ABSTRACT

The opening gun in the battle that ultimately led to the reconquest of anthropology for evolutionism was scarcely heard at the time it was fired. The anthropologist who took the first step, and played the main role, in leading the discipline out of the theoretical morass in which it was mired was Leslie A. White. The ensuing struggle to rehabilitate evolutionism in cultural anthropology, in which Leslie White took the lead, was a long and painful one for him. The factor most often advanced by members of the Boas school as presenting an insurmountable obstacle to the postulation of any evolutionary regularities was the existence of diffusion. The reemergence of cultural evolutionism in American ethnology was slow in coming. One or the bases on which the Boasians rejected cultural evolution was the contention that no objective standards existed by which cultures could be rated or evaluated.