Illustrations | p. vii |
Preface | p. ix |
The Early History of Evolutionism | p. 1 |
Herbert Spencer and the Concept of Evolution | p. 3 |
The Evolutionary Views of Tylor and Morgan | p. 5 |
The Reconstruction of Cultural Evolution | p. 9 |
The Comparative Method | p. 10 |
The Possibility of a Social Science | p. 11 |
The Uniformity of Nature | p. 13 |
The Principle of Continuity | p. 14 |
From Simplicity to Complexity | p. 14 |
The Objective Rating of Cultures | p. 15 |
Evolution Not an Inherent Tendency | p. 16 |
The Psychic Unity of Man | p. 17 |
Differential Evolution | p. 18 |
Contemporary Primitives and Ancestral Cultures | p. 19 |
Modern Primitives Not Primeval | p. 22 |
Primal Human Society | p. 23 |
Survivals | p. 24 |
The Characteristics of Cultural Evolution | p. 27 |
Rectilinearity | p. 27 |
Unilinearity | p. 28 |
The Skipping of Stages | p. 31 |
The Law of Evolutionary Potential | p. 32 |
Rates of Evolution | p. 32 |
Diffusion and Evolution | p. 33 |
The Determinants of Cultural Evolution | p. 39 |
Inherent versus External Determinants | p. 40 |
Psychic Unity as an Active Agent | p. 42 |
Racial Determinism | p. 44 |
Human Perfectibility | p. 48 |
Individuals as Determinants | p. 49 |
The Influence of Great Men | p. 50 |
Ideas as Prime Movers | p. 53 |
Historical Materialism | p. 58 |
Environmental Factors | p. 61 |
Subsistence as a Determinant | p. 62 |
Economic Determinants | p. 64 |
Social Determinants | p. 65 |
War as a Determinant | p. 66 |
Natural Selection | p. 68 |
Conclusion | p. 73 |
Anti-Evolutionism in the Ascendancy | p. 75 |
The Boasian Backlash | p. 75 |
Diffusionism in British Anthropology | p. 78 |
The Functionalist Reaction | p. 80 |
Malinowski | p. 81 |
Radcliffe-Brown | p. 82 |
Anti-Evolutionism in Later British Social Anthropology | p. 85 |
Remaining Islands of Cultural Evolutionism: James G. Frazer | p. 87 |
Hobhouse, Wheeler, and Ginsberg | p. 89 |
Sumner and Keller | p. 91 |
George P. Murdock | p. 94 |
The Barren Landscape | p. 96 |
Theorizing Disavowed | p. 97 |
Historical Particularism | p. 98 |
Early Stages in the Reemergence of Evolutionism | p. 99 |
Leslie A. White | p. 99 |
Diffusion versus Evolution | p. 102 |
The Derivation of Evolutionary Formulas | p. 104 |
Cultural Relativism and the Rating of Cultures | p. 107 |
In Spite of Themselves | p. 108 |
Julian H. Steward | p. 110 |
V. Gordon Childe | p. 115 |
Evolutionism in Ethnology in the 1950s | p. 118 |
The Darwin Centennial | p. 122 |
Issues in Late Midcentury Evolutionism | p. 127 |
New Steps Forward | p. 127 |
General and Specific Evolution | p. 127 |
History versus Evolution | p. 130 |
Archaeology and Evolution | p. 132 |
Service's Sequence of Stages | p. 137 |
Processual Archaeology | p. 141 |
Lewis Binford and Middle Range Theory | p. 142 |
Ethnographic Analogy and Parallels | p. 144 |
Ethnoarchaeology | p. 145 |
General Systems Theory | p. 146 |
Respectability Regained | p. 148 |
"Neo-Evolutionism" | p. 149 |
Features of the Evolutionary Process | p. 151 |
Developmental Stages | p. 151 |
Process versus Stages | p. 155 |
Scale Analysis and the Refinement of Sequences | p. 157 |
Verifying Inferred Sequences of Development | p. 159 |
Directionality in Evolution | p. 159 |
Complexity as the Hallmark of Evolution | p. 161 |
Is Evolution Irreversible? | p. 163 |
The Objective Rating of Cultures | p. 165 |
Rates of Cultural Evolution | p. 169 |
The Mechanisms of Cultural Evolution | p. 171 |
The Darwinian Model | p. 173 |
Adaptation Considered Further | p. 179 |
Typological versus Populational Concepts | p. 181 |
What Drives the Evolution of Culture? | p. 185 |
Elman Service versus Marvin Harris | p. 185 |
Cultural Causality Examined | p. 187 |
Determinants: White and Steward Considered Separately | p. 191 |
Steward and White Compared | p. 194 |
Ecological Approaches: Limitations and Pitfalls | p. 196 |
Functionalism and Evolutionism Join Forces | p. 198 |
Population Pressure as a Determinant of Evolution | p. 200 |
Warfare as a Determinant | p. 208 |
Trade as a Determinant | p. 211 |
Other Perspectives on Cultural Evolution | p. 213 |
Ideology and Evolution | p. 213 |
Marxist Anthropology and Cultural Evolution | p. 218 |
Microevolution and Agency Theory | p. 223 |
Elements of Evolutionary Formulations | p. 229 |
Evolution: Unilinear or Multilinear? | p. 229 |
Laws of Cultural Development | p. 238 |
British Social Anthropology and Cultural Laws | p. 242 |
American Anthropologists and Cultural Laws | p. 243 |
The Comparative Method and Its Application | p. 250 |
The Problem of Sampling | p. 254 |
Current Issues and Attitudes in the Study of Cultural Evolution | p. 263 |
New and Lingering Opposition to Cultural Evolutionism | p. 263 |
The Attitude of British Social Anthropologists | p. 266 |
American Archaeologists Resist "Neo-Evolutionism" | p. 273 |
Archaeologists Accept and Apply Evolutionism | p. 276 |
The Quantification of Cultural Evolution | p. 285 |
Cultural Evolutionism and the Sociologists | p. 286 |
Summary | p. 287 |
References Cited | p. 289 |
Index | p. 313 |
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