Human Adaptation and Cultural Evolution

As an undergrad, I was captivated by the reconstructions of our human history that came from archaeologists and cultural anthropologists like Leslie White, Julian Stewart, Marvin Harris, and Robert Carneiro. The proposed evolutionary trajectory of culture types: bands, to tribes, to chiefdoms, to states. Functional theories of transformation that invoked technological progress, population pressure, class conflict, and other notions, or as Harris would say, the demo-techno-econo-environmental infrastructure. Anthropology and archaeology are the creators and interpreters of an incredible database – the data of humanity around the world and throughout our time on the earth.  In academia, it was only anthropology and archaeology that were therefore asking the big questions of humanity, who are we, where did we come from, and why?

When I returned to graduate school in the late 1980s, things had changed. Poststructuralism and postmodernism had shaken the foundations. But in America, much of the tradition of cultural evolution was still alive. I was introduced to Johnson and Earle’s The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State (1987) by Marvin Harris who was now one of my professors at the University of Florida.  That book was more sophisticated than the earlier evolution treatments in both theory and structure.  It began with a graphic causal model of the evolution of levels of sociocultural integration (family groups, local groups, and regional polities - improved processual versions of the early culture typologies).  It then explored each level with detailed case studies from the anthropological or archaeological literature.

Over the years, two things have led me to expand this class.  A book by the archaeologist Ian Morris, Why the West Rules, For Now.  And the New Cultural Evolution coming from the Neo-Darwinists in anthropology and psychology.  Morris’s book proves that there is still great interest in reconstructing the evolutionary trajectory of humanity.  His approach is traditional top-down, with causality from the material, energetic, geographic, and ecological context of humanity down to the evidence of archaeologists and anthropologists.  The work of the Neo-Darwinists, on the other hand, is bottom-up causality, attempting to explain humanity from the nexus of genes and cultural traits that have evolved for millions and thousands of years, respectively.  Each lecture was expanded to include both top-down and bottom-up causal explanations.

These weekly classes were accompanied by ethnographic films.  No anthropology student should pass through a program without a good dose of the amazing ethnographic films that have been produced over the years (listed below).