Julian Steward
(1902-1972, United States)
Julian Steward is an Neoevolutionist who focused on relationships between cultures and the natural environment. Although Steward learned Historical Particularism when he was a graduate student of anthropology, his interests later turned to environmental influences on cultures and cultural evolution. He argued that different cultures do have similar features in their evolution and that these features could be explained as parallel adaptations to similar natural environments.
Steward began his ethnographic career among the Shoshone, a Native American
tribe in the Great Basin in the West of the United States. Through studying
the Shoshone society in the dry harsh environment, he produced a theory
that explained social systems in terms of their adaptation to environmental
and technological circumstances. Steward’s evolutionary theory, cultural
ecology, is based on the idea that a social system is determined by its
environmental resources. Steward outlined three basic steps for a cultural-ecological
investigation. First, the relationship between subsistence strategies and
natural resources must be analyzed. Second, the behavior patterns involved
in a particular subsistence strategy must be analyzed. For example, certain
game is best hunted by individuals while other game can be captured in
communal hunts. These patterns of activities reveal that different social
behaviors are involved in the utilization of different resources. The third
step is to determine how these behavior patterns affect other aspects of
the society. This strategy showed that environment determines the forms
of labor in a society, which affects the entire culture of the group. The principal concern of cultural ecology is to determine whether cultural
adaptations toward the natural environment initiate social transformations
of evolutionary change.
Although Steward did not believe in one universal path of cultural evolution,
he argued that different societies can independently develop parallel features.
By applying cultural ecology, he identified several common features of
cultural evolution which are seen in different societies in similar environments.
He avoided sweeping statements about culture in general; instead, he dealt
with parallels in limited numbers of cultures and gave specific explanations
for the causes of such parallels. Steward’s evolutionary theory is called
multilinear evolution because the theory is based on the idea that there
are several different patterns of progress toward cultural complexity.
In other words, Steward did not assume universal evolutionary stages that
apply to all societies. For example, he traced the evolutionary similarities
in five ancient civilizations: Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Mesoamerica,
and the Andes. These cultures shared parallels in development of form and
function because all of them developed in arid and semi-arid environments
where the economic basis was irrigation and flood-water agriculture. He
argued that these similarities stem not from universal stages of cultural
development or from the diffusion of civilization between these regions,
but from the similar natural environments.
Sources:
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Barfield, Thomas. 1996 The Dictionary of Anthropology. Malden: Blackwell.
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Barnard, Alan, and Jonathan Spencer. 1997 Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology. London; New York: Routledge.
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Moore, Jerry D. 1998 Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press.
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Winters, Christopher. 1991 International Dictionary of Anthropologists. New York: Garland Publishing.