Leslie White founded evolutionary anthropology school based on Lewis Henry Morgan

Charles Brown


Problem with White's historical materialism was he based it in physics ( human efficiency in energy capture ; human ability to counter to second law of thermodynamics) ; _and not in Natural Historical Evolution or species population growth /Darwinian Fitness_ .



His student well known for writing on White's evolutionary theory of efficiency of energy capture , and general and specific evolution of cultures , Marshall Sahlins , self-critically broke with White's energy capture thesis , but did not take up Natural Historical -Darwinian analysis-synthesis , because rightwing Social Darwinisms ( Spencer , sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, white supremacy ) dominated that field.

However , importantly and critically , White and Sahlins championed fiercely SYMBOLIC SIGN COMMUNICATION AS THE DIFFERENTIA SPECIFICA OF HUMAN BEINGS. This is profoundly correct . I have developed very much anthropological science based in Darwinian-Blackwellian human Natural History and Evolution; and White-Sahlins-LeviStraussian Structural Anthropology and Semiotics.



(In anthroplogical intellectual kindhip , I consider myself Son of Sahlins and Grandson of Leslie White - smiles)


Here is Sahlins on his sublation- overcoming and preserving - of White's historical materialism ( my position is a negation of Sahlins's negation White's materialist physics determinism; mine is Marxist Natural History determinism with more human natural history knowledge than Darwin , Marx and Engels had)


https://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/magazine/21DubaiSIDE-t.html Sept. 19, 2008 In the pre-’60s at the University of Michigan, rebellion consisted of listening gleefully to the anthropologist Leslie White going mano a mano with God. White was one of those maverick intellectuals and politicians, like Thorstein Veblen, Charles Beard and Robert La Follette, who came out of the rural American heartland to off the pieties-and powers-that-be. Some of these intellectuals were village atheists from the beginning. Others, like White, only shook off the idiocies of rural life when they went to the city and the university.


We never knew White was a member of the Socialist Labor Party in the ’30s and early ’40s, contributing articles to The Weekly People under the name John Steel. Nor could you have guessed from his so-Americanized version of Marxism: a theory of cultural evolution based singularly on technological progress. Progress in the Neolithic, he claimed, came from the increase in the amount of energy harnessed per capita because of plant and animal domestication. He was not amused when I objected that energy “per capita” was the same as in the Old Stone Age, since the primary mechanical source remained the human body.



( CB: Come to think of it , after all these years of hearing Sahlins's critique, White's formula would have some validity if we just use "energy harnessed " period -no "per capta" )


Sahlins continues : "On the other hand, I have never repudiated White’s concept of culture as a thoroughly symbolic phenomenon. I never tired of repeating his dictum that no ape can appreciate the difference between holy water and distilled water — because there is none, chemically speaking. That, for me, resolved the contradiction in his own teaching and that of the many human scientists who separate culture from practical activity, as if the symbolic dimension of economic behavior were an afterthought of the material. The “economic basis” of society is culturally constructed. Even our supposedly “rational choices” are based on another, meaningful logic that, for example, makes steak a more prestigious food than hamburger, or women’s clothes different in significant ways from men’s. It turns out that materialism is a form of idealism, because it’s wrong, too.


Marshall Sahlins is an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago and the author most recently of “The Western Illusion of Human Nature.”



https://anthropology.iresearchnet.com/leslie-a-white/

WHITE, LESLIE A. fig.1White accepted an appointment at the University of Buffalo in 1927. Following a visit to a nearby Seneca Indian Reservation, White read Lewis Henry Morgan’s League of the Iroquois. Morgan’s evolutionary ideas resonated with White and he read the works of other evolutionary theorists including Herbert Spenser and Edward B. Tylor. White joined the faculty of the University of Michigan following the retirement of Julian Steward in 1930. Despite tensions with other faculty and administration, he stayed at Michigan until his retirement in 1970. During his tenure, the institution was transformed into one of the leading centers for anthropological teaching and research in the country.



White became a prolific writer while at Michigan, publishing The Science of Culture (1949), The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome (1959), and The Concept of Culture (1973). The Science of Culture is widely regarded as White’s most important work and outlines his ideas about the relationship between culture, culturology (the scientific study of culture), and cultural evolution. According to White, the primary force in cultural evolution is technology and a culture advances as “the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year increases or as the efficiency or means of controlling energy is increased.” As technology becomes more efficient (and more energy is harnessed), the social structure and ideological norms of the society change accordingly.


In addition to his writings on evolution, White continued his lifelong interest in Lewis Henry Morgan and wrote several volumes on Morgan’s research and life. These include Excerpts From the European Travel Journal of Lewis H. Morgan (1937) and Pioneers in American Anthropology: The Bandelier-Morgan Letters 1837—1883 (1940). He was also an avid field researcher who published several monographs including The Acoma Indians (1932), The Pueblo of San Felipe (1932), and The Pueblo of Santa Ana, New Mexico (1942).


White retired from the University of Michigan in 1970. Following his retirement, White moved to Santa Barbara and continued writing at the University of California. On March 31, 1975, he died of a heart attack. White will be remembered as a “neo-evolutionist” who reintroduced the concept of evolution into anthropological theory.


References: Bohannan, P., & Glazer, M. (1988). High points in anthropology. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Marcus, G. E., & Fischer, M. M. J. (1986). Anthropology as cultural critique: An experimental moment in the human sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morgan, L. H. (1960). The league of the Iroquois. New York: Corinth Books. Service, E. (1976). Leslie Alvin White 1900-1975. American Anthropologist, 78, 612-617. White, L. A. (1949). The science of culture: A study of man and civilization. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Inc. White, L. A. (1973). The concept of culture. Minneapolis: Burgess Publishing Company

Yes, Morgan's Societas / Civitas distinction is still fundamental in anthropology all the way to White's student Sahlins.

Societas is the Stone Age; phylogenetically based kinship organizes society. With Civitas is the origin of the male supremacist family , private property and the state, a la Engels.

On Jan 23, 2017, at 8:13 PM, Jim Farmelant < wrote: No mention that White was a member of the Socialist Labor Party and that his neoevolutionism was in large degree inspired by his readings of Engels and of Lewis Henry Morgan, the 19th century American anthropologist, who studied American Indian tribes, andwas a friend of Charles Darwin, and whose work was admired by Darwin, Marx & Engels, and Freud, ---------- Original Message ---------- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leslie-A-White Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2017 15:23:47 -0500 White considered his greatest contribution to anthropology to be his conception of culturology, outlined in a series of essays called The Science of Culture (1949). By culturology, White meant the application to culture of the organismic analogy of structure-function that Herbert Spencer had applied to society. This approach to culture was philosophically materialistic and nonreductionist. However, White was never a social Darwinist, and he opposed Spencer’s interpretations of the Darwinian terms “competition” and “survival of the fittest.” He promoted Tylor’s definition of culture and denied that cultural variation derived from racial differences among humans.