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Leslie White (1900–1975)

White brought evolution back into American anthropology at a time when the Boasian school had turned away from it. He argued that culture could be studied as a system in its own right, apart from the individuals who carry it, and that it evolves in a single direction measurable in energy: culture advances as the amount of energy harnessed per person increases, or as the efficiency of the means of putting it to work improves. The formula is usually taken as the founding statement of neo-evolutionism in anthropology, and his essay on the symbol, as what separates human behaviour from that of other animals, was reprinted across the social sciences.

Leslie Alvin White was born on 19 January 1900 in Salida, Colorado. He served in the Navy in the First World War, studied at Columbia and the New School for Social Research, and took his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1927. His early fieldwork, trained in the Boasian manner, was among the Keresan pueblos of New Mexico, on which he published a series of monographs. In 1929 he visited the Soviet Union and took up Marxism; for a time he wrote for the Socialist Labor Party under a pseudonym. He taught at the University of Michigan from 1930 to 1970, where he built the department of anthropology, and was president of the American Anthropological Association in 1964. He died on 31 March 1975 in Lone Pine, California.

Key concepts

The energy law. In “Energy and the Evolution of Culture” (1943) and The Science of Culture (1949) White proposed that, other factors remaining constant, “culture evolves as the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year is increased, or as the efficiency of the instrumental means of putting the energy to work is increased”. He compressed it into a formula, culture as the product of energy and technology, and read history as a series of advances in energy capture: human muscle, the domestication of plants and animals in the agricultural revolution, and the fuel revolution of coal and oil. The Evolution of Culture (1959) applied the scheme from the origins of culture to the fall of Rome.

The symbol. “The Symbol: The Origin and Basis of Human Behavior” (1940) argued that what makes human behaviour human is the use of symbols, things whose meaning is given by those who use them rather than by their physical properties, and that culture came into being with the capacity for symbolling.

Culturology. White held that culture is a level of reality with its own laws, to be explained in cultural terms rather than by psychology or biology, and called its study culturology, a term he took from the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald. Individuals, on this view, do not make culture so much as carry it; culture determines their behaviour more than they determine it.

Against the Boasians. White made himself the leading critic of Franz Boas and his school, arguing in essays from the 1940s to The Ethnography and Ethnology of Franz Boas (1963) that historical particularism was an anti-evolutionary reaction that had left American anthropology collecting particulars without a theory. He presented his own work as a return to the programme of Lewis Henry Morgan, whom he defended against the Boasians’ dismissal.

Where White stops

His fellow neo-evolutionist Julian Steward pressed the single line. Steward’s Theory of Culture Change (1955) argued for multilinear evolution: societies adapt to particular environments along several lines, and White’s universal scheme ignored the diversity of specific cultures and the conditions that shape them; White answered that Steward confused history, which deals in particulars, with evolution, which generalises. Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service, in Evolution and Culture (1960), proposed to reconcile them by distinguishing general evolution, the overall advance of culture through stages that White described, from specific evolution, the adaptation of particular cultures that Steward studied.

Key works

See also: Evolution · The stage schemes · Deep time and evolution · L. H. Morgan · Boas