Cultural Evolution: Beyond Tylor and Morgan’s Theories

How do human societies change over time? Do all cultures follow the same path from simple to complex? These questions captivated 19th-century thinkers, and the answers they proposed fundamentally shaped how we understand culture today. Two scholars – Edward B. Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan – built the first systematic frameworks for studying cultural change, shifting the conversation from viewing cultures as fixed and static to recognizing them as dynamic, evolving systems. Their theories, though later criticized and revised, remain foundational to anthropology and sociology.

The intellectual climate that made cultural evolution possible 🔗

Before Tylor and Morgan, most European thinkers explained differences between societies through religion or assumed that non-Western peoples represented a state of cultural decline. The Enlightenment and, later, Charles Darwin’s work on biological evolution changed that. Drawing on Enlightenment thought, Darwin’s findings, and new cross-cultural evidence, a generation of 19th-century social theorists began asking a new kind of question: if species evolve, do cultures evolve too?

The answer both Tylor and Morgan gave was yes – and they set out to prove it scientifically. Their work marked the birth of cultural evolutionism, anthropology’s first systematic theoretical framework for understanding human diversity.

Edward B. Tylor and unilineal cultural evolution 🔗

Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) is widely regarded as the founder of cultural anthropology. His landmark 1871 work, Primitive Culture, laid out a bold argument: all human cultures evolve along a single, universal path – from simple to complex, from “savage” to “civilized.” This idea is known as unilineal evolution.

The three-stage model 🔗

Tylor proposed that all cultures pass through three sequential stages: savagery, barbarism, and civilization. In his framework, contemporary Western Europe sat at the pinnacle of civilization, while other societies around the world represented earlier stages of the same universal journey. Crucially, Tylor did not see this as a matter of race or biology – he argued that all human minds are fundamentally equal. The difference between a hunter-gatherer society and an industrialized one, in his view, came down to the accumulated store of knowledge each had built over time.

Tylor’s definition of culture 🔗

One of Tylor’s most enduring contributions was his definition of culture itself. In the opening of Primitive Culture, he defined culture as that complex whole encompassing knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities acquired by humans as members of society. This definition remains widely referenced in anthropology to this day. It was a significant move: culture was no longer a vague, poetic notion – it was something that could be studied scientifically.

The concept of survivals 🔗

Tylor also introduced the concept of “survivals” – customs, beliefs, or practices from earlier stages of cultural development that persist into more advanced societies, even after they have lost their original function. He noted how beliefs from a distant, primitive past seemed to linger into the modern world, such as superstitions or folk rituals. For Tylor, survivals were important evidence that cultures do indeed move through historical stages, because these leftover traits point back to an earlier phase of development. His work on religion followed the same logic: he argued that animism – belief in spiritual beings – was the earliest form of religious thought, and that religious ideas had progressively evolved toward more organized and systematic forms.

Lewis Henry Morgan and societal evolution through kinship 🔗

Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) was an American lawyer and ethnologist who became one of the most influential figures in 19th-century anthropology. Unlike Tylor, who focused on culture broadly, Morgan zeroed in on kinship – the systems by which societies organize family relationships – as the key to understanding social evolution. His close study of the Iroquois nation, which led to his adoption by the Seneca tribe, gave him a rich empirical foundation that most of his contemporaries lacked.

Morgan’s three stages of social evolution 🔗

In his 1877 work Ancient Society, Morgan built on earlier kinship research to develop a theory of three stages of human progress: Savagery, Barbarism, and Civilization. He went further than Tylor by subdividing savagery and barbarism into lower, middle, and upper phases, giving him seven distinct periods in total. Each stage was tied to specific technological and social developments:

• Savagery was characterized by hunting and gathering, communal kinship structures, and the absence of agriculture. Social organization revolved around small, kin-based groups.
• Barbarism arrived with the development of agriculture, animal domestication, and settled communities. Family structures evolved into larger kinship groups, and technological advances included the use of metals.
• Civilization brought advanced technology, written language, and complex political institutions. Private property and class distinctions became prominent features of social life.

Kinship to the state: the evolution of governance 🔗

Morgan’s most original contribution was tracing the evolution of government itself. He argued that early human societies were organized around kinship and personal relationships – what he called a “gentile” system based on people rather than territory. Over time, as property became central to social life, governance shifted toward a political system based on territory and property – the modern state. He saw the principal institutions of human society as having originated in savagery, developed through barbarism, and matured during civilization. This framework was radical for its time: it meant that even something as fundamental as the state was not natural or eternal, but a product of historical evolution.

Morgan’s influence beyond anthropology 🔗

Morgan’s work significantly influenced European social theorists, including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who drew on his analysis of social structure and material culture. Engels’ 1884 work The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State relied heavily on Morgan’s evolutionary schema. This cross-disciplinary reach shows just how foundational Morgan’s ideas were – his work didn’t just shape anthropology, it shaped political theory as well.

What Tylor and Morgan had in common 🔗

Despite their different emphases – Tylor on culture broadly and Morgan on kinship and institutions – both scholars shared a core set of assumptions. Both worked with data from indigenous peoples, whom they viewed as representing earlier stages of cultural evolution, and both relied on the idea that contemporary “primitive” societies could stand in as proxies for the ancient ancestors of more advanced civilizations. Both also rejected the then-popular idea that non-Western peoples were biologically inferior – a significant stance at the time – but unfortunately replaced it with a cultural hierarchy that still placed Western society at the top.

Their shared framework – unilineal evolution – held that all societies travel the same road, even if at different speeds. This idea gave anthropology a comparative method: by studying living societies at different “stages,” scholars believed they could reconstruct the entire history of human culture.

The criticisms: where the theory fell short 🔗

By the early 20th century, the unilineal model came under serious attack. Anthropologists like Franz Boas used rigorous empirical methods to argue that Tylor and Morgan’s theories were speculative and systematically misrepresented ethnographic data. Boas and his followers pointed out that so-called “primitive” contemporary societies had just as much history as so-called “civilized” ones – they had simply developed differently, shaped by their own unique environments, histories, and internal dynamics.

Boas called for an end to “armchair anthropology” – the practice of building sweeping theories from secondhand accounts gathered by travelers, missionaries, and traders. He advocated instead for rigorous fieldwork, arguing that each society must be understood as a product of its own unique history – an approach known as historical particularism.

The unilineal model was also criticized for its ethnocentrism. Theories of unilinear evolution were heavily criticized as racist, since they presumed that some peoples were more evolved than others. By placing Western European civilization at the pinnacle, the framework effectively judged all other societies as incomplete versions of a European ideal – a bias that had real political consequences during the age of colonialism.

Beyond Tylor and Morgan: toward multilinear evolution 🔗

The rejection of unilineal evolution did not mean the end of evolutionary thinking in anthropology – it meant its refinement. By the mid-20th century, neo-evolutionists like Leslie White and Julian Steward reintroduced evolutionary frameworks, but with crucial adjustments. Steward’s concept of multilinear evolution held that cultures can evolve in different ways depending on the unique historical, environmental, and social conditions they face – rather than all following the same single path. This preserved the core insight that cultures change and develop over time, while discarding the rigid, ethnocentric ranking system that had made Tylor and Morgan’s models so problematic.

Today, the study of cultural evolution is deeply interdisciplinary. Anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and evolutionary biologists all contribute to understanding how cultures change. The focus has shifted from ranking cultures on a ladder to examining the processes by which cultures adapt, borrow from one another, and transform – a far more nuanced picture than the one Tylor and Morgan first sketched out.

Their lasting legacy 🔗

It would be easy to dismiss Tylor and Morgan as products of their time – ethnocentric, speculative, and ultimately wrong in the specifics of their models. But that would underestimate what they achieved. They were the first to treat culture as something that could be studied scientifically and comparatively. Tylor’s systematic investigation of culture laid the foundation for anthropology as a scientific discipline, and his definition of culture remains a touchstone. Morgan’s kinship research established the comparative study of kinship as a central anthropological concern – work that continues to inform scholarship today.

Most importantly, both scholars made a crucial conceptual shift: they moved the study of human society away from seeing cultural traits as fixed, God-given, or racially determined – and toward understanding them as dynamic, historical, and evolving. That shift, more than any specific theory they proposed, is their true and enduring contribution.

What do you think? If all cultures evolve differently based on their own histories and environments, is it even possible to compare them fairly across time? And looking at Tylor and Morgan’s work, how much do you think the biases of an era shape the scientific theories produced in it?

References

1. https://anthropology.ua.edu/theory/social-evolutionism/
2. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-Burnett-Tylor
3. https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Courses/HACC_Central_Pennsylvania's_Community_College/ANTH_205:_Cultures_of_the_World_-_Perspectives_on_Culture_(Scheib)/03:_Anthropological_Theory/3.02:_Cultural_Evolution
4. https://nerd.wwnorton.com/ebooks/epub/essculturalanthro4/EPUB/content/1.2.2-chapter02.xhtml
5. https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Edward_Burnett_Tylor
6. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lewis-Henry-Morgan
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Society
8. https://horizonbooks.com/book/9781835529577
9. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45950/45950-h/45950-h.htm
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unilineal_evolution
11. https://maxias.in/study-material/anthropology/historical-particularism-as-a-critical-development-to-classical-evolutionism/
12. https://www.britannica.com/topic/cultural-evolution/Multilinear-theory
13. http://sumananthromaterials.blogspot.com/2019/07/neo-evolutionism-with-special-emphasis.html
14. https://anthropology.iresearchnet.com/edward-burnett-tylor/