Unilinear evolutionism
Unilinear evolutionism is the notion that there exists one dominant line of evolution. In other words, all societies pass through the same stages. Since societies will progress at different rates, those societies which have been slower will remain at a 'lower' level than those which progress more rapidly. Of course, all this begs the question of what exactly it means for social institutions to be 'progressing' or 'evolving'. Different unilinear evolutionists have emphasized different things: material culture, means of subsistence, kinship organization, religious beliefs. But unilinear evol
utionists, in general, believed that these phenomena are interrelated, and that therefore changes, say in means of subsistence, create evolutionary changes in kinship organization, religious belief and practice, and so on.
Maine, Lubbock, and Morgan
The idea of unilinear evolution grew from the early nineteenth-century monogenist theorists, but its high point was in the late nineteenth century, when it stood as the central idea of anthropological thought. The first major issue was that of the family versus the social contract: the outcome would lead directly to kinship theory, a central stage of anthropological debate ever since.
The social contract had stood for nearly two hundred years as a cornerstone of legal thought. Then, in 1861, Scots-born jurist Sir Henry Maine turned against the idea. He objected to it because of its artificial nature and its use in what he regarded as faulty legal fictions. Recalling his specialized knowledge of Roman law (and assuming its great antiquity), Maine argued that society originates instead in the family and in kinship groups built upon the family. In the absence of much opposition from inside the anthropological fraternity, family and kinship easily emerged victorious. However, this led ultimately to a host of vehement debates about the prehistory of the family and descent systems, and the relation of those systems to 'primitive promiscuity', the idea of 'private property', totemism, and the incest taboo (see Kuper 1988).
About a decade after Maine's book, two sometime politicians from opposite sides of the Atlantic came to prominence as anthropologists. Sir John Lubbock sat in the House of Commons as the Liberal Member of Parliament for London University, and was later elevated to the Peerage as Lord Avebury. He was a banker by profession, and is remembered today for his bill which established 'bank holidays' (so-called because he knew he could get more support among the Conservative opposition by calling them that than by calling them 'workers' holidays'). He also wrote prolifically on anthropology, archaeology, and the natural sciences.
Lewis Henry Morgan's career had certain similarities: success in business coupled with politics, and indeed amateur authorship of books on natural history. He was a part-time railroad tycoon and an upstate New York Republican state senator. His political renown was far less great than Lubbock's. Nevertheless his influence was profoundly ironic - because his key anthropological ideas were taken up by Karl Marx and especially by Friedrich Engels (1972 [1884]). The Republican state senator's emphasis on private property as the driving force of evolution struck a chord with his Communist admirers. In 1871, Lubbock and
Morgan met and discussed such matters, when the latter visited England.
Morgan is remembered primarily for two things. First, he was one of very few theorists of the nineteenth century to conduct serious field research. After a chance encounter with a Western-educated Iroquois named Ely Parker, Morgan was to spend many years working with Iroquois and other Native American peoples. He studied especially their kinship systems and their traditional political institutions, and he was active on their behalf as a campaigner for land rights. Secondly, after his discovery of 'the classificatory system of relationship' (essentially, the classifying of parallel cousins by the same terms as brothers and sisters), he developed a comparative model for the understanding of kinship systems worldwide. This was, in his view, the key to unlocking the prehistory of human society.
Matrilineality versus patrilineality
Most nineteenth-century scholars believed that matrilineality came before patrilineality, but they had different views about the evidence for this and the reasons why one system of unilineal descent might emerge first and the other evolve from it. Lubbock (1874 [1870]) maintained some scepticism about the significance of primitive matrilineality, but he accepted that existing matrilineal societies had evolved along similar lines. He believed that matrilineality had once been more common, when marriage was not fully developed. With fully developed marriage, he believed, property would go from a man to his own children (patrilineally) rather than to his sisters' children (matrilineally). Yet Lubbock also pointed out that in the most 'savage' of societies, marriage is unknown, 'female virtue' is not highly regarded, and women are treated as inferior to men. Thus he could not support the more radical matriarchal theories which were emerging. On the more clearly patrilineal side, Maine (1913 [1861]) had thought the Romans were quite ancient, and they, along with the Hebrews, Greeks, and Teutonic nations, all had patrilineal descent: he saw no reason to look to distant ethnography or to further speculation beyond the works of his predecessors in jurisprudence.
Those who favoured the primacy of matrilineality debated both with the patrilineal theorists and with other matrilineal theorists. Morgan and his arch-enemy John Ferguson McLennan (also a lawyer, and parliamentary draftsman for Scotland) left the patrilineal theorists behind and reserved their most vehement criticisms for each other. The debate centred on the reasons why matrilineality might have preceded patrilineality. McLennan (1970 [1865]) thought that a struggle for food in early times led to female infanticide. The resulting shortage of women led to polyandry (i.e., one woman with several husbands). Members of these ancient societies could not determine the father of any given child, so they came to reckon descent matrilineally. Patrilineality developed later, as men began first to capture, and subsequently to exchange women with men from other bands.
Morgan (1871; 1877) rested his case on kinship terminology - something which McLennan regarded as of little or no significance. Part of Morgan's argument was diffusionist. The Iroquois of New York State and Ontario (with whom Morgan worked in the 1840s and 1850s) had matrilineal descent and inheritance and a relationship terminology similar in some ways to South Asian ones. He noted too that the neighbouring Ojibwa had a terminology of similar structure even though they spoke a very different language. He reasoned that the First Peoples of North America must have migrated from Asia, a fact today firmly established though in his time still one of speculation. He argued, further, that Asian peoples must once have been matrilineal. Their common classification of the father and the father's brother by one relationship term, and their classification of parallel cousins as 'brothers and sisters', implied to Morgan a system of marriage of several brothers to the same woman. From such a system, he reasoned, matrilineal descent emerged.
Morgan believed that relationship terminologies are conservative, and as such reflect ancient social facts. In other words, they preserve hints of past forms of social organization because other aspects of society change faster than the terminology its members use. In his scheme, patrilineality came rather late, with the rise in private property and its associated laws of inheritance, from father to son. The matrilineal Iroquois represented an in-between stage in evolution, before patrilineal descent but long after what he called the stage of 'promiscuous intercourse'. The early phase of promiscuity evolved into a system of cohabitation or intermarriage between brothers and sisters, which gave rise to a 'communal family' and a custom, reported in Hawaii, whereby a group of brothers and their wives, or sisters and their husbands, once held common 'possession' over one another. This was reflected in his own time by the Hawaiian custom of such a kinship grouping still describing their relationship as pinalua, or one of intimacy, though no longer maintaining the practice of common sexual possession (if it ever really existed). The relationship terminology system of Hawaiian and other Polynesian languages, in turn, classifies only by generation, with parents and their siblings all called 'father' and 'mother', and both siblings and cousins called 'brother' and 'sister'.
Swiss jurist J. J. Bachofen, in Das Mutterrecht (1967 [1861]: 67-210), presented yet another notion of matrilineal pre-eminence. His theory rested on a supposed early feminist movement which overthrew primeval male dominance. This, he said, was followed by a subsequent resurgence of male authority. Bachofen's evidence involved mainly survivals of notions about female deities (from the matriarchal phase) and the ethnographic discovery of South American couvade (from the male overthrow of female authority). This French word designates the custom in which husbands of pregnant wives act as if they are pregnant themselves. Native South Americans reportedly did this in order to deflect malevolent spirits and keep them away from the unborn baby. Bachofen, in fact, here confused matrilineality (descent through the mother) with matriarchy (rule by mothers), but his theory had some following in his own time. It also anticipated more recent revolutionist, and indeed feminist, perspectives on 'primitive society'.
It is important to remember that all these arguments were made within the framework of unilinear evolution. There was little concern with cultural diversity for its own sake. To the unilinear evolutionists, cultural diversity was only important as an indicator of different stages within a grand evolutionary scheme. Perhaps the fact that most of the key protagonists were lawyers is significant too. As a pastime they debated over descent as in work they might have argued over competing inheritance claims. The logic and nuance of argument was important to them. There is a real sense in which anthropology as we know it began with law -whether with the notion of natural law (and the social contract) or with the squabbles over family and kinship which, from Maine onwards, became a central focus of the anthropological discourse.
Theories of 'totemism'
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, though interest in kinship remained strong, other aspects of culture became focal points. Among these was religion, especially totemism. A short ethnographic excursion into 'totemism' may help to clarify the points of debate.
'Totemism' is today often written in quotation marks because there is a real question as to whether the category itself represents a single, specific phenomenon. Many have argued that when we talk about totemism, we are actually talking about quite different things in different cultures. However, nineteenth-century writers generally perceived totemism as a worldwide phenomenon, found in Native North and South America, Australia, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. Arguably, elements of 'totemism' - the symbolic representation of the social by the natural - are found in European thought too, but not to the same degree, and certainly not with the same coherence as in, say, Australian Aboriginal thought. Military symbolism is one obvious example - calling units or operations by the names of animal species.
The word totem is from the Ojibwa. The word was introduced into the English language in 1791 by a British merchant, but the first good description of Ojibwa totemic ideas was in 1856, by one Peter Jones, who was both a Methodist missionary and an Ojibwa chief. The next ethnographer, in 1885, was also an Ojibwa, and all subsequent cross-cultural notions of totemism emanate, at least in part, from these two indigenous accounts (see, e.g., Levi-Strauss 1969b [1962]). In Ojibwa thought, the totem is contrasted to the manitoo. The totem is represented by an animal species, and it symbolizes a patrilineal clan. It appears in mythology, and there is a rule that a person cannot marry one who shares his or her totem. The manitoo is also represented by an animal species, but it is the guardian spirit of an individual rather than a group. It comes in dreams, and a person cannot kill or eat his or her manitoo.
Similar notions are found in other cultures, but there are differences. For example, ethnographers of Australia have recorded some six forms of 'totemism', with each Aboriginal society possessing some two or three. There are (1) 'individual totems' which resemble the manitoos of the Ojibwa, though they often belong specifically to medicine men rather than to ordinary individuals. There are (2) 'clan totems', like the totems of the Ojibwa. These can be emblems of patrilineal clans, or of matrilineal ones. There are also (3) phratry totems, a phratry being simply a group of clans; and (4) moiety totems, where society is divided in 'half' (French moitié), on either patrilineal or matrilineal principles. There are (5) section and subsection totems, these divisions being marriageable categories defined by a combination of descent and generational principles. Finally, there are (6) land-based totems, for example, belonging to spirits of sacred sites. Usually in Australia, all these kinds of totem represent beings whose flesh cannot be eaten and whose fellow members cannot be taken as lovers or spouses. So they tend to incorporate the abstract principles of both the Ojibwa manitoos and the Ojibwa totems.
As ethnographic literature on 'totemism' grew, especially of the Australian varieties, armchair theorists in Europe used that literature to speculate on the origin and psychological nature of totems. French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1963 [1898]) argued that the most 'primitive' of men were in awe of blood and refused to cohabit with females of their respective clans, since they believed that their totemic gods inhabit this clan blood. Scottish folklorists Andrew Lang and Sir James Frazer emphasized the consubstantial relation between a man and his totem. Sir Edward Burnett Tylor saw totemism simply as a special case of ancestor worship. Yet whatever their considerable disagreements, almost all theorists of the day saw a relation between totemism and exogamy, and most held that totemism had evolved first. Furthermore, by implication at least, almost all of them saw this as an answer to the problem of primal human society, because these evolutionists believed that Australian Aboriginal culture represented a survival of early culture (for further details, see Kuper 1988: 76-122; Barnard 1999). The prime example of 'primal culture' had moved from Sir Henry Maine's Romans to the Aborigines.
Interesting among theories of totemism is that of Sigmund Freud (1960 [1913]: 140-55 passim). Though essentially a Lamarckian, he built his theory on the ideas of Darwin and also of theologian William Robertson Smith. What he sought to explain was no less than the origin of totemism, sacrifice, and the incest taboo all at once. Freud imagined a primal horde of males and females in which one male eventually became dominant. This male alone controlled the females, and he alone had sexual access to them. Members of the horde ultimately came to revere him as a god, but the young males resented his authority. They killed him and had sex with their sisters and their mothers. Then they felt guilty for doing such a horrible thing, so, it seems, they invented totemism! More precisely, the alpha-male primate, patriarch of the horde came to be remembered as a totemic being. His descendants invented sacrifices to appease his spirit. They instituted rules forbidding incest to stop the 'natural' proclivity of males to mate with their mothers. Thus, according to the Freudian view, the horrible deeds of murder and incest came to be forgotten, though vestiges of it remained deep in the totemic systems of Australian Aborigines, and very deep in the subconscious of all humanity. Freud saw both the Greek myth of Oedipus and the 'Oedipus complex' as 'memories' of these distant events.
Tylor and Frazer on 'early' religion
Religion attracted the attention of several scholars. Two are worthy of special note because of their position in the discipline, their great influence, and indeed for the high quality of their work: Tylor and Frazer. Both had the advantage of great longevity (Tylor lived from 1832 to 1917, and Frazer 1854 to 1941). Thus, for decades, their successive publications and public pronouncements represented the established, unilinear evolutionist view. Especially in Frazer's case, this view competed with emerging diffusionist, functionalist, and relativist ideas as later generations rebelled against evolutionism.
Sir Edward Tylor's introduction to anthropology came during a trip to North America. In Havana he met Henry Christie, a gentleman adventurer and like himself an English Quaker, who was about to set off for
Mexico. Tylor went with him and later published his first book on what he found (Tylor 1861). There and in subsequent works, especially Primitive Culture (Tylor 1871), Tylor explored the evolution of culture through the doctrine of 'survivals'. The idea is that present-day culture retains elements which have now lost their function, but whose present existence is a testimony to their past importance. Morgan's kinship terminologies are an example. Others, which Tylor was fond of, include items of clothing which formerly were functional but which in his time were only decorative: unused buttons behind the waist of a jacket, or cut-away collars always kept turned down. One of the most curious aspects of Tylor's method was his study of school children in London, for he believed that they, being less mature and less educated, might hold clues to primitive thought. In the realm of religion, he argued that survivals of ancient rituals and beliefs continue long after the original meaning has been forgotten, while the more instinctual and primitive thoughts of civilized humanity may still hold hints of the earlier development of religious ideas.
Tylor's theory of religion consisted of a scheme of evolution from 'animism', the all-embracing doctrine that souls (Latin animi or animae) exist independently of the material world. He noted that in virtually every human society, there is a common belief in a spiritual essence which survives death. People the world over make offerings to the dead, or to revere things such as trees or streams in which souls are believed to dwell. Tylor postulated that the earliest peoples held this notion through dreams in which souls appeared to them; and that societies eventually developed the practices of making offerings, and later, sacrifices, to such souls, fairies, and deities. He believed that fetishism (when humans control their deities through material objects) and totemism (in which animal or plant species are vested with souls) developed from animism.
In a number of respects, Tylor agreed with Lubbock, though it was in fact the latter who more simply stated the unilinear scheme many nineteenth-century anthropologists seem to have accepted: atheism (the absence of definite ideas on a deity), to fetishism, to nature-worship or totemism, to shamanism (where deities are believed to be remote and powerful, accessible only through shamans), to idolatry (when gods become like men), to theism (Lubbock 1874 [1870]: 119). Tylor avoided making such an explicit sequence as this, perhaps because he viewed the evolution of religion as a complex matter, with survivals of earlier stages overlapping with newer ideas and different kinds of animism emerging simultaneously. Tylor's contribution therefore was less substantive and more theoretical and methodological, and as such it still stands as an achievement of evolutionist thought - however flawed the paradigm of unilinear evolutionism may be.
Sir James Frazer was, for most of his career, a classics scholar and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. The University of Liverpool granted him the title of Professor of Social Anthropology in 1907, but he held this as an honorary position. A shy man, he is said to have disliked teaching, but earned sizeable royalties from his voluminous, influential, and widely read books. His Golden Bough is one of the great books of anthropology, and it was widely read by generations of intellectuals of all kinds (the young Bronislaw Malinowski, then still a mathematician, read it in order to improve his English). On the surface, The Golden Bough represents an attempt to explain the origin and meaning of the slaughter of ancient Italian priest-kings, each by his successor. On a deeper level, it merges myth and history, ethnography and reason, to build a fanciful, poetic overview of the human psyche and social order. The Golden Bough was first published in 1890, and expanded to twelve volumes in 1900. Let me quote the final words of the 1922 abridged edition:
Without dipping so far deep into the future we may illustrate the course which thought has hitherto run by likening it to a web woven of three different threads -the black thread of magic, the red thread of religion, and the white thread of science . . . Could we then survey the web of thought from the beginning, we should probably perceive it to be at first a chequer of black and white, a patchwork of true and false notions, hardly tinged as yet by the red thread of religion. But carry your eye farther along the fabric and you will remark that, while the black and white chequer still runs through it, there rests on the middle portion of the web ... a dark crimson stain, which shades off insensibly into a lighter tint as the white thread of science is woven more and more into the tissue. (Frazer 1922: 713)
What is intriguing here is that while Frazer privileges one realm of culture (namely science) over the others, he nevertheless attributes it to the most primitive as well as the most civilized cultures. From a relativist point of view (see chapter 7), magic in so-called primitive societies may be thought of as nothing more than applied science, or technology. Frazer here sees religion as evolving after primitive science, and modern culture as containing both these threads. This is interesting in light of more recent debates between fundamentalist Christians, who call themselves 'creation scientists', and American anthropologists who in their view have blind faith in the 'false doctrine' of Darwinism (see, e.g., Williams 1983; Stipe 1985). Both sides claim for themselves the status of 'scientist' and claim for science the truth which Frazer also believed it represented.
All the unilinear evolutionists, whether they specialized in kinship or in religion, held a vision of anthropology as a science which tied the present and the past. They sought origins, and they found them among their 'primitive' contemporaries. Their methodological flair, however, was dampened as succeeding generations turned away from the question of origins. Anti-evolutionists turned to diffusion, social function, and cultural diversity. We shall take up those stories later. Yet it is important to see the next phase in evolutionist thought, universal evolutionism, as an attempt to return to grand questions, if not of origins then of universal history.
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