In January 1900, the American ethnologist, anthropologist and culturologist Leslie White was born in Colorado. It was he who introduced the term "culturology", which designated a separate independent discipline. Leslie White was an ardent advocate of evolutionism. This helped him to stand in cultural anthropology at the very source of the creation of neo-evolutionism. The most significant first works in this area were written by Leslie White.
Biography
In World War I, the future scientist came to the end of hostilities, he devoted a whole year to the US Navy. Only in 1919 he managed to enter Louisiana State University, and in 1921 transferred to Columbia to study his favorite psychology. In 1923, Leslie White received a bachelor's degree, and a year later - a master's degree. In 1927, he was already a doctor in anthropology and sociology at the University of Chicago. From there, a young scientist went on an expedition to study the culture of the Pueblo Indians.
Then his work began at the University of Buffalo (New York). Having visited the Soviet Union in 1929, Leslie White returned under great impression and immediately joined the Socialist Labor Party. From that moment on, the party newspaper began to publish articles under the pseudonym John Steel. Leslie White wrote them. Culturology as a science gradually matured in his work, especially after he got a job at the University of Michigan in 1930, where he stayed for life.
Scientific and political views
Despite the fact that the scientific merits of Leslie White were great, and his work received almost worldwide fame, for thirty long years he remained a simple assistant to the professor. The reason for this delay in his scientific career was his political views, as well as the area of his scientific interest. The fact is that America was an extremely religious country, and now there are a huge number of small sects and traditional large denominations.
Views on evolution impeded career advancement, and the Catholic clergy even excommunicated the scientist from the church for such blasphemy. In those days, it was not just a shame, but real ostracism. And only in the sixties did he become famous, although Leslie White’s theory has long been known to all anthropologists in the world. In 1964, he was finally elected president of the American Association of Anthropologists. For more than thirty years he has been awaiting the recognition of his work at Leslie White's home university.
Cultural studies
“A person is able to create symbols, and this suggests that he is characterized by a culture that has its own evolution,” said Leslie White. The science of culture, which he founded, considers the process of evolution as energy. Culture can move forward only as the amount of harnessed energy increases per capita, that is, as the savings and efficiency of energy controls increase, and more often both.
The concept of culture given by Leslie White includes three components: ideological, social (where collective behavior and its types are considered) and technological. He considered the latter as the basis. That is why many of his contemporary colleagues attribute the scientist to technological determinists (a division in the social sciences). Leslie White on the formation of the science of cultural science wrote several outstanding works, where he clearly outlined three differentiated processes, and of them three interpretations, which are tightly connected with each other, since they complement each other in everything. This is a historical, functional and evolutionary beginning.
Three approaches
Leslie White's concept of culture suggests exploring precisely these three principles. The historical approach concerns temporary processes, that is, the sequence of any unique events. Functional analysis is intended for the formal process: studying the structural and functional aspects of cultural development. The interpretation of formal-temporal processes, that is, phenomena representing a temporary sequence of forms, is entrusted to evolutionism.
If we consider, for example, a popular uprising, then, according to the historical approach, concrete popular uprisings are studied, from the point of view of a formal analysis, common signs of all popular uprisings are derived, and the evolutionary approach analyzes the changes in the forms and types of popular uprisings, considering their cultural and socio-historical aspect. Thus, this phenomenon will be examined and studied comprehensively.
About the theory of evolution
Leslie White promoted the ideas of the American ethnographer and scientist L. G. Morgan, who traced the progressive development of mankind from ancient society, from savagery through barbarism to civilization. While all of cultural America was drowning in triumphant anti-evolutionism, Leslie White in many works of the polemical warehouse exposed this militant diffusionism, the denial of cultural evolution. Culture cannot develop beyond evolutionary laws.
In addition to diffusionist schools, White’s opponents were both theologians and creationists, who argued that evolution was a chimera of a sick mind, and God created all life on earth, including culture. It also worked out that the theory of evolution was used by Karl Marx in his works, and later by other politicians of the radical makeup, who were followed by the socialist labor movement. The appearance of a sharp opposition on the part of the entire capitalist system seems natural, since its representatives - private owners, the church, capitalists - were afraid to lose their dominant position.
On the progress of culture
The main rebuke diffusionists put what evolutionists say about the development of culture of different nations according to a single scenario, although it is obvious that African tribes from the Stone Age immediately stepped into the Iron Age, and the Bronze Age passed by them. Here the opponents are wrong. Evolutionism does not deny some elements of diffusion, but cultural phenomena (tillage, metallurgy, writing, and the like) always develop at certain stages.
This does not exclude the fact that cultural contacts can facilitate borrowing, and certain peoples can simply pass some stages. The evolution of culture and the cultural history of an individual people are two different things. Leslie White argued that from the point of view of progressivity it is impossible to evaluate different peoples. Objective criteria are needed for such an assessment.
Postulates
There are completely logical and adequate ways to evaluate cultures, which proceed from the assumption that culture is a means that helps to make life long and safe. And the progress of culture is an increasing degree of control over nature and its forces that people use. It compares not only purely technical achievements, but also the improvement of the social system, religion, philosophy, ethical standards, and all this without the slightest separation from the cultural context that corresponds to them.
White proposed a lot of original ideas, with the help of which the concepts of "sign" and "symbol" are distinguished. Culturology was to become a separate scientific discipline, and White began to justify its postulates. At first, he did this solely from research interests that were related to the concept of symbolic behavior, then he already took up the terminology, taking it beyond the concepts of psychology.
Books
Culture was presented to White as a system, self-adjusting and integral, with all its material and spiritual elements, and cultural studies - as a branch of anthropology, where culture is seen as an independent system of elements that are organized according to its own principles. Therefore, there is culturology according to its own laws. White's fundamental works "The Evolution of Culture", "The Science of Culture", "The Concept of Culture" predetermined the emergence of a new scientific discipline - cultural studies.
Cultural science appeared in our country quite recently, and it was finalized only ten years ago, and therefore the most characteristic problems for it are the refinement of the categorical apparatus, problem field, research methods, correlation of all this with what has already been determined in world cultural studies. That is why the work of such an author as Leslie White is especially relevant for Russia, since the foundations of Western cultural science were laid by him back in the middle of the last century.
The main functions of culture
The main function of culture has already been said - this is ensuring humanity not only a long, but also a safe and pleasant existence. Although the consequences of cultural evolution can be called war, and the environmental crisis, and epidemics, and much more that does not add human life to safe pleasantness. White believed that only culture determines human existence, since it is not human nature that is the creator of culture, but, on the contrary, culture leaves its mark on one or another kind of primates.
In the fifties, social sciences acquired a system theory, which began to dominate the approach to the study of society. Thus, a behavioral revolution took place, and culture as a separate subject of research was refused to be accepted. She was given a completely materialistic definition and placed in the category of abstract.
Controversy
White proposed to consider the phenomena and objects of the social world, not only in the contexts of anatomy, physiology and psychology, but also from an extrasomatic point of view. He promoted the idea of separating the symbolic from the somatic, but with control over energy.
Society is capable of processing energy - and this is a key property that allows comparing the most diverse societies and cultures. Here, White formulated the above general law regarding the measure of increasing energy that per capita.
Culture functions
The development of cultural systems and their study allowed White to take a different look at the functions of culture. In 1975, he wrote a fundamental work on the concepts of cultural systems with the key to understanding tribes and nations. There are, in his opinion, such cultural systems to which ethical or psychological terms are not applicable. They cannot be judged as good or bad, or smart or stupid.
Since White was a supporter of social evolutionism, he did not bypass any of the problems of sociocultural dynamics. His book "The Evolution of Culture" has become a desktop for culturologists around the world. In it, he presented the paramarxist model of the development of civilization. The main cultural systems are the tribe and the nation, the vectorial structure of the social system (that is, each has not only magnitude, but also orientation). In theory, this is identical to classes and groups.
Civil Society Features
White was engaged in an analysis of Western cultures of our time, and therefore could not help addressing the topic of civil society. This topic is very problematic and rather poorly developed. Here White left a lot of material to study and further develop existing problems. First of all, he highlighted the features of the structure of civil society.
- Civil society is always segmented, and this segmentation is geographic and social. So, there are provinces, states, counties, areas, and the like.
- The population of civil society is always divided into classes both from a social point of view and from a professional one. So, each person has gender, marital status, age, and so on.
- Civil society cannot do without a hierarchical class division, which is based on the dominance of property rights.
Contradictions
Civil society is filled with internal contradictions, and therefore much less stable than the primitive tribes. It contains a variety of vectors, which are represented by numerous professional and social groups, and therefore civil society is somewhat disorganized by the diverse orientation that such multi-vectority creates. Nevertheless, modern cultural systems compensate for this instability by the unifying role of the church and the state.
White was very respected in the scientific community of the second half of the twentieth century, although he was criticized for his theory of quality in a variety of cultures, as well as for too much love for classical evolutionism. However, his work received worldwide recognition, albeit not immediately. And the works of Leslie White live and develop with the help of the best representatives of the school of the "social organism".