ANT-2 Lecture Notes - Lecture 31: Lewis H. Morgan, Sociocultural Evolution, Evolutionism
Document Summary
As anthropologists began to accumulate data on different cultures during the mid- nineteenth century, they needed to be able to explain the cultural differences and similarities they found. The desire to account for the vast cultural variation that had been observed gave rise to anthropological theory. In an attempt to account for the diversity of human cultures, the first anthropologists, writing during the last half of the 19th century suggested the theory of cultural evolutionism. All societies pass through a series of distinct evolutionary stages: we find differences in contemporary cultures because they are at different evolutionary stages of development. Euro-american cultures were at the top of the evolutionary ladder and less-developed" cultures on the lower rungs. The evolutionary process was thought to progress from simpler (lower) forms to increasingly more complex (higher) forms of culture. Hired to represent the iroquois in a land grant dispute.
