White's `neo-Lamarckism'

Many archaeologists seem to be laboring under the significant misapprehension that the evolution of Steward, White, and Service derived from Darwinism. Thus, Price, for example, writes:

What may generally be called adaptive models have had considerable impact throughout American anthropology, at least since the work of White and Steward. Such models are derived ultimately from the paradigm of Darwinian evolution; they are based upon the observed occurrence of random variation, the differential survival of which is non-random, governed by the principles of adaptation and selection ([Price 1978]: 162).

Leaving aside the fact that no `principle of adaptation,' of equal standing with that of natural selection, may be located in the writings of Darwin, it must be objected that this description of social evolutionism has little to do with what White actually wrote. In fact, White has little to do with Darwin at all. His theory rather represents a curious pastiche incorporating elements of Morgan (and the nineteenth century evolutionists in general), Marx and Herbert Spencer.

As a rough approximation of the influence of various writers on White, we may take the number of pages in his The Evolution of Culture ([White 1959]) on which each author's name is mentioned. We see, then, that Darwin's name is mentioned on seven pages of the 370-page book (and these references have primarily to do with his views on `primitive promiscuity'), while Morgan and Tylor merit fifteen pages apiece. Moreover, the term ``natural selection'' receives not a single mention in the entire volume.

That White in no way conceived of his thought as related to Darwinism is also apparent in the fact that he accepts `neo-platonism' and `neo-Lamarckism' as ``valid terms'' ([White 1959]: ix) for his Science of Culture. No, his conception of evolution as ``a temporal sequence of forms'' ([White 1959]: 30) is clearly based on his reading of the nineteenth century social evolutionists. Indeed, ``the theory of evolution set forth in [his] work does not differ one whit from that expressed in Tylor's Anthropology in 1881'' ([White 1959]: ix). The evolutionary sequence he developed is formally quite similar to that set forth by Morgan in Ancient Society, comprising a series of stages distinguished by the acquisition of one or more technological and/or `integrative' traits, to use the term preferred by Service.

White's debt to Marx is less explicit but no less significant. Writing as he was in the United States in the 1950's, he was understandably reticent in drawing attention to this fact. Service however, writing in a relatively less oppressive climate, relates that White taught Marx in his classes in the thirties at the University of Michigan ([Service 1975]: xvi). The debt is obvious in White's ``theory of technological determinism'' ([White 1959]: 24). The form of Marxism which he adopts is, however, a nondialectical, substantivist one, borrowing Marx's model of society but putting aside his theory of history. This is, as Price notes, a ``classical heresy'', and one which she herself adopts ([Price 1978]: 163). White even betrays himself in certain turns of phrase. For example, he writes: ``The families were in association with one another like marbles in a sack; they were not knit together by specific and particular ties between their respective constituent members'' ([White 1959]: 81). This immediately calls to mind, of course, Marx's famous passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Luis Bonaparte in which he likened the French peasantry to ``potatoes in a sack'' ([Marx 1963]: 124).

White's peculiar ideas about thermodynamics he borrows from Herbert Spencer, apparently by way of Schrödinger ([Carneiro 1973]). He asserts that life in general, and human social life in particular, is a form of reverse entropy, a mechanism for capturing and containing energy, temporarily and locally reversing the inexorable progress of the Second Law of Thermodynamics ([White 1959]: 34-36). Thus his evolutionary stages are defined according to levels of energy capture, each being defined by a broad category of technology; the first by human labor power, the second by the addition of domesticated animals and plants and the third by the use of fossil fuels. Each stage is associated with a particular form of social organization; the first with societas, the second with civitas (archaic states and empires) and the third with that curious variant of civitas known as industrial society. Social change thus took two forms:

1. technological revolutions, in Childe's sense of the term, each followed by
2. a gradual expansion to the energetic limits of the new social form, a process conceptualized in terms of gradually increasing efficiency.

The relation is made clear by the following passage from Herbert Spencer:

The formula finally stands thus: Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity; and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation. ([Spencer 1862], part ii. chap. xvii. p. 396)

Civilization as a kind of potential energy. Thus, while White no doubt profited from the Modern Synthesis by association, his theory, as Dunnell has done more than anyone to point out, bears no relation whatsoever to evolutionism in the contemporary biological sciences (e.g. [Dunnell 1996]). That we ever imagined such a theory, which moreover ``average[s] all environments together to form a constant factor which may be excluded from our formulation of cultural development'' ([White 1959]: 39), to be in any way Darwinian can only be attributed to a profound uncertainty as to the meaning of the term `evolution.'