Exam 11: Evolution Redux

Leslie White's contention that "culture evolves as the efficiency of energy capture increases" is borne out by Johnson's data on the relationship between energy input and output in hunter-gatherer, horticultural, and intensive agricultural societies.

Leslie White divided cultures into "technological," "sociological," and "ideological" levels that basically corresponded to Marx's three-part division of societies.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the FBI maintained surveillance records on dozens of anthropologists suspected of left-wing political leanings.

Boas argued that geographical regions were associated with certain types of cultures only because the boundaries of those regions (mountains, rivers, coasts) limited the ability of cultural practices to diffuse from one region to another.

Boas acquired the idea of culture areas from museum displays, which had always organized cultural artifacts by geographical regions.

Although hunter-gatherers work less than people in the United States, the advent of "labor-saving" technology since the 1950s has reduced the work week for Americans by nearly one full day.

Economist Ester Boserup argued that people would only opt for intensified food production if they were forced to-either by increasing population or the demands of a dominant class of tribute-takers.

A.L. Kroeber's doctrine of possibilism suggested that within a given region only a single kind of cultural adaptation was possible.

Anthropologists now recognize that the nutritional hardship that Steward attributed to hunter-gatherers like the Shoshone was largely the result of white contact and resulting loss of territory.

Julian Steward's 1936 article on Great Basin hunter-gatherers was the first application of a materialist theory to explain the characteristics of a specific culture, although it is now recognized as having reached erroneous conclusions about hunter-gatherer kinship and social organization.