ABSTRACT
Cultural evolution, although long an unfashionable concept, has commanded renewed interest in the last two decades. This interest does not indicate any serious reconsideration of the particular historical reconstructions of the nineteenth-century evolutionists, for these were quite thoroughly discredited on empirical grounds. It arises from the potential methodological importance of cultural evolution for contemporary research, from the implications of its scientific objectives, its taxonomic procedures, and its conceptualization of historical change and cultural causality. An appraisal of cultural evolution, therefore, must be concerned with definitions and meanings. But I do not wish to engage in semantics. I shall attempt to show that if certain distinctions in the concept of evolution are made, it is evident that certain methodological propositions find fairly wide acceptance today.
From Julian H. Steward, Theory of Culture Change. Copyright © 1955 by the University of Illinois Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher and the author. Julian H. Steward is Research Professor of Anthropology, University of Illinois.
