12 Evolutionary Cultural Materialism in the American Century

1. Introduction: THE REBIRTH OF EVOLUTIONARY MATERIALISM

With the arrival of Boasian cultural anthropology in the early 20th century, the Long Decade of the 1860s seemed far away. The work of Lewis Henry Morgan and Edward Tylor felt antiquated. Darwin, too, was set aside – not simply in anthropology, but across the sciences prior to the Modern Synthesis of genetics and natural selection in the 1930s. Marx had long been a hidden presence, but particularly in the United States, he was not discussed at American universities. Most of all, the ethnocentrism of 19th century writings – organized around a purported ascent from savagery, through barbarism, to civilization – seemed to express a world of prejudice that anthropology had left far behind.

But beginning in the 1930s, two disaffected cultural anthropologists would critique Boasian anthropology and offer alternatives that resembled and sometimes indeed found inspiration in 19th century anthropology. Marx would remain hidden, but his intellectual presence would be significant. By 1945, this new approach – operating again under the banner of social evolution – would catch the winds powering the rapid growth of anthropology. Darwin, too, would return, this time as a critique of racial typologies. By 1970, what we can most descriptively call neo-evolutionary cultural materialism defined the center of anthropology as a scientific enterprise. It brought together cultural anthropologists, archaeologists, and physical anthropologists in a unified field.

It is important to note that the anthropologists who worked in this perspective did not feel that they were on a mission to revive ethnocentrism. They believed they had cast out the prejudices of the 19th century, while restoring what was sound. That said, stressing the autonomous, scientific nature of their enterprise, an enterprise housed in museums and university classrooms, contributed to the long division between communities studied and anthropological researchers.

This chapter will introduce the key thinkers and ideas involved in neo-evolutionary cultural materialism, and the relationship between this perspective in cultural anthropology, and the development of the New Archeology and the New Physical Anthropology. Because we have been heavily titled toward sociocultural approaches, wee will start with the New Archeology. We will then discuss the New Physical Anthropology, before entering into a lengthy analysis of cultural materialism.

2. The New Archeology

We have not, so far, given much attention to archaeology. This reflects both my professional interests, which are mainly sociocultural, but also the uneven and often divergent development of the sub-fields of anthropology. That said, both the divergence and the unevenness can be overstated. In this section we will sketch key developments in the history of archaeology, and then focus our attention on archaeology at during the middle decades of the 20th century, and the rapid rise of the New Archeology during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

2.1 The Long Slow Rise of Archaeological Science

The maturation of archaeology is tied to the growth of the natural sciences, and for archaeology, the key partner has long been geology. While it is true that the goals of geologists and archaeologists diverge, as the Scottish prehistorian Daniel Wilson (1816-1892) noted way back in 1862, it is also true that without geology archaeology has little to stand on (Kehoe, 1998:52). In fact, by the start of the long decade of the 1860s, Wilson and his colleagues had applied geology instructively to questions of the human past. Their work produced a slow realization that not only was the earth old, as geologists affirmed, but the human presence on earth was also old, and the past differed from the present (Trigger, 1989).

Gaining these insights required heavy borrowing from geology. First, archaeologists recognized the utility of the geological concept of relative dating, which makes the seemingly modest claim that one layer of sediment is older than another. If Artifact A is found in a layer of sediment below Artifact B, it seems reasonable to infer that A is older than B. And if Artifact C is found in the same layer as Artifact B, it is likewise reasonable to infer that they are both younger than A, and also contemporary to one another. Reasoning of just this sort created the shocking realization that human remains found with stone tools and the bones of extinct fauna were contemporaries, and humans had once hunted extinct animals.

The simplicity of such a claim can easily be overstated: geological processes are neat and tidy, and awareness of this weakness in the chain of inference led a Danish antiquarian named Christian Jürgensen Thomsen (1788 – 1865) to develop a technique called seriation. Seriation is based on regular shifts in the frequencies of particular categories or types of artifacts (see Figure 3-A below). Given the coordinated shifting in the presence of Artifact 1 and Artifact 2, the association between the stratigraphic and architectural sequences are less likely to be arbitrary.

Figure 1 Seriation

303.5 Figure 1 Seriation

Another important concept borrowed from geology is uniformitarianism. The principle of uniformitarianism states that it is possible to reason from the observable present to past processes which can no longer be directly observed. As Charles Lyell put it in his Principles of Geology in 1830: “to explain the former changes of the Earth’s surface by reference to causes now in operation.” Darwin applied uniformitarianism to argue that the ability of pigeon breeders to produce variant strains through artificially selecting breeding pairs across a relatively small number of generations could be extrapolated to recognize the capacity of natural selection to generate variant strains through differential adaptation to food sources, predation pressure, and other processes.

2.2 Archaeology as Ethnology: From Morgan to Boas

Beyond this capacity to find chronological and classificatory order (and the wide adoption of Thomsen’s three age model: stone, bronze, and iron) it’s fair to say that archaeologists accomplished relatively little on the methodological front over the next century. The most important development was at once conceptual and ideological: integrating archaeological findings with ethnological analogues.

The basic assumption of the nineteenth century ethnologists, as we have seen, was that it was possible to observe the European past by observing contemporary ways of life that had survived from antiquity. What the Scottish ethnologist John McLennan called “unequal development” made possible what the French ethnologist Joseph Marie de Gérando called “philosophical time travel.” The capacity of living peoples to represent the human past at once made archaeological collections redundant and valuable: if stratigraphic excavations produced the same sequences as ethnological comparisons, both were strengthened.

Not all 19th century antiquarians were focused on stratigraphy and seriation, and excavations were rarely careful. For many – perhaps most – the basic work of the antiquarians was to locate and collect objects of interest, and then transport them back to a museum where they could be arranged in compelling displays that drew the support of both wealthy patrons and the public at large. There was, thus, a strong symbiosis between archaeological digs and museum displays. The collections of artifacts that were produced were very sizable. Arguably, a lot of damage was done to potentially rich archaeological resources to feed the curiosity of the public and retain the support of patrons.

Museum displays, and the rhetoric of the field, communicated two lessons:

1. Prehistorians document extinct life ways that belong to the past, have no vitality in the present, and no existence in the future.
2. There are decisive breaks between contemporary Native people and antiquarian materials in their vicinity.

The first statement reflects a view that was shared by 19th century ethnologists and antiquarians alike. Modern, contemporary, colonizing peoples live in the present and own the future. Colonized people remain in the past and have no future other than assimilation or extermination. Because assimilation and extermination break any link between present and past, colonized peoples have no claim to the past.

The second statement is more specific to archaeology, because it disconnects archaeological collections from living peoples, and transfers their curation and display to prehistorians. In some cases, this dissociation was achieved by asserting that the contemporary occupants of the land have no connection to its antiquities, as was the case for the “mound builders” of the eastern United States (Sayre, 1998). In other cases, it was achieved through unquestioned inequalities, as when Native workers were hired as manual laborers paid to excavate the past dwellings of their own people.

2.3 Boasian Archaeology

You will recall that the Boasians rejected progressive stage models and the reduction of museum displays to narratives of the rise of civilization. This introduced a conceptual revolution into archaeology, but the results were usually unspectacular. The same basic methods were utilized, but the displays were altered. Rather than documenting a universal movement from savagery through barbarism to civilization, the goal of the Boasian curator was to add historical depth and material richness to the documentation of historical peoples.

One of the most spectacular results was the Northwest Coast Hall at the American Museum of Natural History. Boas played a central role in the collection of the materials and the organization of the displays. Rather than stages, the logic of the display is geographic and ethnic. Each historical people is associated with artifacts, some the result of excavations, others the results of purchases or unlawful takings from living communities. That last point is critical, as we will see in a later module. Despite the divide in moral vision between the anthropologists of Morgan’s era and the Boasians, all alike operated on the assumption that the materials they collected belonged to the institutions they represented – and more grandly to humanity as a whole.

But the work of Boas to build the Northwest Coast Hall was unusual. As we have noted, most Boasians had little interest in archaeology. Consider the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California. From the beginning, a large share of their collections – which reached 230,000 items by the time Hearst died in 1919, and are close to one million today –  came from around the world. In recent years, the collection has been attributed to Alfred Kroeber – who, you will recall – is often named as the first Boasian. But Kroeber was a minor source of materials. He primarily donated recordings of interviews and photographs. He left the archaeological work to the archaeologists, and he considered that work to require a kind of rough and ready outdoorsman skill set more than scholarly preparation.

The museum actually functioned as a storehouse for treasures collected by antiquarians . Kroeber accepted their donations in order to retain the patronage of Phoebe Elizabeth Apperson Hearst (1842-1919). Hearst’s financial largess supported not just the museum, but the Department of Anthropology and the larger university as well. One of Kroeber’s few forays into archaeology occurred in 1913, when Hearst demanded more materials from Native Californians and provided a small budget. At the time, an interesting character named Llewellyn Lemont Loud was working as a museum custodian. Loud was an autodidact, self-taught in archaeology, who was allowed to sit in free on lectures and took a great interest in the materials. In December 1912, and again in July 1913, Kroeber sent Mr. Loud out on short expeditions, with instructions to make a quick visual survey. He was to note locations but make no collections, and most importantly, not to excavate.

Loud completely disregarded Kroeber’s instructions. Not only did he collect and excavate, he requested additional funds on a regular basis to ship the materials back and cover his time. Their correspondence survived. Loud memorably signed each request “Yours for the revolution.” Kroeber did not fire Loud. Indeed, Loud went on to become a permanent fixture at the Hearst Museum, and a “legendary” fieldworker among California and Nevada archaeologists (Lantier and Tushingham, 2017). He published a handful of archaeological reports. Kroeber wrote Loud’s obituary after his death in 1946, describing him as a “preparator, guard, janitor, and unofficial field archaeologist, and combinations of these activities.” He noted also that Loud was known for his intellectual independence, self sufficiency, and solitary nature.

Boasian anthropology was not, by any means, a major moment in American archaeology. There seems to be wide agreement among historians of archaeology that the discipline languished in the early 20th century and became reduced to collecting objects and organizing them for display. That was soon to change.

2.4 Walter Taylor’s New Archeology

The first shot fired in the revolution that would dramatically change archaeology came from Walter W. Taylor (1913-1997). In 1948, Taylor published a revision of his dissertation, titled A Study of Archeology. That is not a misspelling. For a time,  dropping the “a” such that archaeology became archeology marked allegiance with a new movement claiming to mark a decisive break with the past.  Taylor certainly pulled no critical punches. The archaeologist and intellectual historian Alice Kehoe summarizes Taylor’s work thus (Kehoe, 1998: 97):

Neither before nor since has there ever been such a merciless exposure of cant, braggadocio, formulaic pronouncements, and naive or unthinking procedures. Blood flowed in torrents from a host of gored oxen.

Perhaps Taylor’s critique of the leaders of his field was so unrelenting because he had been severely injured, and then held as a prisoner of war, by the German military. He had no patience left. That said, he also found many problems with existing practices. At the time, archaeology lacked both theoretical interest and orienting questions. It was simply “a set of techniques for retrieving data” and the data really was not data at all: it amounted to classification for the sake of classification (Kehoe, 1998). At its highest level, “traits” were assigned to “cultures” and cultures little more than the arbitrary recognition of a certain number of traits.  Thanks to the support of the cultural anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn and others, Taylor obtained academic employment at Southern Illinois University after a decade of marginalization.

2.5 Archeology as Evolutionary Cultural Materialism 

The next blow to the established practice of interwar archaeology came in 1962, when Lewis Binford (1931-2011) published a paper titled “Archaeology as Anthropology.” Binford was difficult to ignore. Binford’s New Archeology promised to transform archeology from pottery collecting to a science that would contribute to anthropological knowledge. The new archeologists wanted to develop scientific explanations of human behavior based on archeological evidence.

It is important to understand that when Binford wrote about anthropology, he did not mean Boasian anthropology.  He meant neo-evolutionary cultural materialism. Binford studied with Leslie White at Michigan, and he embraced White’s vision of a science of culture. An important theme in the New Archeology was that archeology contributed to ethnological insight, and vice versa. Although Binford remained the leader of the movement, momentum grew as the new Boomer generation entered universities in the late 1960s, reaching full force after 1968 (Binford and Binford, 1968).

2.5.1 Emulating Hempel (sort of)

Inspired at a step removed by Leslie White, the New Archeology largely embraced the same basic concepts as neo-evolutionary materialism in sociocultural anthropology. But there was one significant difference. While cultural materialists revived Marx and Morgan, and made a materialist approach to theory the core of their claims to scientific soundness, the new archeologists developed an intense interest in the philosophy of science and the nature of scientific explanation (Watson, LeBlanc, and Redman, 1971). A rather obscure German philosopher of science named Carl Hempel (1905-1997) became the unexpected hero of the movement.  It is an interesting question whether or not Hempel was aware of his celebrity among American archeologists. I suspect he was not.

In his writings, Hempel advanced what he called a “hypothetico-deductive” model of science. He insisted that all real science is deductive. By this he meant that science starts with theories, and research involves deriving and testing hypotheses that can “operationalize” those theories and expose them to the friction of the world. It really doesn’t matter how the theory emerges – whether from a dream or from reading Hamlet. All that matters is whether a theory can generate testable hypotheses (Hempel, 1966). This meant that soaking in the data to develop insights – a beloved practice of many historians and anthropologists – really wasn’t necessary.

There were actually several steps involved in getting from concept to hypothesis. The first step was formulating an abstract theory. One could, for example, define culture as an extra genetic adaptation, and then define adaptation as the material processes by which any living thing solves its problems of survival. The next step was deriving covering laws, or potentially testable propositions that can be logically deduced from more abstract theoretical frameworks. A cultural materialist might suggest that humans organize work so as to maximize caloric returns from their efforts, for example. The challenge is then to reformulate the covering law as a hypothesis that makes a testable prediction. One might, for instance, examine an array of food cultigens, each requiring an input of effort and providing an output of calories. A reasonable prediction would be that people would gravitate on a seasonal basis toward cultigens with the highest return on effort. At an empirical level, one would have to measure caloric inputs and outputs in a satisfactory manner.

One test could never be definitive, and neither could one covering law. But as additional covering laws were developed, and as more testable hypotheses were tested, and as the results accorded with expectations, it would be reasonable to claim that incremental increases in confidence suggested you were on the right path. With convergence across methods and measures, the abstract theory – while not directly testable – could be considered more and more robust.

Hempel’s approach to scientific understanding was persuasive enough to make one think it might apply to archeology, and abstract enough to make doing so very difficult. If you examine the programmatic writings of the new archeologists, you will find mostly restatements of Hempel’s concepts (like my summary above) rather than applications to actual cases.  It proved, indeed, much easier to read Hempel and summarize his work than to actually put it into practice (Watson, LeBlanc and Redman, 1974). Perhaps in despair, archaeologists at the University of Arizona hired Merrilee Salmon, a philosopher of science, as a full time tenured faculty member. Her first major work – Philosophy and Archaeology – appeared in 1982 and focused on adapting the Hempelian framework for use by archaeologists.

2.5.2 Deduction + Statistical Sampling + Systems Theory = sound and fury?

If Hempel unintentionally contributed to the scientific hubris to the Boomer generation, that hubris was not the product of Hempel’s writings alone. The new archeologists also discovered statistical sampling and systems theory. Statistical sampling was actually introduced into archaeology in the 1950s, in a paper by Albert Spaulding (1914-1990). The major problem with Spaulding’s proposal (Spaulding, 1954), as later archaeologists realized, is that statistical analyses are based on the mathematics of probability, which requires that all instances of whoever or whatever you are sampling have an equal chance of being selected. The challenge was defining the universe of observations. As the archaeologist David Clarke later observed, sampling proved to be “exceedingly difficult for archaeologists” (Clarke, 1968: 551).

Systems theory reached the New Archeology somewhat later, in 1968. The conceptual framework of systems theory was invented by a mathematician and pioneering computer scientist named Norbert Wiener (1894 – 1964).  Wiener coined the word cybernetics in 1948, and the first and most basic cybernetic idea is that of a system: any set of elements connected in such a manner that a change in one produces changes in the others. For example, when information flows across elements connected in a systematic manner, we can speak of it as a system of communication.  More precisely, it is a rather special form of communication known as feedback. In a cybernetic system, there are two kinds of feedback. Positive feedback causes deviations in the system to grow constantly larger, it amplifies divergences. Negative feedback causes deviations to become progressively smaller. To understand the importance of the fact that deviations can be amplified or muted, we have to know that cybernetic thinking assumes that all systems  possess a point of homeostasis – a steady state. Positive feedback pushes the system away from homeostasis, while negative feedback pushes it back toward homeostasis. Together, they can maintain a stable system even while enabling manageable change.

Human body temperature provides a fine example. For an average human being, normal body temperature is 98.6 degrees. If your temperature rises above that point, whether due to exertion or to a viral infection, your body may respond by causing you to reduce your activity due to fatigue, and/or by causing your body to produce sweat which evaporates from your skin as your blood flows into your extremities. Exercise is thus a deviation amplifying force – it generates positive feedback that causes your physiological system to move away from its condition of homeostasis. Perspiring, on the other hand, is a deviation neutralizing force. It generates negative feedback that operates to bring your physiology back into normalcy and balance.

Everything works to return your body temperature to homeostasis. Presumably, if there is no negative feedback to counteract positive feedback, and your temperature continues to rise, your organs will ultimately fail, and you will die of hyperthermia. Systems can and do crash, and when they do, the result can be nasty. It may be worth noting that current climate change models are based on cybernetic principles.

It was certainly possible to think of past societies as systems – the organic analogy between the body and society was articulated by Emile Durkheim in the late nineteenth century. But it was unclear exactly what this meant. Kent Flannery created considerable excitement, but it was a very high level, low resolution sort of insight (Flannery, 1972). Plug systems theory into the Hempelian framework, and one could perhaps create covering laws related to positive and negative feedback. But despite considerable enthusiasm, no one really ever managed to achieve more than figurative insights. It was left to Merrilee Salmon to deliver the bad news (Salmon, 1978).

It is tempting to conclude that the New Archeology thus had a Shakesperian quality: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. But arguably there was something more accomplished. Archaeologists started wrestling with conceptual frameworks and the challenges of moving beyond the rhetoric of science to actually producing work that most scientists would recognize as such (Redman, 1991).

3. The New Physical Anthropology

Parallel to the New Archeology, a New Physical Anthropology also emerged in the postwar era. The New Physical Anthropology was led by Sherwood Washburn (1911-2000) and other young anthropologists. Washburn’s view of the old physical anthropology was similar to Walter Taylor’s view of the old archaeology: it amounted to bone collecting. But physical anthropologists took those bones and developed racial classifications. Generalizations that were spurious and generally untestable carried the potential for serious harm. Washburn wanted to bring physical anthropology into alignment with contemporary evolutionary biology, which had rejected racial typologies and was built on the Modern Synthesis of genetics and Darwinian evolution in the 1930s (Mikels-Carrasco, 2012).

Washburn particularly wanted to move beyond static, typological efforts to define races, a practice that had dominated the field since the 19th century. He set in motion what biologists termed a population approach to biological variation. From a population perspective, continuities across populations provided evidence of shared ancestry, while variation within populations provided the genetic fuel for adaptation. This belatedly aligned studies of human biological variation with the conceptual framework of Darwin and the statistical approach of Boas (Caspari, 2003)

Washburn also sought to focus more research on human behavioral evolution, and he supported efforts that went beyond the search for ancient fossils. He sought insights into human evolution that were informed by field studies of living primates (Washburn and Devore, 1963) as well as ethnographic studies of contemporary human societies whose subsistence was based on hunting and gathering. The latter efforts led to the famous and influential 1966 Man the Hunter conference which dramatically changed anthropological perspectives on foraging societies (Washburn and Lancaster, 1968).

In summary, the new physical anthropology combined current population approaches to human variation, with a renewed, expanded focus on the field observation of primate social life, and ethnographic studies of human foragers. The premise was that such studies might illuminate the deep evolutionary foundations of  human behavioral evolution. It brought together ethnographic studies of hunter gatherer livelihoods, field studies of primates, and deeper training of anthropologists in core biological competencies like population biology and genetics. As things worked out, a new approach to the evolution of behavior was developing in evolutionary biology, that would come to be called human behavioral ecology. But the enduring accomplishment of the New Physical Anthropology was the integration of physical anthropology into the biological sciences – notably signaled by renaming the sub-field biological anthropology.

There is much more to say, but much that has happened in biological anthropology is very new. We will examine a more dated development – human behavioral ecology – in the final chapter.

4. Leslie White and Julian Steward lead a Revolution in cultural anthropology

We turn now to the materialist revolution in cultural anthropology. Two figures were particularly prominent in this movement: Julian Seward (1902-1972) and Leslie White (1900-1975). Both White and Steward had deep Anglo-American roots, and both matured in important ways in the American West. Born two years apart, they died three years apart. Their professional paths crossed early in their careers: Steward founded the anthropology program at the University of Michigan in 1928, where he was succeeded by Leslie White in 1930. White spent the remainder of his career at Michigan – a remarkably long tenure that matches Kroeber’s at U.C. Berkeley – while Steward moved on. Most notably, White served as Chair at Columbia University between 1948 and 1953, mentoring a remarkably talented cohort of students. But White and Steward were rarely collaborators, except via their students. Many of Steward’s Columbia students – most supported by the G.I. Bill – became faculty in White’s Michigan department. Much as the core cohort of British social anthropologists studied with both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, the next generation of cultural materialists studied, on different occasions, with White and Steward, and with one another.

During their graduate studies, Steward and White had genuine, and genuinely conflictual, relationships with the Boasians. During the Depression, both received financial support from Elsie Clews Parsons, and both relied on fieldwork Parsons funded in the Southwest. In the absence of Parsons’ largess, it is unlikely either would have finished their studies. As a graduate student, Steward worked with Alfred Kroeber at the University of California, becoming the most prominent student of the most prominent Boasian. But Kroeber and Steward clashed on many points. Kroeber was committed to the argument that culture history reflected such complex causality that it could not be explained. For Kroeber there were no “laws” of culture. If any factor weighed more heavily than others, he thought it would be religion, art, and aesthetics. Although he completed a celebrated work linking cultural patterns to environmental differences in Native North America (Kroeber, 1939), Kroeber was skeptical of environmental adaptation as a determining factor.

Steward, for his part, was quite certain that some aspects of culture were much more important than others: culture might be complex, but causality was less so. His proposed conceptual language captured this: some aspects of culture were core features, while others were secondary features. Core features helped solve the adaptive challenges of reproduction and production. If you changed a core feature, there would be consequences. Technologies, and the organization of work, were particularly important, as was the distribution of resources in the environment. He retained the Boasian emphasis on historically unique outcomes – an approach that came to be called multilinear evolution to distinguish his thinking from White’s.

White’s relationship to the Boasians was more episodic and oblique. White studied psychology at Columbia University, and in doing so he crossed paths and attended seminars taught by Alexander Goldenweiser, one of Boas’s star students. Later, White studied sociology at the University of Chicago, and crossed paths with Edward Sapir, another star Boasian. It was Sapir who connected White with Parsons, and pressed for the acceptance of his dissertation against a highly skeptical audience of sociologists. The faculty in sociology at Chicago all held divinity degrees and were committed to Christian social reforms. Their skepticism, evidently, had to do with White’s avid atheism, and perhaps, as well, his embrace of socialism. Eventually, White would become the most virulent critic of Boasian anthropology, based partly on what he felt was the lack of any serious plan for social change.

Both White and Steward encountered Marxist thinking, and both were influenced by it. Steward noted later in his life that almost everyone read Marx during the Great Depression, trying to find a way forward (Hanc, 1980). But White’s commitment to socialism went much deeper than Stewards. White first encountered socialism on the docks of San Francisco, where he hung out with ship builders after returning from World War One on a hospital ship. Viewing the casualties of war, he embraced Pacifism. And from the dockyard workers, White learned about the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) and Lewis Henry Morgan. Morgan’s work had attracted the interest of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and was accepted into the Marxist canon. Daniel De Leon (1852-1914) the leader of the SLP, adopted Morgan’s Ancient Society as a distinctively American approach to the history. Thus White found shipwrights and sailors, dock workers and others, reading Morgan.

When he arrived at Columbia and encountered the Boasian’s, White was perplexed and disappointed to discover they held Morgan in disdain. He spent his lifetime gathering and publishing Morgan’s extant writings, including his field notes and travel journals. White also continued his membership in the SLP for many years, writing pieces for socialist newsletters under the pseudonym John Steele. White also made several trips to the Soviet Union, and returned impressed. As it happened, White’s version of economic determinism – which held that energy capture per capita drove cultural evolution, went astray of the Stalinist account, and he was forced out. Remarkably, White was never called before the HUAC, and the FBI took only glancing interest in him.

Much as the label of multilinear evolution was applied to Steward’s work, so unilinear evolution became attached to White’s (particularly by Robert Lowie, Kroeber’s colleague at Berkeley). To this date many discussions view this as the key difference between them, but it was largely epiphenomenal. White was drawn to abstract formulas and broad generalizations. Although he continued his ethnographic studies in the American Southwest, which began under the tutelage of Elsie Clews Parsons, for the rest of his life, he never applied his theories to his ethnographic findings. Steward, on the other hand, while not a diligent field worker, integrated his fieldwork into his conceptual writings.

In summary, we can say that beginning in the 1930s, Leslie White and Julian Steward began remaking 20th century anthropology in a manner that restored its alignment with the Long Decade of the 1860s. By 1960, the conceptual framework of the students who followed them was in some ways closer to Lewis Henry Morgan and Karl Marx than to Franz Boas or Bronislaw Malinowski. Steward and White, each in his own way, advocated a return to models of material causality, placing technology and economic life at the core of culture. Most importantly, where the Boasians saw thousands historically unique traditions, Steward and White saw cross-cultural regularities that made it possible to classify human cultural diversity into a relatively small set of types.

During the 1960s, the students of Steward and White developed neo-evolutionary taxonomies that have proven to be very resilient in textbooks introducing cultural anthropology. If you have taken an introductory course, they are probably familiar to you. White led the way by sorting food systems into foraging, horticulture, pastoralism, and pre-industrial intensive agriculture, in a manner reminiscent of the Scottish Enlightenment (White, 1959). Later, Steward’s students added corresponding classifications of economies, polities, and social structures. Marshall Sahlins built on the work of Karl Polnyi to classify economic systems into three categories: reciprocal gift economies, redistributive economies, and peasant markets (Sahlins, 1968). Morton Fried likewise captured essential features of social inequality with three categories: egalitarian, ranked, and stratified (Fried, 1967). Lastly, Elman Service sorted political variation into a four stage typology of bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states (Service, 1971). Only art and religion seemed to resist such ordering. Rather than an endless series of unique experiments defying classification, as the Boasians held, the neo-evolutionists argued that the comparative study of human societies revealed complex patterned progressions that were ultimately determined by technology, energy, and food.

5. MARVIN HARRIS AND CULTURAL Materialism

Cultural materialism was a distinctively American development that spread slowly and incompletely to Great Britain, and never really took root in France or elsewhere. Although the revival of taxonomic sequences and materialist explanations was initially led by Leslie White and Julian Steward, during the 1960s Marvin Harris (1927-2001) emerged as the most prominent proponent of neo-evolutionary materialism. Harris held the Chair in Anthropology at Columbia until 1980. He called his approach cultural materialism, and he was insistent that it was the  best path forward for anthropology.

His first major work, published in 1968, was a theoretical history that narrated the rise of anthropology as a science (Harris, 1968). As Harris viewed it, the history of anthropology had a clear story to tell. On the one hand, there were thinkers who led anthropology off course, including the German Romantics and the Boasians. He called these misguided souls obscurantists. On the other hand, there were thinkers who saw the way forward, including Morgan, White,  Steward, and himself. In later statements of his position (Harris, 1980) he continued to champion cultural materialism and dismiss alternatives. Two alternatives to cultural materialism particularly drew his ire. On the one hand, he dismissed what he called cultural idealism for abandoning the generalizing theory and retreating from science. On the other hand, he rejected science that would extend evolutionary biology to the explanation of modern human behavior. Darwinian evolution mattered, but only in the past. Once modern humans evolved, human history was cultural history.

This is an important point. Despite his frequent use of the word “evolution” and his emphasis on behavior over culture, cultural materialism was rooted in economic materialism, not biological evolution. Put differently, Harris was much closer to Marx and Morgan than to Darwin. And like Leslie White and Julian Steward, he remained an advocate of cultural theory that excluded any form of biological causation that went beyond environmental factors like the availability of protein in human diets. Harris’ discomfort with biological approaches to behavior became very clear during the 1970s, when cultural materialists collided with new behavioral approaches in evolutionary anthropology. From the perspective of Harris and most cultural materialists, any mention of genes risked reviving the recently defeated demon of Nazi anthropology. The idea that one could study the biological foundations of behavior without an intent to revive racism was beyond his imagination. He was not alone in that sentiment. Today that may seem puzzling, but context matters: in 1970, as sociobiology gathered momentum, the end of World War Two was just 25 years in the past. It would fall to the baby boom generation to make the study of biological approaches to human behavior acceptable again.

5.1 Cultural Materialism and Cultural Infrastructures

To explain cultural materialism, we need to understand two basic concepts: the idea that anthropology is an etic science, and the idea that anthropology is the scientific study of cultural infrastructures. Let’s start with the latter. In the history of anthropology there are few ideas as influential as the concept of infrastructure. The concept has impacted anthropology on several related but distinct occasions. Differences apart, all have some debt to economic materialism and technological determinism. The concept of infrastructure most familiar to twentieth century anthropologists derives from the thinking of Karl Marx. His concept of mode of production has been particularly influential. Harris, it bears noting, was never an enthusiast for Marxism. But he found much value in Marx’s work, suitably modified.

Between 1960 and 1980, Harris described modes of production as having three layers:

Visually, these three layers convey levels of causal primacy: the infrastructure places constraints on what is possible in the political structure, and the political structure in turn limits what is thinkable in the world of ideas. To the degree that there is alignment between the three layers, people will lead their lives without awareness of the forces that shape their way of life. But when the layers are out of alignment, social conflict will develop and people will become aware that life is out of balance. This model was part of Leslie White’s lectures at Michigan for many decades, and indeed it is sometimes referred to as the Michigan layer cake model of culture.

Of the three components that make up a culture, the most fundamental is the infrastructure: it provides the foundation or base of the mode of production. It is consistent with Marx’s general metaphor to think of an infrastructure as the foundation of a building. The political structure is at once supported – and thus made possible – and constrained by the infrastructure. You can of course frame structures that differ in some ways on the same foundation, but you cannot build anything you want. This sense of determinism – that the infrastructure “selects” an aligned political structure – is key to the interest of anthropologists in Marx’s theory of modes of production.  To complete our analogy, the ideological superstructure might be thought of as relatively cosmetic features like the paint and trim. Julian Steward lacked a visualization, but it is clear that he placed the interplay of resources and technologies, and the resulting organization of work, at the base of any social order. Every part of the infrastructure, in this sense, was a core feature of culture: a feature that could not vary arbitrarily because any change to the core impacted the society as a whole.

Making sense of the top of the layer cake presented the most troubles. Marx and Engels invested considerable energy developing a critique of the notion that the history of humanity is a history of ideas. In doing so they referred to their opponents as idealists and to their own work as materialism. It seems clear that despite the weight given to ideology in actually existing socialist regimes, Marx viewed ideology as ancillary to the real causal forces at work in human life. In fact, Marx developed the concept of mode of production as a critique of German philosophers like G.W.F. Hegel, who saw history as the history of ideas, and radicals who Marx dismissed as “utopian socialists” (e.g., Ludwig Feuerbach, who focused his efforts on the critique of religion). Hegel and Feuerbach exemplified idealist perspectives, because they thought that human societies were powered by worldview and belief systems. Feuerbach pressed an atheist argument humans created gods rather than vice versa. Marx agreed, but he rejected the proposal that meaningful social change could come from attacking religious beliefs. Marx famously called religion “the opiate of the masses” – but he did so because he felt that, like opium, religion took people’s pain away. In Marx’s view, it was fruitless to try to simply remove a spiritual opiate. The real question was why people were in pain, and thus in need of an imaginary god, in the first place. The answer was exploitation – and exploitation was an outcome of how the economic infrastructure was organized, rather than religious beliefs. To end exploitation, change must happen at the infrastructural level – in the social relations of production and forces of production. The forces of production are the technologies available to produce material life, while the social relations of production refer to how the production process is organized. For example: Who controls the distribution of costs and benefits? Do private individuals control the production process, or collective organizations? Is production for individual gain, or for the greater good?

Harris’s cultural materialism was a little different. In defining the concept of a cultural infrastructure, Harris began with the argument that culture could be conceptualized as an extragenetic adaptation. Adaptation in turn refers to how a community solves its problems of survival, which consist of the need to subsist in the short run, and the need to reproduce in the longer run. Thus all human communities have to develop food systems and family systems. But although adaptation is a human universal, adaptive systems vary in patterned ways across human societies. Like other neo-evolutionary thinkers, Harris felt that these patterns could be captured through typologies like bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states. One could start at the bottom, with a taxonomy of human food systems:

Typology of Human Food Systems

These categories were not new. They first came into use in the 18th century, particularly in the Scottish enlightenment. But 20th century anthropologists had a lot more empirical research to build on, and they created more complex causal models. The concept of cultural infrastructures made it possible to work up from the bottom:

Michigan “Layer Cake” Model

Food production is closely related to demographic characteristics (population density, age and sex ratios, settlement size, relative mobility), as well as the division of labor, and the organization of work. These factors, in turn, impose limits on sociopolitical systems:

NEO-EVOLUTIONARY TAXONOMY of Kinship, Socio-Political Systems, Economies, and Religions

There were many problems with these efforts at cross-cultural typologies. The correlations were often weak, the causality hard to explain, and the categories could not contain the variation they were meant to capture. Thus foragers were not always egalitarian, and their kinship systems were not always bilateral. Archaeology has revealed that some hunter gatherers produced monumental architecture (e.g., Poverty Point in Louisiana) and lived in stratified societies (e.g, the Calusa of Florida) that sometimes included brutal systems of slavery (e.g., the North Pacific coast of North America).

In addition to troubles with the categories, there were troubles with reading them as chronologies. But whatever their limits, the food based typologies revealed patterns across tremendous cultural variation and powered narratives about directional change: as one moved from foraging to industrialism, populations grew and became more sedentary and urban, and they also became more unequal across multiple dimensions.

But what explains those patterns of variation?

Like Leslie White and Julian Steward, Harris felt that food production had an outsized impact on human social, economic, and political organization. Because it was so fundamental, food production was part of the cultural infrastructure. Demographic characteristics were also infrastructural, and they included population density, community scale, and settlement patterns, as well as the age and gender of people in the society.

5.2 Cultural Materialism AS AN ETIC SCIENCE

If the basic theoretical framework of cultural materialism is captured by the concept of infrastructures, the methodology of the approach rests on he idea that anthropology is an etic science. By methodology, we mean an answer to this question: How should we study cultural infrastructures?

Cultural materialism prioritized specific kinds of research questions and field methods. Researchers needed to ask questions that revealed infrastructures. For example, they needed accurate numbers on land use and labor investments in farming, as well as the density and geographic distribution of settlements. These questions should be approached as scientific questions intended to produce etic data.

Harris borrowed the concept of etic data from linguistics (Harris, 1976).  The root of the contrast comes from the work of a linguist named Kenneth Pike (Pike, 1955). Pike noted that although most people could tell you whether you were pronouncing a sound in their language correctly, they could not explain  how to correct a mispronunciation. Linguists, however, had developed an approach called articulatory phonetics, which enabled them to specify how the sounds of a language are produced through the careful examination of the position of the tongue, whether the mouth is open or closed, whether air is ejected, and other criteria. Pike contrasted phonetics to phonemics, or the study of how people perceive the sounds of their language. His key insight, which went back to Boas, was that there was a gap between a phonemic and a phonetic account of a language. Native speakers provided emic accounts, while linguists developed etic accounts. Pike later used the distinction for other purposes, including the difference between being able to participate in and understand particular speech events in social context, as opposed to grasping general rules that transcend situated events (Pike, 1993).

Harris found Pike’s distinction compelling, and developed his own take on it that is more about knowledge in general than linguistics. For Harris, knowledge is emic when we possess it and can communicate it. We articulate and share emic knowledge with the people around us. In doing field research then, an anthropologist might ask people to share their knowledge of the world around them. The result of such inquiries will be emic understanding, an ability to grasp what Bronislaw Malinowski called the native’s point of view (Malinowski, 1922). Harris felt strongly that while such knowledge is of great interest, it is not science. In doing emic research, anthropologists are, in fact, adding to the body of non-scientific knowledge. Just as most fluent speakers of languages cannot explain how they produce the sounds in their language, there is a lot of cultural knowledge they cannot share. It might be below their conscious awareness, or it might just be knowledge they have no interest in, have never thought about, or simply do not know.

As Harris saw things, it was foolish to focus field research collecting the knowledge of a community, because that knowledge was unlikely to provide insights into infrastructural questions, and thus unlikely to advance science. Etic knowledge, on the other hand, refers to knowledge that is built by the inquiries of trained scientific observers. No one but scientists will ask scientific questions and collect scientific data to test scientific theories. Science, Harris believed, is a specialist endeavor, requiring years of training. Scientists form a delimited community of practice. In relation to on the ground field methods, etic anthropology tended toward structured surveys and systematic observations. Long unstructured interviews and participatory experience were unlikely to deliver scientific insights.

Concluding Observation

There is a lot of complexity to mid-twentieth century anthropological thought. Here is one point that may have gotten lost in the discussion. There is a really important theme to note in relation to cultural materialist, and that is a determination to keep scientific research and local cultural knowledge distinct. This matters. As some anthropologists sought to develop more rigorously scientific approaches to their work – whether as ethnographers or archaeologists, physical anthropologists, or linguists – there was a tendency to expand the gap between scientifically valued evidence and what mattered to the communities under study. As a result, the communities studied often questioned the value of the research that was conducted. Relationships became even worse when the expertise that anthropologists developed – which was often disconnected from traditional knowledge – was given greater weight in interactions with courts and government agencies. These social gaps between anthropologists and the communities and traditions they studied widened between 1945 and 1970. Indeed, they may have reached levels that exceeded research during the prior century. As we will see in a later chapter, the development of indigenous methodologies was in some ways a response to this situation.

Supplemental Open Educational Resources

Anthropological Records. University of California. 1937-1999. The Online Books Page, University of Pennsylvania.

Kroeber, Alfred L. 1925. Handbook of the Indians of California. U.S. Government Printing Office. Dover reprint. Internet Archive, 2012.

Northwest Coast Hall. American Museum of Natural History.

Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology. University of California

References Cited

Binford, Lewis R. 1962. Archaeology as Anthropology. American Antiquity, 28(2): 217–225.

Binford, Lewis and Sally Binford. Editors. 1968. New Perspectives in Archeology. Aldine.

Burnham, John C. 2012. “Anthropologist A. L. Kroeber’s Career as a Psychoanalyst: New Evidence and Lessons from a Significant Case History.” American Imago 69 (1): 5–27.

Caspari, Rachel. 2003. “From Types to Populations: A Century of Race, Physical Anthropology, and the American Anthropological Association.” American Anthropologist 105 (1): 65–76.

Clarke, David. 1968. Analytical Archaeology. Columbia University Press.

Driver, Harold E., and William C. Massey. 1957. “Comparative Studies of North American Indians.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 47 (2): 165–456.

Flannery, Kent V. 1972. “The Cultural Evolution of Civilizations.” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 3 (1): 399–426.

Fried, Morton H. 1967. The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay in Political Anthropology. Random House.

Geertz, Clifford. 1957. “Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example.” American Anthropologist 59 (1): 32–54.

Geertz, Clifford. 1984. Culture and social change: the Indonesian case. Man 511-532.

Golla, Victor. 2022. California Indian Languages. University of California Press.

Harris, Marvin. 1976. History and Significance of the Emic/Etic Distinction. Annual Review of Anthropology 5: 329-350.

Hempel, Carl G. 1966. Philosophy of Natural Science. Prentice-Hall.

Jacknis, Ira. 2002. “The First Boasian: Alfred Kroeber and Franz Boas, 1896-1905.” American Anthropologist 104 (2): 520–32.

King, Charles. 2020. Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Kroeber, Alfred L. 1925. Handbook of the Indians of California. U.S. Government Printing Office.

Kroeber, Alfred L. 1936 Culture Element Distributions: III Area and Climax. University Of California Publications In American Archaeology And Ethnology 37 (3): 101-116.

Kroeber, Alfred L. 1952. The Nature of Culture. University of Chicago Press.

Kroeber, Alfred L. 1962. A Roster of Civilizations and Culture. Aldine Publishing Company.

Kroeber, Alfred L., Clyde Kluckhohn, Wayne Untereiner, and Alfred G. Meyer. 1951. Culture. A critical review of concepts and definitions. Papers of the

Lantier, Harrison, and Shannon Tushingham. 2017. “Newly Discovered Studio Photographs of Revolutionary Anthropologist Llewellyn Lemont Loud.” Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 37(1): 70–77.

Kroeber, Alfred L. and Talcott Parsons. 1958. The Concepts of Culture and Social System. American Sociological Review 23(5): 582-90.

Lewis, Herbert S. 2022. “Alfred L. Kroeber’s Career and Contributions to California’s Indigenous Peoples”, in Bérose – Encyclopédie internationale des histoires de l’anthropologie, Paris.

Mikels-Carrasco J. 2012. Sherwood Washburn’s New physical anthropology: rejecting the “religion of taxonomy”. History and philosophy of the life sciences, 34(1-2), 79–101.

Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology 47(1). Harvard University. Cambridge.

Pike, Kenneth. 1954. Language in Relation to a Unified Theory of Structure of Human Behavior. Mouton

Richardson, Jane, and Alfred L. Kroeber. 1940. Three Centuries of Women’s Dress Fashions, a Quantitative Analysis. University of California Press.

Redman, Charles L. 1991. “Distinguished Lecture in Archeology: In Defense of the Seventies—The Adolescence of New Archeology.” American Anthropologist 93(2): 295–307.

Sahlins, Marshall. 1968. Stone Age Economics. Aldine.

Salmon, Merrilee H. 1978. “What Can Systems Theory Do for Archaeology?” American Antiquity 43 (2): 174–83.

Salmon, Merrilee. 1981. Philosophy and Archeology. Academic Press.

Sayre, Gordon M. 1998. “The Mound Builders and the Imagination of American Antiquity in Jefferson, Bartram, and Chateaubriand.” Early American Literature 33(3): 225–49.

Service, Elman Rogers. 1971. Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective. Random House.

Smithsonian Institution. 1978-2022. Handbook of North American Indians, 22 volumes. U.S. Government Printing Office.

Spaulding, Albert C. 1953. Statistical techniques for the discovery of artifact types. American Antiquity 18(4): 305-313.

Stanlaw, James. 2022. “Alfred Kroeber and the Development of Linguistic Anthropology: A Brief Reassessment”, in Bérose – Encyclopédie internationale des histoires de l’anthropologie, Paris.

Strum, S.C., D. G. Lindburg, and D. Hamburg. Editors. 1999. The New Physical Anthropology: Science, Humanism, and Critical Reflection. Pearson College.

Taylor, Walter W. 1948. A Study of Archeology. Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Center for Archaeological Investigations.

Washburn, Sherwood, and Irven. DeVore. 1963.  Baboon ecology and human evolution. In African Ecology and Human Evolution, eds. F. C. Howell and F. Bourliere, pp. 335-67. Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology, No. 36. Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

Washburn, Sherwood, and C. S. Lancaster. The evolution of hunting. In Man the Hunter, ed. Richard B. Lee, pp. 293-303. Chicago: Aldine.

Watson, Patty Jo, Steven A LeBlanc, and Charles L Redman. 1971. Explanation in Archeology: An Explicitly Scientific Approach. New York: Columbia University Press; and later

Watson, Patty Jo; Steven A LeBlanc, and Charles L Redman.1974. The Covering Law Model in Archaeology: Practical Uses and Formal Interpretations. World Archaeology, 6(2): 125–132.

Weltfish, Gene. 1948. In Henry’s Backyard. Schuman.

White, Leslie A. 1959. The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome. Routledge.

Wiener, Norbert. [1967] 1988. The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society. Hachette Books.