Social Change

Human relations may be considered as patterned interactions over time. Thus, temporal change and continuity are constant and fundamental features of the human condition. In this perspective, the typical usage of the social change concept—as only applying when a “normal” state of affairs is radically and rapidly altered—involves several flawed assumptions, including the idea that stasis is normal and that only change needs explanation. The alternative is to think of our key topics, including society, culture, and nature, as processual—as unfolding over time. Anthropology has a twofold relationship to social change. On the one hand, the long time period of human biological and cultural evolution provides bountiful evidence of social change; on the other hand, the microscopic time and space perspective of ethnography favors static views of culture and society and thus misleadingly renders change abnormal and exogenous.

Cultural evolution is generally used for major changes in social organization that have taken place over the length of human prehistory and history, involving the emergence of ranking and stratification, states and bureaucracies, specialized occupations, cities, and so on. Empirical generalizations about and theories of cultural evolution abounded in the 18th and 19th century. Among the most important are found in the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Herbert Spencer,Edward Burnett Tylor, and Lewis Henry Morgan. Typically, these authors approached social change as a series of stages with distinctive lists of characteristics, such as Morgan's memorable, if patronizing, “savagery, barbarism, and civilization,” further subdivided into lower, middle, and upper units (resulting in odd terms such as “upper savagery,” whose marker was the invention of the bow and arrow). Such stage theories tended to assume progress over time, arrogantly envisioning the most powerful European-based societies of the world as the pinnacle of change (Marx and Engels, however, envisioned a further step forward, to “communism”). Clearly, then, cultural evolution models reflected not just “pure” scholarship but also the worldview of European imperialism and emergent capitalism.

At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, Franz Boas emphatically criticized the flaws of stage theories, such as their rigidity and egregious speculation. Nevertheless, he also addressed change as a kaleidoscopic flow of influences among cultures—so-called historical particularism. His interest in social change waned, however, when confronted by recent changes in non-Western cultures impacted by the West, which he tended to ignore. The late Boasians (such as Alexander Lesser) initiated the study of recent history among Native Americans, but this was overshadowed by the revival of stage theories [Page 2095]of cultural evolution under the auspices of Leslie White and Julian Steward. While White reasserted the single line of advance posited by 19th-century theorists, Steward more subtly argued for many regional histories, which were partly unique but across which one sometimes finds comparable and thus generalizable transitions, such as the formation of class- and state-based societies. Without doubt, the revival of evolutionary models was shaped by the post-World War II triumph of United States technological, political, and economic power.

Emerging from White and Steward, there have been two important lines of inquiry. One explores the causes of change between stages—is it technological improvement, especially control over energy? Is it gradually growing populations? Is it sacred consensus? Is it political coercion, and if so, based on what? Territorial circumscription?Management of irrigation? The other questions the stage approach—at least in its most schematic format—emphasizing complex systems dynamics and ambiguous, transitional cases, while at the same time retaining the insight that there are broad tendencies over time toward inequality and centralization of power.

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