Lectures 3. Theoretical schemes of cultural changes
1. Evolutionary theories of cultural development
2. Cyclic theories of cultural change
3. P.Sorokin’s wave model of cultural development
4. Nonlinear scheme of cultural and historical development.
Evolutionary theories of cultural development
Theorists of evolutionism understand culture as a process of adaptation of society to the conditions of natural existence. The basic ideas of classical evolutionism are:
- direction of movement of human society and culture from simple to complex;
- logical character of the changes, in according to a specific law.
Evolutionary dynamics of cultural form is the progressive complication of socio-cultural life with the necessary increase in the level of its organization.
The formation of evolutionary ideas was influenced by achievements of natural science, especially biology, including the discovery by Charles Darwin (1809-1882) of evolutionary patterns of change in living organisms. This led to the formation of evolutionary ideas in cultural studies. The most outstanding representatives of evolutionism in the cultural studies were Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) and E. Taylor (1832-1917). Spencer in his famous work "Fundamentals of Sociology" made a systematic analysis of biological and social organisms, demonstrating similarity in their origin and development. He considered the development of culture as an irreversible process of evolution, which manifests itself in complications and improvement of the initially primitive cultural systems. Tylor defined culture as "a general improvement of the human race through achieving of higher organization of the individual and of society".
There are different types of evolutionary conceptions: Single-linear and multi-linear. The Single-linear conceptions of the historical process of evolution were expressed in the writings of Herder, G. Hegel, Karl Marx. Philosophy of culture around the nineteenth century was under great influence of the representative of german classical philosophy G. Hegel (1770-1831). He introduced the concept of "world reason", "world spirit", "absolute culture" as the ultimate goal of human development towards achievement of "absolute knowledge". He defined culture as the gradual manifestation of the creative forces of "global mind", which passes various stages of self-knowledge and strives to achieve through the dialectical struggle of opposites "absolute knowledge". To the linear model of historical development of society also belongs the Marxist conception of socio-historical formations, which considers cultural and historical process as the ascent from one formation to another on the path of progress.
Thus, single-linear model recognizes that the way of culture – it is a gradual movement from barbarism to civilization, during which more complex cultural elements deny the existence of earlier versions, which are characterized as less than perfect. The global culture has the only one universally recognized goal, which determines the gradual development and flourishing of a single cultural whole.
Multi-linear theories of cultural evolution are associated with the recognition of possibility of diverse approximately equal ways of socio-cultural development, which greatly complicates the possibility of determining the general laws of evolution.
Evolutionary conceptions have many supporters, but they does not cover all the mechanisms of cultural dynamics. Typically, forward-linear vector is complemented by the development of culture in a form of circle or wave.