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Leslie White | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1900-01-19)January 19, 1900 Salida, Colorado |
| Died | March 31, 1975(1975-03-31) (aged 75) Lone Pine, California |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Anthropologist |
| Known for | Neoevolutionism White's law |
Leslie Alvin White (January 19, 1900,Salida, Colorado – March 31, 1975,Lone Pine, California) was an American anthropologist known for his advocacy of the theories oncultural evolution,sociocultural evolution, and especiallyneoevolutionism, and for his role in creating the department ofanthropology at theUniversity of Michigan Ann Arbor.[1] White was president of theAmerican Anthropological Association (1964).[2]
White lived first inKansas and thenLouisiana.[citation needed] He volunteered to fight inWorld War I, serving in theUS Navy before enrolling atLouisiana State University in 1919. In 1921, he transferred toColumbia University, where he studied psychology, receiving aB.A. in 1923 and aM.A. in 1924. His PhD inAnthropology and Sociology came from theUniversity of Chicago(1925).
White studied at Columbia, whereFranz Boas had lectured, however he supported cultural evolution as defined by writers such asLewis. H Morgan andEdward Tylor. White's interests were diverse, and he took classes in several other disciplines, including philosophy atUCLA, andclinical psychiatry, before discovering anthropology viaAlexander Goldenweiser courses at theNew School for Social Research. White also spent a few weeks with theMenominee andWinnebago inWisconsin during his PhD His thesis proposal was a library thesis, which foreshadowed his later theoretical work. He conducted fieldwork atAcoma Pueblo, New Mexico.
In 1927 White began teaching at theUniversity at Buffalo.
Teaching atUniversity of Buffalo marked a turning point in White's thinking. White developed an interest in Marxism in 1929, he visited theSoviet Union and on his return joined theSocialist Labor Party, writing articles under the pseudonym "John Steel" for their newspaper.[3]
White went to Michigan when he was hired to replaceJulian Steward, who departedAnn Arbor in 1930. Although the university was home to a museum with a long history of involvement in matters anthropological, White was the only professor in the anthropology department itself. He remained here for the rest of his active career. In 1932, he headed a field school in the southwest which was attended byFred Eggan,Mischa Titiev, and others.
White brought Titiev, his student and a Russian immigrant, to Michigan as a second professor in 1936. However, during theSecond World War, Titiev took part in the war effort by studying Japan. Perhaps this upset the socialist White. In any case by war's end White had broken with Titiev, who would go on to found the East Asian Studies Program, and the two were hardly even on speaking terms. No other faculty members were hired until after the war, when scholars likeRichard K. Beardsley joined the department. Most would fall on one side or the other of the split between White and Titiev.
As a professor in Ann Arbor, White trained students such asRobert Carneiro,Beth Dillingham, andGertrude Dole who carried on White's program in its orthodox form, while other scholars such asEric Wolf,Arthur Jelinek,Elman Service, andMarshall Sahlins andNapoleon Chagnon drew on their time with White to elaborate their own forms of anthropology.
Over time, White's views became framed in opposition to that ofBoasians, with whom he was institutionally at odds. This could take on personal overtones: White referred to Boas's prose style as "corny" in theAmerican Journal of Sociology.Robert Lowie, a proponent of Boas's work, referred to White's work as "a farrago of immature metaphysical notions", shaped by "the obsessive power of fanaticism [which] unconsciously warps one's vision."[4]
One of White's strongest deviations from Boas's philosophy was a view of the nature of anthropology and its relation to other sciences. White understood the world to be divided into cultural, biological, and physical levels of phenomena. Such a division is a reflection of the composition of the universe and was not aheuristic device. Thus, contrary toAlfred L. Kroeber,Kluckhohn, andEdward Sapir, White saw the delineation of the object of study not as a cognitive accomplishment of the anthropologist, but as a recognition of the actually existing and delineated phenomena which comprise the world. The distinction between 'natural' and 'social' sciences was thus based not on method, but on the nature of the object of study: physicists study physical phenomena, biologists biological phenomena, and culturologists (White's term) cultural phenomena.
The object of study was not delineated by the researcher's viewpoint or interest, but the method by which he approached them could be. White believed that phenomena could be explored from three different points of view: the historical, the formal-functional, and the evolutionist (or formal-temporal). The historical view was dedicated to examining the particulardiachronic cultural processes, "lovingly trying to penetrate into its secrets until every feature is plain and clear." The formal-functional is essentially thesynchronic approach advocated byAlfred Radcliffe-Brown andBronisław Malinowski, attempting to discern the formal structure of a society and the functional interrelations of its components. The evolutionist approach is, like the formal approach, generalizing; but it is also diachronic, seeing particular events as general instances of larger trends.
Boas claimed his science promised complex and interdependent visions of culture, but White thought that it would delegitimize anthropology if it became the dominant position, removing it from broader discourses on science. White viewed his own approach as a synthesis of historical and functional approach because it combined the diachronic scope of one with the generalizing eye for formal interrelations provided by the other. As such, it could point out "the course of cultural development in the past and its probable course in the future" a task that was anthropology's "most valuable function".
This stance can be seen in his views of evolution, which are firmly rooted in the writings ofHerbert Spencer,Charles Darwin, andLewis H. Morgan. While it can be argued that White's exposition of Morgan and Spencer's was tendentious, it can be safely said that White's concepts of science and evolution were firmly rooted in their work. Advances in population biology and evolutionary theory passed White by and, unlike Steward, his conception of evolution and progress remained firmly rooted in the nineteenth century.
For White, culture was a superorganic entity that wassui generis and could be explained only in terms of itself. It was composed of three levels: the technological, the social organizational, and the ideological. Each level rested on the previous one, and although they all interacted, ultimately the technological level was the determining one, what White calls "The hero of our piece" and "the leading character of our play". The most important factor in his theory is technology: "Social systems are determined bytechnological systems", wrote White in his book, echoing the earlier theory ofLewis Henry Morgan.
White spoke of culture as a general human phenomenon and claimed not to speak of 'cultures' in the plural. His theory, published in 1959 inThe Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome, rekindled the interest insocial evolutionism and is counted prominently among theneoevolutionists. He believed that culture–meaning the total of all human cultural activity on the planet–was evolving. White differentiated three components of culture: technological, sociological, and ideological. He argued that it was the technological component which plays a primary role or is the primary determining factor responsible for the cultural evolution. His materialist approach is evident in the following quote: "man as an animal species, and consequently culture as a whole, is dependent upon the material, mechanical means of adjustment to the natural environment."[5] This technological component can be described as material, mechanical, physical, and chemical instruments, as well as the way people use these techniques. White's argument on the importance of technology goes as follows:[6]
For White "the primary function of culture" and the one that determines its level of advancement is its ability to "harness and control energy."White's law states that the measure by which to judge the relative degree of evolvedness of culture was the amount of energy it could capture (energy consumption).
White differentiates between five stages of human development. At first, people use the energy of their own muscles. Second, they use the energy ofdomesticated animals. Third, they use the energy of plants (so White refers to agricultural revolution here). Fourth, they learn to use the energy of natural resources: coal, oil, gas. Fifth, they harnessnuclear energy. White introduced a formula,
whereE is a measure of energy consumed per capita per year,T is the measure of efficiency in using energy harnessed, andP represents the degree of cultural development in terms of product produced. In his own words: "the basic law of cultural evolution" was "culture evolves as the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year is increased, or as the efficiency of the instrumental means of putting the energy to work is increased".[6] Therefore, "we find that progress and development are effected by the improvement of the mechanical means with which energy is harnessed and put to work as well as by increasing the amounts of energy employed".[5] Although White stops short of promising that technology is the panacea for all the problems that affect mankind, liketechnological utopians do, his theory treats the technological factor as the most important factor in theevolution of society and is similar to ideas in the later works ofGerhard Lenski, the theory of theKardashev scale, and some notions oftechnological singularity.
