ALB wrote: Anthropolgy has

 I think the issue of social evolutionism in anthropological circles is an interesting one and not quite cut and dried,   Back in the 19th century Sir James Frazer wrote an influential book The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion  (1890) which posited a so called ” primitive mind” which he portrayed as superstitious and irrational  and which he contrasted with the modern scientific rational mind.   This was representative of a kind of ethnocentric essentialistic approach to what earlier in the 18th century was called “the Problem of the Savage”.  In the  Medieval era you has this cosmological notion of a Great Chain of Being  (actually it goes back to the Ancient Greeks)  in  which human beings were seen as intermediate between the  animal world and the angels by virtue of possessing a soul. In the early modern era,  European explorers, on  first encountering the “Savage”, were  struck by  the great differences between these so called primitive cultures and modern European societies.  Hence “the Problem of the Savage” – how to accommodate the Savage within this overall hierarchical schema when all human beings purportedly occupied the same level  within this Great Chain This problem was effectively “resolved” in the course of the 19th century by the transformation of the old Great Chain idea into the notion of a racial hierarchy  under the influence of  Darwinian evolutionary theory. You can see where this kind of fits in with what I said above about the “primitive mind versus the modern mind”. Point is that quite  a bit of subsequent anthropology was devoted to combating this sort of racist ethnocentrism .  I can remember reading Evans Pritchard’s  Witchcraft , Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937) which called into question this whole idea of the primitive mind. EP showed, for instance,  that the very procedures that the Azande adopted to determine witchcraft  – such as the famous chicken oracle –  mimicked scientific methodology e.g. double blind tests  EP was trying to say that it was quite misleading to think of human beings developing – or evolving – from one way of looking at the world into another.  Rationality – and irrationality – in other words are universal human traits  that occur throughout  our historyI note the wikipeda article on Leslie White refers to Franz Boas who was a prominent figure in cultural anthropology and a fierce critic of evolutionary theory.   But as I understand it Boas specifically rejected a teleological version of evolutionary theory  (not evolutionary theory per se) such as was apparently held by Lewis Henry Morgan – the notion that history is a process of “unfolding” and development  through predetermined stages  towards some predetermined end.  This is different  from the idea of evolution by natural selection.  Did not Marx himself welcome the fact that Darwin has banished teleology from the natural sciences? . If so, that sort of makes the relationship between Marx and Morgan a little more problematic than it might first appear