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Social Evolutionism

Drawing on Enlightenment thought and Darwinian theory in the mid-to late 19th century there grew a number of rival evolutionary theories from the West that attempted to explain the differences in distant peoples, who were encountered more frequently through exploration and conquest. In particular, theories biological theories of difference and religious explanations of spiritual degradation dominated. It was in this context that social evolutionism arose. Social evolutionary thinkers maintained that people were not intrinsically different but rather were ultimately the same, sharing a basic "psychic unity". What accounted for their differences was the idea that they were experiencing different stages of their cultural maturation. Such famous social evolutionary theorists as Herbert Spencer, Edward Tylor, and Lewis Henry Morgan shared the assumption that "cultures" evolved from simple to complex in a uniform manner and that this process of evolution could be defined and marked through particular stages. Herbert Spencer developed a broad typology based on increasing differentiation in societies and labeled them: simple, compound, doubly compound, trebly compound. He also developed a typology based on political organization, where societies were situated on a continuum from military to industrial culture. Edward Tylor employed Montesquieu's tripartite sequence of development stages, in which he classified cultures as savages, barbarians, or civilized peoples. Lewis Henry Morgan specified each of these stages by further differentiating them between low, middle, or high.

In this paradigm of social evolutionary thinking, "culture" was treated as analogous to civilization. The stage at which societies were classified was based on a pattern of features, often including technological development, subsistence type, marriage forms, family structures, and political organization. A society's "culture" (or level of civilization) was internally determined, the change occurring from within the group itself through the germination of a seed of thought. Edward Tylor gave one of the first explicit definitions of culture in 1871 in his opening sentence of Primitive Culture. He wrote: "Culture, or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."

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