Sahlins and Service, in order to effect a rapprochement between the theoretical works of White and Steward, introduced a distinction between two kinds of evolutionary theory. The first of these they called `general evolution.' This is the perspective, championed by White, that ``general progress ... occurs in culture, and it can be absolutely, objectively, and non-moralistically ascertained'' ([Sahlins and Service 1960]: 27). It is precisely the perspective that produces the `world growth stories' we have just been discussing. It is transhistorical, referring to a broad, total movement in Human Culture from its very beginnings and far into the future, and making no reference to actual people or to actual societies except insofar as they serve to exemplify the Progress of Culture.
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Steward's approach was very different. Sahlins and Service dubbed
it `specific evolution,' and characterized it as ``a connected,
historic sequence of forms'' ([Sahlins and Service 1960]: 33). Their conception
was that general evolution understands societies in terms of their
ontogeny, while specific evolution does so in terms of their phylogeny.
Steward himself termed this approach `multilinear evolution' (Table
1.1). This he distinguished from -and
proclaimed superior to - the 'unilineal evolution' of White. The focus
of multilinear evolution is ``the search for laws which formulate
the interrelationships of particular phenomena which may recur cross-culturally
but are not necessarily universal'' ([Steward 1955]: 29). Steward
explicitly eschewed the grand pretensions of general evolution, asserting
that his ``delimitation of problem and method precludes all efforts
to achieve universal explanations or formulations of human behavior''
([Steward 1955]: 7).![[*]](file:/usr/share/latex2html/icons/footnote.png){kind=icon}
He chose instead to study particular developmental sequences in particular
geographical locations. These varied sequences are then compared to
one another in order to divine certain processual regularities that
might be used to understand yet other similar cases, the objective
being ``to formulate the conditions determining phenomena of limited
occurrence'' ([Steward 1955]: 8).
It is clear that Steward's formulation of `multilinear evolution' evades the many pitfalls of general evolution. At the same time it avoids the twin traps of particularism and historicism. It understands particular societies to be the product of particular, unique historical trajectories, while simultaneously recognizing that similarly-organized social groups in similar physical environments will often undergo similar evolutionary processes. Thus parallelism and the study of parallelisms are the analytical core of multilinear evolution.