A new line of research that took social and cultural anthropologists to our primitive contemporaries8 gave prime focus to living cultures. Those following the evolutionary approach regarded these primitive communities/tribes living in isolated existence as the contemporary representatives of the culture that we ‘moderns’ might have lived. Their approach can be illustrated thus:
Figure 4.3 Evolution of Contemporary Cultures
They argue that civilization has moved from the stage of barbarism to savagery to civilization. But there are some societies that are still barbaric, or savage. In both time or space, the movement is from barbaric to savagery to civilization. Evolutionists consider these stages as given, and every society has to move from one stage to another. We shall elaborate this line of thinking when we discuss social and cultural change. Suffice it to say that evolutionists amongst social anthropologists approached the present-day tribal societies with that specific theoretical orientation.
Other cultural anthropologists were amazed by the enormous diversity in cultural patterns, even those associated with the fulfilment of basic human needs. It is this concern that led them to develop a theory of culture as ‘superorganic’, and promote cultural relativism as a scientific ethic.
It was British sociologist Herbert Spencer who described culture as ‘Super-organic’, to differentiate between the natural environment of inorganic and organic materials. Originally, the earth possessed only inorganic matter. It took several million years for organic matter to occur and evolve into Homo Sapiens. And it took several thousand years for Man to develop a society-specific superorganic to build cultures and much longer still to fashion civilizations. Social sciences now use the word Culture for this superorganic pool, which is derived from the German word Kultur.
The concept of cultural relativism
[H]olds that any cultural phenomenon must be understood and evaluated in terms of the culture of which it forms part. … We, the students of culture, live in our culture, are attached to its values, and have a natural human inclination to become ethnocentric over it, with the result that, if unchecked, we would perceive, describe, and evaluate other cultures by the forms, standards, and values of our own, thus preventing fruitful comparison and classification (Kroeber, 1965: 1033).
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