Configurations of Culture Growth

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

THE author has made many notable contributions to the study of social evolution among both pre-literate and literate peoples, and has championed the need for special study of the latter. His life-work at Berkeley, University of California, is being recognized this year by the award of the Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He builds, in the work under notice, around catalogues of leading names in philosophy, the sciences and the arts to show that, in all lines of work, florescence occurs in spurts now and then, often with a whole constellation of great masters. He has no doubt taken counsel with specialists so as to set forth widely accepted lists of leaders, especially those marking the apices of florescences, while acknowledging that a subjective factor inevitably comes in, as it does in all our work. The fact that even science, which is inherently cumulative, has its periods of blossoming, is well brought out, as is the sharpness of development and the shortness of major blossoming in dramatic art-the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century in England, the years around the middle of the seventeenth century in France are notable examples. The apex of florescence in philosophy is, on the other hand, apt to come late, after a longish preparation, an interesting and understandable fact. Configurations of Culture Growth By A. L. Kroeber. Pp. x + 882. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press; London: Cambridge University Press, 1944.) 7.50 dollars.