Energy and the Evolution of Culture

* Article: Leslie White. Energy and the Evolution of Culture. The American Anthropologist, 1943

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Discussion

Kevin Jon Fernlund:

"In 1943, the anthropologist Leslie White published “Energy and the Evolution of Culture.” This remarkable article appeared in the pages of the American Anthropologist in the issue that immediately followed the one containing the Margaret Mead piece on planning Oceania’s future. This was the article in which she articulated the Boasian creed of cultural relativism, thereby put-ting belief or political commitment ahead of science; there is a fine line between creed and dog-ma. White taught at the University of Michigan and was an unreconstructed nineteenth-century evolutionist who saw his work picking up right where his predecessors Lewis Henry Morgan, Herbert Spencer, Edward Tylor, and Karl Marx left off, sans the racial determinism.

On this important point, White was emphatic: “Although peoples obviously differ from each other physically, we are not able to attribute differences in culture to differences in physique (or “mentality”). In our study of culture, therefore, we may regard the human race as of uniform quality, i.e., as a constant, and, hence, we may eliminate it from our study.” White removed race from the table and focused instead on the purity of energy; by energy he meant the “capacity for performing work.” White declared, “Everything in the universe may be described in terms of energy. Galaxies, stars, molecules, and atoms may be regarded as organizations of energy. Living organisms may be looked upon as engines that operate by means of energy derived directly or indirectly from the sun. The civilizations, or cultures of mankind, also, may be regarded as a form or organization of energy.” In 1959, he would call civilizations or cultures “thermodynamic systems.”

White eliminated race and he eliminated place from his study as well. Just as he considered the former a constant, he considered habitat, even though “no two habitats are alike,” to be also a constant. He did so by reducing the “need-serving, welfare-promoting resources of all particular habitats to an average.”

Having dispensed with the constants of race and place (but not class as he was a clandestine Socialist), White then turned to the three variables of energy, technology, and product. That is,

1) “the amount of energy per capita per unit of time harnessed and put to work within the culture;”

2) the “technological means with which this energy is expended,” and

3) the “human need-serving product that accrues from the expenditure of energy.”

White expressed the relationship of these variables in a formula: E x T = P (Energy expended per capita per unit of time) x (the Technological means of its expenditure) = (the magnitude of the Product per unit of time)."

(https://jbh.journals.villanova.edu/index.php/JBH/article/view/2612/2532)