Revision summary
White tied cultural evolution to energy capture. Steward replaced one ladder with multilinear ecology. Sahlins used Service’s types, then the affluent forager and a turn to meaning. None simply revived Morgan’s three stages. The debate is how far energy and habitat explain culture.
Model answer
Introduction
After Boas blocked unilinear ladders, White, Steward, and Sahlins rebuilt evolution in different keys: energy, ecology, and then a critique of the West’s own story.
Body
Leslie White
- Culture evolves as the amount of energy harnessed per capita. Tools and thermodynamics, not ideas alone, move stages.
- The scheme is neo-evolutionist and general. It underplays local history, which Boasians had prized.
Julian Steward
- Multilinear evolution and cultural ecology: similar environments can yield similar adaptations, as in irrigation states.
- The patrilineal band and Great Basin Shoshone work showed culture as a working relation with habitat, not a single ladder.
Marshall Sahlins
- Early Sahlins with Elman Service still used bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states. Stone Age Economics then stressed the original affluent society of foragers.
- Later Sahlins turned against crude materialism and, in Culture and Practical Reason, against treating economy as nature. Evolution became a question about meaning as well as surplus.
Together
- White gives a global energy metric. Steward gives local pathways. Sahlins first classifies, then warns that evolution stories are themselves cultural.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD W[White energy] --> G[General evolution] ST[Steward ecology] --> MU[Multilinear] SA[Sahlins] --> T[Types then critique]
Conclusion
White measured energy, Steward mapped many paths, Sahlins first used neo-evolutionary types and then criticised the reduction of culture to calories. Cultural evolution after Boas is plural.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Discuss the contemporary population problems in the light of various socio-cultural demographic theories
Next question in the 2022 paper (Q8). View answer →
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Is White the same as Morgan?
Both are general evolutionists. White’s metric is energy, not kinship stages of savagery.
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Did Sahlins abandon evolution?
He abandoned simple material ranking. He did not abandon history.
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