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Feb 20, 2021 · In the 20 th century, “culture” emerged as a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of human phenomena that cannot be attributed to genetic inheritance. Specifically, the term “culture” in American anthropology had two meanings: (1) the evolved human capacity to classify and represent experiences with symbols, and to ...
Aug 16, 2020 · They famously identified over 100 definitions of culture that were in use during the early 20th century across varied academic fields, including history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and psychology.
- Catherine Raeff, Allison DiBianca Fasoli, Vasudevi Reddy, Michael F. Mascolo
- 2020
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Apr 14, 2021 · These perennial, age-old fears lend urgency to the need to understand youth culture, and they provide hints as to why social scientists—in the fields that developed late in the nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries, such as psychology, sociology, and social work—studied youth culture for decades before historians took it seriously.
- Overview
- Unilinear theory
cultural evolution, the development of one or more cultures from simpler to more complex forms. In the 18th and 19th centuries the subject was viewed as a unilinear phenomenon that describes the evolution of human behaviour as a whole. It has since been understood as a multilinear phenomenon that describes the evolution of individual cultures or societies (or of given parts of a culture or society).
Unilinear cultural evolution was an important concept in the emerging field of anthropology during the 18th and 19th centuries but fell out of favour in the early 20th century. Scholars began to propagate theories of multilinear cultural evolution in the 1930s, and these neoevolutionist perspectives continue, in various forms, to frame much of the research undertaken in physical anthropology and archaeology, the branches of anthropology that focus on change over time.
The Age of Discovery introduced 15th- and 16th-century Europeans to a wide variety of “primitive” cultures. Almost immediately, European intellectuals began efforts to explain how and why the human condition had come to be so diverse. Although the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes was very much mistaken when he described indigenous peoples as living in conditions in which there were “no arts, no letters, no society” and experiencing life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” his description encapsulates the era’s popular conception of the “savage.” Ignoring or unaware of a variety of facts—many indigenous peoples enjoyed a much better standard of living than European peasants, for instance—Hobbes and other scholars posited that everything that was good and civilized resulted from the slow development away from this “lowly” state and toward the “higher” state represented by the cultures of Europe. Even rationalistic philosophers such as Voltaire implicitly assumed that the “upward” progress of humankind was part of the natural order.
This Enlightenment notion that there was, in fact, a “natural order” derived from the philosophers of ancient Greece, who had described the world as comprising a Great Chain of Being—a view in which the world is seen as complete, orderly, and susceptible to systematic analysis. As a result, scholarship during the Enlightenment emphasized categorization and soon produced various typologies that described a series of fixed stages of cultural evolution.
Most focused on three major stages, but some posited many more categories. For instance, in his Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1795; Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind), the Marquis de Condorcet listed 10 stages, or “epochs,” of cultural evolution. He posited that the final epoch had begun with the French Revolution and was destined to usher in universal human rights and the perfection of the human race. The Danish archaeologist Christian Jürgenson Thomsen is widely acknowledged as the first scholar to have based such a typology on firm data rather than speculation. In Ledetraad til nordisk Oldkyndighed (1836; A Guide to Northern Antiquities), he categorized ancient European societies on the basis of their tools, calling the developmental stages the Stone, Bronze, and Iron ages.
In the later 19th century, theories of cultural evolution were enormously influenced by the wide acceptance of the theory of biological evolution put forward by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species (1859). Social scientists found that the framework suggested by biological evolution offered an attractive solution to their questions regarding the origins and development of social behaviour. Indeed, the idea of a society as an evolving organism was a biological analogy that was taken up by many anthropologists and sociologists and that persisted in some quarters even into the 20th century.
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Cultural evolution is an evolutionary theory of social change. It follows from the definition of culture as "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation and other forms of social transmission". [1] .
A Historical Sketch of Sociological Theory: The Early Years. Chapter Summary. Classical sociological theories are theories of great scope and ambition that either were created in Europe between the early 1800s and the early 1900s or have their roots in the culture of that period.
The early 19 th century saw great changes with the Industrial Revolution, increased mobility, and new kinds of employment. It was also a period of increased trade, travel, and globalization that exposed many people — for the first time—to societies and cultures other than their own.
