Cultural Evolution and Political Centralization

Abstract

Since the inception of the discipline, the study of cultural evolution has played a cyclical role in anthropology. Over the past 125 years, anthropologists have tended to either emphasize or deemphasize the importance of long-term evolutionary change in the course of human history. The first direct analyses of cultural evolution emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century as social scientists in Europe and the United States began to struggle with the diverse people and cultures of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and other world areas. The field of anthropology emerged as a social science umbrella devoted to the politics, sociology, economics, art, and ideology of these non-Western peoples from the far corners of the globe. Lewis Henry Morgan and Edward B. Tylor were among the first anthropologists to begin writing synthetically about non-Western peoples. Both Morgan and Tylor developed formal evolutionary models as a means of bringing order to the plethora of information being brought in from the field by missionaries, colonists, and nascent ethnographers.