EVOLUTION IN CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: A REPLY TO LESLIE WHITE

Abstract

EVOLUTION IN CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY: A REPLY TO LESLIE WHITE By ROBERT H. LOWIE LESLIE White's last three articles in the A merican A nthropologist 1 require a reply since in my opinion they obscure vital issues. Grave matters, he clamors, are at stake. Obscurantists are plotting to defame Lewis H. Morgan and to undermine the theory of evolution. Professor White should relax. There are no underground machinations. Evolution as a scientific doctrine-not as a farrago of immature metaphysical notions-is secure. Morgan's place in the history of anthropology will turn out to be what he deserves, for, as Dr. Johnson said, no man is ever written down except by himself. These articles by White raise important questions. As a victim of his polemical shafts I should like to clarify the issues involved. I premise that I am peculiarly fitted to enter sympathetically into my critic's frame of mind, for at one time I was as devoted to Ernst Haeckel as White is to Morgan. Haeckel had solved the riddles of the universe for me. ESTIMATES OF MORGAN Considering the fate of many scientific men at the hands of their critics, it does not appear that Morgan has fared so badly. Americans bestowed on him the highest honors during his lifetime, eminent European scholars held him in esteem. Subsequently, as happens with most celebrities-Aristotle, Darwin, George Eliot, for exa~ple-the pendulum swung in the opposite di­ rection. The reaction overshot its mark at times, as when Americanists doubted even Morgan's Crow findings. Nevertheless, appreciation has been frequent and ample even in later periods. Haddon calls Morgan the greatest sociologist of the past century ; Rivers hails him as the discoverer of the classificatory system; Radcliffe-Brown'rates Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity a monu­ ment of scholarly, patient research ; Mitra pictures Morgan as an anthro­ pological colossus, a greater Tylor; Marcel Mauss and Paul Radin are avowed admirers. 2 What, precisely, does White expect? An academic muezzin at every center of learning who shall lead anthropologists in daily Rochester-ward obei­ sances and genuflections? MORGAN AND BOASIANS The term Boasian is misleading. Of the great physiologist Johannes MUller a one-time disciple said: There is no school in the sense of common dogmas, for he taught none, only a common method. This holds for Boas. White, 1943, 1944, 1945. 'Haddon, 1934, p. 127. Rivers, 1914, p. 4 f. Radcliffe-Brown, 1941, p. 1. Mitra, pp. 109­