In Search of Universal Laws

Franz Boas and his students have dominated anthropology for almost first half of the twentieth century. Their theory of historical particularism was about describing every single detail of specific cultures. But then during the second half of the twentieth century a new wave of thinkers sought for universal and scientific laws trying to find the operating system for all human societies. As a result, we have Cultural Neo-Evolutionism, Cultural Materialism, and Sociobiology – scientific and nomothetic approaches to anthropology.

The key proponents of Cultural Neo-Evolutionism are Leslie White, Julian Steward, Marshall Sahlins, and Elman Service. Their primary enquiry was to answer how and why cultures evolve over time and what universal laws might govern that evolution. White asked how energy use and technological efficiency drive cultural progress? Steward, by contrast, asked how different ecological conditions shape cultural adaptation?[1] What these theories, perhaps, did not answer was how general laws could genuinely explain unique cultural phenomena. However, their approach has advanced cultural evolutionism resulting in a synthesis.

Marvin Harris is the proponent of Cultural Materialism. He asked how material and infrastructural factors, like technological, reproductive, and economic, would determine cultural patterns and change. Here the concern is whether knowledge in anthropology resides with the observer (etic) or the participant (emic). He believed that it was the etic, the behavioral domain.[2] However, he did not answer how the cultural meaning itself might shape infrastructure and that led to the advancement of ‘infrastructural determinism.’

Finally, the rise of Edward O. Wilson’s sociobiology. This was later reformulated as evolutionary psychology. This theory seeks to explain the social and moral behavior in genetic terms. If evolution favors individual survival, then why altruism, cooperation, and social structures persist.[3] What is left answered here is the connection between morality and biology; whether culture and morality could be limited to biology. This advanced a biologically grounded view of culture reevaluating the boundaries between nature and nurture.

Bibliography

Erickson, Paul A., and Liam D. Murphy. A History of Anthropological Theory. 6th ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. pp. 130–145.

[1] Paul A. Erickson and Liam D. Murphy, A History of Anthropological Theory, 4th ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 130-133.

[2] Erickson and Murphy, History of Anthropological Theory, 136-138.

[3] Erickson and Murphy, History of Anthropological Theory, 143-144.