Leslie White

Leslie Alvin White (19 January 1900, Salida, Colorado – 31 March 1975) was an American anthropologist known for his advocacy of theories of cultural evolution, social evolutionism and especially neoevolutionism. He was responsible for creating the department of anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor which has been a leading force in new anthropological thought since that time.

Biography

Early influences

Dr. White was born to a peripatetic civil engineer in Salida, Colorado on January 19, 1900. His grandfather had been a prominent New England pastor, and his father had inherited many personality traits from that work-ethic background, but none of the religious aspects. His mother had an affair, and when the parents divorced the custody of the children was given to the father because of the circumstances. From five years old, Dr. White had only his brothers and sister as friends, as they moved to Lane, Kansas in 1907 and lived far in the countryside. He would often say how much he learned from the farm life, but he was also very lonely. Dr. White was always a good scholar, but when he used his analytic abilities to find flaws in his father's logic, he would often get a beating. White's sister got pregnant when she was seventeen years old, and it shook the whole family. It was so shameful for their father that he moved them around to various places during the pregnancy, and finally they settled just north of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The brothers became somewhat estranged, but White was always close with his sister. His sister had the baby while staying with their mother, and from then all the brothers began visiting and resumed the relationship with their mother and step-father. World War I arrived, and White felt a patriotic calling to enlist. He enlisted in the Navy, just in time for the armistice. Nevertheless, he often recalled this period as "the most romantic period of 9(his) life" and it influenced his anti-war stance from that point forward. Afterwards, he matriculated from Louisiana State University in 1919.

Academic career

In 1921 he transferred to Columbia University where he studied psychology, taking a BA in 1923 and an MA in 1924. Although at the same university as Franz Boas, Leslie White missed the founding father of American anthropology altogether. However, his interests even at this stage of his career were diverse, and he took classes in several other disciplines and institutions, including philosophy at UCLA, and clinical psychiatry, before finally discovered anthropology via Alexander Goldenweiser's courses at the New School for Social Research. In 1925 White began studies for a Ph.D. in sociology/anthropology at the University of Chicago and had the opportunity of spending a few weeks with the Menominee and Winnebago in Wisconsin. After his initial thesis proposal — a library thesis which foreshadowed his later theoretical work — he conducted fieldwork at Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico. Ph.D. in hand, White began teaching at the University at Buffalo in 1927, where he began to rethink the anti-evolutionary views that his Boasian education had instilled in him.

White became attracted to one of his students and married her one year later, in 1929. He remained married to Mary Pattison White for 38 years. In 1930, he moved to Ann Arbor, where he would remain for the rest of his active career.

The three-year period at Buffalo marked a turning point in White's life. It was during this time that he developed a worldview — anthropological, political, and ethical — that he would hold to and actively advocate until his death. The student response to the then-controversial Boasian anti-evolutionary and anti-racist doctrines that White espoused helped him formulate his own views regarding the evolution of human social life. In 1929 he visited Soviet Union and on his return joined the Socialist Labor Party, writing articles under the pseudonym ‘John Steel' for their newspaper.

White came to Michigan when he was hired to replace Julian Steward who departed Ann Arbor in 1930. Although the university was home to a museum with a long history of involvement in matters anthropological, White was the only professor in the anthropology department itself. In 1932 he headed a field school in the southwest which was attended by Fred Eggan and Mischa Titiev, among others.

It was Titiev that White brought to Michigan as a second professor in 1936. As a student of White — and who knows, perhaps his status as a Russian immigrant was salient as well — Titiev suited White perfectly. However, during the Second World War, Titiev took part in the war effort by studying Japan. Perhaps this upset the socialist White — in any case by war's end White had broken with Titiev and the two were hardly even on speaking terms. More faculty were not hired until after the war, when the two-man department was expanded. This, compounded by the foundation by Titiev of the East Asian Studies Program and the import of scholars like Richard Beardsley into the department, created a split on which most professors fell one way or another.

Later life

White's wife of thirty eight years contracted cancer, finally passing away dying after a long,painful demise on June 5, 1959. Mary had been a rather traditional academic wife who took care of all aspects of his life so that he could be free to concentrate on his work. Aware of her husband's many affairs, she chose to ignore them. As she became ill,he took care of every aspect of her care with great devotion, and had great remorse over how he had treated her perhaps finally realizing how important she had been to him. Some close friends urged him not to be overly distressed however, telling White that Mary told them she understood him and loved him in spite of his transgressions in the past. She even prepared lists for him of his favorite recipes and habits to prepare him for when she was gone. After she passed away he began a downward spiral. Although he had always been a social drinker, the shock of her departure was too much for him. He clearly became an alcoholic at this period, and his work and life suffered. He did no research for this decade and neither completed a biography he had worked on nor finished the sequel to "Evolution of Culture." At this time Mary had also been and important editor to him, and helped finish his work with many insightful comments. Perhaps her greatest contribution had been her ability to change the tone of his work away from a caustic, adversarial tone that affected his work in this period.

He married Helen Heatlie, a woman twenty years younger than him, on September 21, 1964. Heatlie was a very different person from Mary, and their relationship was turbulant. Later he said he never would have married her is not for the alchohol. They divorced the next year, and he was facing not only the end of his marriage, but the death of both a brother and a sister to cancer. The divorce proceedings were scandalous to the academic community at the time, and he was most distressed about being separated from his study, books and papers.

He joined Alcoholics Anonymous and went to AA meetings twice a week for the rest of his life. As an ethnographer, he found the organization unique and praised it highly in spite of his reluctance to embrace the guidance of any "higher being" as the organization proscribes.

As a professor in Ann Arbor White trained a generation of influential students. While authors such as Robert Carneiro, Beth Dillingham, and Gertrude Dole were to carry on White's program in its orthodox form, other scholars such as Eric Wolf, Elman Service, and Marshall Sahlins drew on their time with White to elaborate their own forms of anthropology.

White's anthropology

White's views were formulated specifically against the Boasians, with whom he was institutionally and intellectually at odds. This antagonism often took on an extremely personal form: White referred to Franz Boas's prose style as "corny" in no less a place than the American Journal of Sociology, while Robert Lowie referred to White's work as "a farrago of immature metaphysical notions" shaped by "the obsessive power of fanaticism [which] unconsciously warps one's vision."

One of the strongest deviations from Boasian orthodoxy was White's view of the nature of anthropology and its relation to other sciences present. White understood the world to be divided into cultural, biological, and physical levels of phenomenon. Such a division is a reflection of the composition of the universe and was not a heuristic device. Thus, contrary to Alfred L. Kroeber and Kluckhohn or Edward Sapir, White saw the delineation of the object of study not as a cognitive accomplishment of the anthropologist but a recognition of the actually existing and delineated phenomena which comprise the world. The distinction between 'natural' and 'social' sciences was thus not based on of method, but rather on the nature of the object of study – physicists study physical phenomena, biologists biological phenomena and culturologists (White's term) cultural phenomena.

While the object of study was not delineated by the researcher's viewpoint or interest, the method by which he approached them could be. White believed that phenomena could be explored from three different points of view, the historical, the formal-functional, and the evolutionist (or formal-temporal). The historical view was essentially Boasian, dedicated to examining the particular diachronic cultural processes, "lovingly trying to penetrate into its secrets until every feature is plain and clear." The formal-functional is essentially the synchronic approach advocated by Alfred Radcliffe-Brown and Bronisław Malinowski, attempting to discern the formal structure of a society and the functional interrelations of its components. The evolutionist approach is, like the formal approach, generalizing. But it is also diachronic, seeing particular events as general instances of larger trends.

While Boas claimed his science promised loving penetration, White thought that it would "emasculate" anthropology if it became the dominant position. White viewed his own approach as a synthesis of historical and functional approach because it combined the diachronic scope of one with the generalizing eye for formal interrelations provided by the other. As such it could point out "the course of cultural development in the past and its probable course in the future" a task that was anthropology's "most valuable function."

As a result White frequently championed nineteenth century evolutionists in a search for intellectual predecessors unclaimed or — preferably – denounced by Boasians. This can be clearly seen in his views of evolution, which are firmly rooted in the writings of Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, and Lewis H. Morgan. While it can be argued that White's exposition of Morgan and Spencer's was tendentious, it can be safely said that White's concepts of science and evolution were firmly rooted in their work. Advances in population biology and evolutionary theory passed White by and, unlike Steward, his conception of evolution and progress remained firmly rooted in the nineteenth century.

For White, culture was a superorganic entity that was sui generis and could only be explained in terms of itself. It was composed of three levels, the technological, the social organizational, and the ideological. Each level rested on the previous one, and although they all interacted, ultimately the technological level was the determining one, what White calls "The hero of our piece" and "the leading character of our play". The most important factor in his theory is technology: "Social systems are determined by technological systems", wrote White in his book, echoing the earlier theory of Lewis Henry Morgan.

White spoke of culture as a general human phenomenon, and claimed not to speak of ‘cultures' in the plural. His theory, published in 1959 in The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome, rekindled the interest in social evolutionism and is counted prominently among the neoevolutionists. He believed that culture – meaning the sum total of all human cultural activity on the planet – was evolving. White differentiated between three components of culture: technological, sociological and ideological, and argued that it was the technological component which plays a primary role or is the primary determining factor responsible for the cultural evolution. White's materialist approach is evident in the following quote: "man as an animal species, and consequently culture as a whole, is dependent upon the material, mechanical means of adjustment to the natural environment"[1]. This technological component can be described as material, mechanical, physical and chemical instruments, as well as the way people use these techniques. White's argument on the importance of technology goes as follows[2]:

Technology is an attempt to solve the problems of survival.
This attempt ultimately means capturing enough energy and diverting it for human needs.
Societies that capture more energy and use it more efficiently have an advantage over other societies.
Therefore, these different societies are more advanced in an evolutionary sense.

Composite image of the Earth at night, created by NASA and NOAA. The brightest areas of the Earth are the most urbanized, but not necessarily the most populated. Even more than 100 years after the invention of the electric light, some regions remain thinly populated and unlit.

For White "the primary function of culture" and the one that determines its level of advancement is its ability to "harness and control energy". White's law states that the measure by which to judge the relative degree of evolvedness of culture was the amount of energy it could capture (energy consumption).

White differentiates between five stages of human development. In first, people use energy of their own muscles. In second, they use energy of domesticated animals. In third, they use the energy of plants (so White refers to agricultural revolution here). In fourth, they learn to use the energy of natural resources: coal, oil, gas. In fifth, they harness the nuclear energy. White introduced a formula

C= ET,

where E is a measure of energy consumed per capita per year, T is the measure of efficiency of technical factors utilising the energy and C represents the degree of cultural development. In his own words: "the basic law of cultural evolution" was "culture evolves as the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year is increased, or as the efficiency of the instrumental means of putting the energy to work is increased"[3]. Therefore "we find that progress and development are effected by the improvement of the mechanical means with which energy is harnessed and put to work as well as by increasing the amounts of energy employed"[4]. Although White stops short of promising that technology is the panacea for all the problems that affect mankind, like technological utopians do, his theory treats the technological factor as the most important factor in the evolution of society and is similar to the later works of Gerhard Lenski, the theory of Kardashev scale of Russian astronomer, Nikolai Kardashev and to some notions of technological singularity.

Selected publications

Ethnological Essays: Selected Essays of Leslie A. White. University of New Mexico Press. 1987.
The Science of Culture: A study of man and civilization. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1949.
The Pueblo of Santa Ana, New Mexico. American Anthropological Association Memoir 60, 1942.
The Pueblo of Santo Domingo. American Anthropological Association Memoir 60, 1934.
The Pueblo of San Felipe. American Anthropological Association Memoir No. 38, 1932.
The Acoma Indians. Bureau of American Ethnology, 47th annual report, pp. 1-192. Smithsonian Institution, 1932.

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