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Socio Cultural Evolution www.AssignmentPoint.com www.AssignmentPoint.com Sociocultural evolution, sociocultural evolutionism or cultural evolution are theories of cultural and social evolution that describe how cultures and societies change over time. Whereas sociocultural development traces processes that tend to increase the complexity of a society or culture, sociocultural evolution also considers process that can lead to decreases in complexity (degeneration) or that can produce variation or proliferation without any seemingly significant changes in complexity (cladogenesis). Sociocultural evolution is "the process by which structural reorganization is affected through time, eventually producing a form or structure which is qualitatively different from the ancestral form". (Note, this article focusses on that use of the term 'socio-cultural evolution' to refer to work that is not in line with contemporary understandings of the word 'evolution'. There is a separate body of academic work which uses the term 'cultural evolution' using a more consensus Darwinian understanding of the term 'evolution'. For a description of this work, based in the foundational work of DT Campbell in the 1960s and followed up by Boyd, Richerson, Cvalli-Sforza, and Feldman in the 1980s, go to Cultural evolution or Dual inheritance theory.) Most 19th-century and some 20th-century approaches to socioculture aimed to provide models for the evolution of humankind as a whole, arguing that different societies have reached different stages of social development. The most comprehensive attempt to develop a general theory of social evolution centering on the development of socio-cultural systems, the work of Talcott Parsons (1902-1979), operated on a scale which included a theory of world history. Another attempt, on a less systematic scale, originated with the worldsystems approach. www.AssignmentPoint.com More recent approaches focus on changes specific to individual societies and reject the idea that cultures differ primarily according to how far each one is on the linear scale of social progress. Most modern archaeologists and cultural anthropologists work within the frameworks of neoevolutionism, sociobiology and modernization theory. Many different societies have existed in the course of human history, with estimates as high as over one million separate societies; however, as of 2013, only about two hundred or so different societies survive. Introduction Anthropologists and sociologists often assume that human beings have natural social tendencies and that particular human social behaviours have non-genetic causes and dynamics (i.e. they are learned in a social environment and through social interaction). Societies exist in complex social environments (i.e. with natural resources and constraints) and adapt themselves to these environments. It is thus inevitable that all societies change. Specific theories of social or cultural evolution often attempt to explain differences between coeval societies, by positing that different societies have reached different stages of development. Although such theories typically provide models for understanding the relationship between technologies, social structure or the values of a society, they vary as to the extent to which they describe specific mechanisms of variation and change. www.AssignmentPoint.com Early sociocultural evolution theories – the theories of Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer and Lewis Henry Morgan – developed simultaneously with, but independently of, Charles Darwin's works and were popular from the late 19th century to the end of World War I. These 19th-century unilineal evolution theories claimed that societies start out in a primitive state and gradually become more civilized over time, and equated the culture and technology of Western civilization with progress. Some forms of early sociocultural evolution theories (mainly unilineal ones) have led to much criticised theories like social Darwinism and scientific racism, used in the past to justify existing policies of colonialism and slavery and to justify new policies such as eugenics. Most 19th-century and some 20th-century approaches aimed to provide models for the evolution of humankind as a single entity. However, most 20th-century approaches, such as multilineal evolution, focused on changes specific to individual societies. Moreover, they rejected directional change (i.e. orthogenetic, teleological or progressive change). Most archaeologists work within the framework of multilineal evolution. Other contemporary approaches to social change include neoevolutionism, sociobiology, dual inheritance theory, modernisation theory and postindustrial theory. In his seminal 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins wrote that "there are some examples of cultural evolution in birds and monkeys, but ... it is our own species that really shows what cultural evolution can do". Early views of society www.AssignmentPoint.com In the unilineal-evolution model at left, all cultures progress through set stages, while the multilineal-evolution model at right emphasizes distinctive culture histories Organic society Several centuries before sociology developed as a widespread discipline, the 14th-century Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun viewed societies as living organisms that, due to universal causes, experience cyclic birth, growth, maturity, decline and inevitable death. Decline and fall Theories of social and cultural evolution were common in modern European thought. Prior to the 18th century, Europeans predominantly believed that societies on Earth were in a state of decline. European society held up the world of antiquity as the standard to which to aspire; and Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome produced levels of technical accomplishment which Europeans of the Middle Ages sought to emulate. In religious terms, Christianity taught that people lived in a debased world fundamentally inferior to the Garden of Eden and to Heaven. The idea of progress During the Age of Enlightenment European self-confidence grew and the notion of progress became increasingly popular. During this period what would later become known as "sociological and cultural evolution" had its roots. www.AssignmentPoint.com Stadial theory Enlightenment and later thinkers often speculated that societies progressed through stages: in other words, they saw history as stadial. While expecting humankind to show increasing development, theorists looked for what determined the course of human history. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (17701831), for example, saw social development as an inevitable process. It was assumed that societies start out primitive, perhaps in a state of nature, and could progress toward something resembling industrial Europe. While earlier authors such as Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) had discussed how societies change through time, the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th century proved key in the development of the idea of sociocultural evolution.[citation needed] In relation to Scotland's union with England in 1707, several[quantify] Scottish thinkers pondered the relationship between progress and the affluence brought about by increased trade with England. They understood the changes Scotland was undergoing as involving transition from an agricultural to a mercantile society. In "conjectural histories", authors such as Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), John Millar (1735-1801) and Adam Smith (17231790) argued that societies all pass through a series of four stages: hunting and gathering, pastoralism and nomadism, agriculture, and finally a stage of commerce. Auguste Comte (1798-1857) Philosophical concepts of progress, such as that of Hegel, developed as well during this period. In France, authors such as Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715www.AssignmentPoint.com 1771) and other philosophes were influenced by the Scottish tradition. Later thinkers such as Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) developed these ideas.[citation needed] Auguste Comte (1798-1857) in particular presented a coherent view of social progress and a new discipline to study it: sociology. These developments took place in a context of wider processes. The first process was colonialism. Although imperial powers settled most differences of opinion with their colonial subjects through force, increased awareness of nonWestern peoples raised new questions for European scholars about the nature of society and of culture. Similarly, effective colonial administration required some degree of understanding of other cultures. Emerging theories of sociocultural evolution allowed Europeans to organise their new knowledge in a way that reflected and justified their increasing political and economic domination of others: such systems saw colonised people as less evolved, and colonising people as more evolved. Modern civilization (understood as the Western civilization), appeared the result of steady progress from a state of barbarism, and such a notion was common to many thinkers of the Enlightenment, including Voltaire (1694-1778). The second process was the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism, which together allowed and promoted continual revolutions in the means of production. Emerging theories of sociocultural evolution reflected a belief that the changes in Europe wrought by the Industrial Revolution and capitalism were improvements. Industrialisation, combined with the intense political change brought about by the French Revolution of 1789 and the U.S. Constitution, which paved the way for the dominance of democracy, forced European www.AssignmentPoint.com thinkers to reconsider some of their assumptions about how society was organised. Eventually, in the 19th century three major classical theories of social and historical change emerged: sociocultural evolutionism the social cycle theory the Marxist theory of historical materialism. These theories had a common factor: they all agreed that the history of humanity is pursuing a certain fixed path, most likely that of social progress. Thus, each past event is not only chronologically, but causally tied to present and future events. The theories postulated that by recreating the sequence of those events, sociology could discover the "laws" of history. www.AssignmentPoint.com