3 - Breaking Down Cultural Complexity: Inequality and Heterogeneity

Abstract

This chapter presents several widely held assumptions concerning the nature of cultural evolution. Cultural evolution does not reduce to a unitary phenomenon measurable by a taxonomy or a single variable. Indeed, the latter conceptualizations lead to unproductive taxonomic debate and bind to the assumptions. The broad sweep of human history encompasses a dynamic process of cultural evolution by which human societies have both grown in complexity and collapsed in disarray. The concept of cultural evolution implies not just any change but developmental change, specifically the process of change that separated the late Pleistocene world of independent, internally homogeneous human societies from the modern world of interdependent, internally heterogenous industrial nations. Even though the existence of such evolution at present appears obvious, fundamental debate over the study of cultural evolution has raged in anthropology and archaeology for much of this century. Conceptualizing evolutionary change as a single variable shares some common problems with the typological approach. Specifically, it lumps all the developmental change that occurs cross-culturally and prehistorically under a single heading. The concept of complexity subsumes a wide variety of potentially independent variables, such as stratification and diversity. As with the typological approach, researchers cannot study the interaction of these variables in change nor identify causal forces within cultures. It is becoming increasingly clear that the concept of complexity includes too much.