
American Studies ETDs
Publication Date
7-22-1976
Abstract
STATEMENT OF PROBLEM: The acceptance and popularity of White's theory, which helped reinstate cultural evolution as an anthropological subdiscipline and break the ground for the rapidly growing field of Marxist anthropology, indicate the current intellectual and scientific status of anthropology. A typical response to White's theory is fascination--coupled with an inexplicable intellectual indignation. This dissertation explains why.
PROCEDURE: The author analyzes White's two books on cultural evolution, The Science of Culture (cl949) and The Evolution of Culture (cl959), chapter by chapter. The purpose of each is determined and the arguments White gives in its support listed and analyzed. The author scrutinizes his data base, use of the scientific method, definitions, philosophic assumptions, and logic. The process of concept-formation (abstraction) and consequent rules of definition are compared with White's use of words.
RESULTS: The major point of every chapter and every argument offered in its support are false. White's theory is based on the premises that (1) reality is whatever people say it is, and (2) language is a tool of deception. He relies on the analytic-synthetic dichotomy (an unnatural split between concretes and higher-level abstractions). His mystical view of history is traced back through Hegel, Kant, St. Augustine and Plato to pre-Greek mysticism, then contrasted with the scientific method. His data base excludes the only direct evidence for 99 percent of cultural evolution: archaeology. It consists of a little primate ethology, history, psychology, and ethnology, i.e., data on cultures distinguished by being outside the mainstream of cultural evolution. Fallacies include reductionism (denial of the identity of the phenomena studied), determinism {application of reductionism to motivation), false either-or choices (a parody of Aristotle's excluded middle), jumbled analogies, linguistic analysis (based on the analytic-synthetic dichotomy), the stolen concept (using a word while denying its essential meaning), switching labels, strawmen, package-deals, equivocation, assertion, repetition, vehemence, non sequiturs, intimidation, cue-words and -prefixes, and argument-by-metaphor(anthropomorphization of stolen concepts). White's five contradictory explanations of culture, 11culturology,11 physics, psychopathology, technology (a stolen concept excluding science and knowledge) and kinship (the evidence is inadequate for valid inference) are contrasted with psychology. The significance of his attempt to obliterate the concept of the human mind is examined.
CONCLUSIONS: White's theory is a parody of science. The author examines his influence on his students' thinking and research and on anthropology, the reasons his theory has been honored, the many similarities of his philosophy to Nazism, and the significance of his desired omnipotent world-state.
POSTSCRIPT: The dissertation completed, the only thing the author could not explain was why White himself accepts his theory. She happened on an hypothesis that not only explains all the discrepancies, but is of such potential significance that she compiled an index for students of atypical human thought processes, particularly those caused by frontal lobe injury.
NOTE: The author presented the essence of this analysis in a paper, 11A Fresh Appraisal of Leslie White's Theory of Cultural Evolution," at the American Anthropological Association Symposium on Cultural Theory, December 2, 1972 in Toronto. The presentation was well attended, the paper well received, and there were dozens of requests for copies at the meeting and during subsequent months. To date, no flaw in this analysis has been brought to the author's attention. The reader can assess the accuracy of this analysis only by personally examining White's books in light of the points made in this dissertation.
Language
English
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
American Studies
Level of Degree
Doctoral
Department Name
American Studies
First Committee Member (Chair)
Frank Cumming Hibben
Second Committee Member
Richard Alan Anderson
Third Committee Member
Howard N. Tuttle
Recommended Citation
Amsden, Diana. "Piltown ii: Leslie White'S Theory Of Cultural Evolution." (1976). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/amst_etds/130