Multilineal evolution
The multi-linear evolution is a sociological theory of the 20th century about the evolution of societies and cultures. It consists of competing theories of various sociologists and anthropologists and replaced the theories of unilinear evolution of the 19th century.
Description
The critique of classical social evolutionism led researchers to reconsider their views: contemporary theories and models of development trying blank, ethnocentric speculation, comparisons and value judgments to avoid and look at individual companies in their own historical context. These conditions provided the context for new theories such as cultural relativism and the multi-linear evolution.
In the 40s developed anthropologists such as Leslie White and Julian Steward an evolutionary model on a more scientific basis and thus created the Neoevolutionismus. White rejected the distinction between " primitive" and "modern " societies and divided the companies according to their energy consumption, with more energy allows for greater social differentiation. Steward rejected the idea of progress and drew attention to Charles Darwin's idea of " adaptation ", according to which all societies must adapt to their environment.
The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service attempted to unify approaches in Evolution and Culture, Whites and stewards. Other anthropologists developed on this basis theories of cultural ecology and ecological anthropology. The most prominent examples are Peter Vayda and Roy Rappaport. In the late '50s, Stewards students like Eric Wolf and Sidney Mintz oriented by the cultural ecology through to Marxism, to the world - system theory, dependency theory and Marvin Harris ' cultural materialism.
Most contemporary anthropologists reject the idea of the 19th century by progress and unilinear evolution from still. In the tradition of Steward they pay particular attention to the relationship between a culture and its environment when they try to explain different aspects of a culture. But most modern anthropologists have chosen a general systematic approach by examining cultures as emergent systems and consider the whole social environment including the political and economic relations. Others reject the evolutionary ways of thinking completely and instead consider historical contexts, contacts with other cultures and the operation of cultural symbol systems. The simple idea of cultural evolution was so useless and replaced by a variety of nuanced approaches. In the field of development studies have authors such as Amartya Sen presents an understanding of human development and prosperity, which also provides the simplistic notions of progress in question, but at the same time retains much of the original inspiration.