 Evolution: Specific and General. In Evolution and Culture. M.D. Sahlins and E.R. Service, eds. Pp. 12-44. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
1955 Theory of Culture Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.