Advances in Evolutionary Culture Theory
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 19: 187-210 (Volume publication date October 1990)
William H. Durham
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)
Reading “Evolutionary Culture Theory,” I started thinking more about my own ideas of how cultures emerge and develop. I relate well to the presented premise that all cultures sprang forth from a common ancestral culture. Durham concisely explains evolutionary culture theory (ECT) during his concluding remarks:
Evolutionary culture theory is based on the premise that, however else [cultures] may be related, all cultural systems are related by descent. In other words, a long and unbroken chain of cultural transmission connects each of the world’s extant cultural systems with a single common ancestor; however remote and obscure the ties may be,all cultures have “descended with modification” from this one original culture.
Durham states that the main questions in ECT have to with why so many cultures, more than 4000, have branched from the one culture and with the pace and mechanism with with that change occurred. Durham labels these as questions of differentiation and transformation respectively. In writing about differentiation Durham asks why so many cultures instead of “simply one global human culture.” This question struck a nerve with me as I’ve often toyed with the idea of whether we’re moving in the direction of having one global culture. I then started to think of culture development in terms of the Big Bang.
What if cultures developed along the lines of the development of the universe? Think of cultures being galaxies exploding forth from one dense, concentrated ancestral culture. The galaxies/cultures move apart from each other, but there is within-culture cohesion. Maybe new cultures form in like fashion to the formation of new galaxies. My first Internet searches with the words “Big Bang” and “culture” turned up a lot of links on the TV show, “The Big Bang Theory,” and then with a bit of refining I can across a post by Howard Bloom titled The Big Bang And The Birth Of Culture in which he describes the Big Bang as a social event:
The story of how culture emerged way, way back when begins with the Big Bang. Culture is a social thing. And this has never been a cosmos of loners. From the git-go 13.7 billion years ago it’s been a social universe, a cosmos of tight, intimate bunches, of massive mobs, and of huge communities. The Big Bang was profoundly social.
Edward Blair Bolles critiques an article by Ian Tattersall in the American Museum of Natural History that speaks of Speech’s Big Bang:
[Tattersall] argues that the use of symbols was an invention, the fruit of some insight, that led to an eruption of cultural behavior — the production of rock art, creation of decorative beads, etc. Although it would be a long time before speech would become written language, language is assumed to have been born when symbols were invented.
More and more I think that will have to study linguistics whether I want to or not. Anyway, in thinking of culture and the Big Bang, I mostly thought of the idea of one global culture and how that may relate to scenarios that predict that the universe would expand for a while before collapsing back to its original state which lead me to think of human technological advancement as being driven, moved, directed by innate demands to coalesce back into one culture… roads, vehicles, telecommunication, boats, planes, the Internet, the types of ideas captured in art and literature all working toward forming this one global culture. This is a line of thinking to which I definitely wish to return. I believe that this model could be helpful to my understanding and I look forward to investigating and developing it more.
