The idealism of Boasian cultural anthropology found its first challenge in 19th-century cultural evolutionism, which had its origins in the early modern notion of the Great Chain of Being. Stimulated mainly by Darwinian thought, 19th-century classical evolutionism arranged the different lifeways of the world on a hierarchical and unilinear ladder proceeding from savagery to barbarism to civilization, taking as exemplary of the latter such evolved civilizations as the Euro-American and the Asiatic. The second tendency in this thought was the identification of “race” with culture. One saw the “lower races,” most of them with black or brown skin, as having, through biological incapacity for culture, fallen behind or lost out in the evolutionary competition for “the survival of the fittest.”
These unilinear hierarchies and their presumptions were challenged by the Boasians on a number of fronts. First, their fieldwork, largely undertaken among American Indians, showed the widespread influences of diffusion between cultures, stimulating culture change that rendered any simple picture of unilinear evolution untenable. All cultures learned from each other throughout their histories. Also, the discovery that cultural adaptation to particular local physical environments had an important influence on evolution led to a more pluralistic and multilineal approach to culture change. The comparison of cultures that arose in early 20th-century anthropology produced diverse theoretical and methodological consequences, most notably the concept of cultural relativism, a theory of culture change or acculturation, and an emphasis on the study of symbolic meaning. Perhaps the most important achievement of Boas and his students was the demonstration that there is no necessary connection between culture and “race,” that the capacity for culture of specific groups was not genetically controlled, and that the freedom to create cultures independent of biology was one of the great achievements of human evolution.
French ethnology under the influence of Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss and their successors emphasized the study of culture, or society, as a total system with a definite “structure” consisting of elements that “functioned” both to adapt to changing circumstances and to reproduce its integral structure. The total system approach influenced British social anthropology in the form of Bronisław Malinowski’s functionalism and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown’s attention to the dynamics of social structure. British structural-functionalism became influential, even in the United States, as a countercurrent to the cultural emphasis of American anthropology. In part this emphasis is present because, after World War II, many American anthropologists did ethnographic fieldwork in Africa, South Asia, and the Pacific, where British-trained social anthropologists were the pioneers. The emphasis on the study of whole cultures and on cultures as systems in American cultural anthropology, often called holism, also showed both French and British influence.
Although it began in the study of social structures, “structuralism” aimed at understanding the universals of mental structures. It was mainly developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss, who was much influenced by Durkheim and Mauss as well as by structural linguistics. Structuralism affected American cultural anthropology, harmonizing with idealist elements and the treatment of culture as first of all patterns of belief or ideas which eventuated in practical activity. Only later, in the last several decades of the 20th century, were the strategy and tactics of practical life given primary emphasis in the work of such sociologically oriented theorists as Pierre Bourdieu and in the analyses of the social dynamics of discourse by linguistic anthropologists such as Dell Hymes. The interaction between ideas on the one hand and social and political behaviour on the other has long been a contested issue in cultural anthropology, and it remains so.
The development of American cultural anthropology between the two World Wars and into the decade of the 1960s was significantly shaped by anthropological linguist Edward Sapir, who demonstrated the determinative effect of language on culture and worldview and who argued that culture is largely psychological. Since language is central to the task of the ethnographer, to learning, to the expression of thought and values, and to the transmission of culture, Sapir’s language-anchored perspectives have had important and continuing resonance. His psychological emphasis was influential in the culture-and-personality movement that flourished under other Boasians, notably Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict.
The Boasian resistance to the sweeping and confining generalizations of classic evolutionism had two consequences: an emphasis on culture change at a specific level of analysis and a priority on studying the patterns or configurations of local cultural beliefs and values. Pattern and configuration became key concepts for explaining the relation of culture traits to each other and the study of local patterning of cultural traits and changes over time. Benedict’s popular presentation, Patterns of Culture (1934), though espousing a cultural psychology, is an example, as is the austere and massive Configurations of Culture Growth (1944) by another of Boas’s students, A.L. Kroeber.
This emphasis on the study of internal patterns and configurations of particular cultures as these are expressed in language led in two directions: to “cultural relativism” and to the study of “culture contact,” or “acculturation.” “Relativism,” which resists universal judgments of any kind, is usually identified with American cultural anthropology, mainly through the work of Benedict and Melville Herskovits. It remains a persistent challenge to the generalizing impulse in anthropology and in the academy.
Ethnographic fieldwork had been undertaken mainly in colonial situations characterized by contact between conquering and conquered cultures. This experience produced a theory of cultural cross-fertilization (acculturation) and culture change. A legacy of colonialism was the great differential between developed and underdeveloped parts of the world. The “development project” undertaken by the wealthier nations after World War II to relieve colonial poverty and diminish global inequities has produced various cultural theories of development based on continuing anthropological research as well as strong critiques of the discipline’s role in development.
Cultural anthropology has maintained its concern for the history of change in particular cultures. Kroeber was the most notable cultural historian among Boas’s students, examining change over the long term on a scale that connected easily with the historical sociology of Max Weber and the social history of Fernand Braudel. The last two decades of the 20th century witnessed a striking invigoration of historical anthropology that took issue with utilitarian and materialist interpretations of cultural stability and change, emphasizing the importance of symbols and their meaning for all human action. Marshall Sahlins was a leading proponent of this school of “historical anthropology.”
Cultural ecology also has its roots in an earlier cultural anthropology, particularly the study of the geographic and environmental context of culture change. The neo-evolutionist Leslie White reacted to the idealism of the cultural approach, turning his attention to the progress of technology in harnessing energy to serve the survival and subsistence needs of cultures. Cultural ecology has sought to produce a more quantitative discipline than is characteristic of most cultural anthropology, which has remained rooted in the humanities.