Human relations may be considered as patterned interactions over time. Thus, temporal change and continuity are constant and fundamental features of the human condition.
The alternative is to think of our key topics, including society, culture, and nature, as processualβas unfolding over time. Anthropology has a twofold relationship to social change. On the one hand, the long time period of human biological and cultural evolution provides bountiful evidence of social change; on the other hand, the microscopic time and space perspective of ethnography favors static views of culture and society and thus misleadingly renders change abnormal and exogenous.
Cultural evolution is generally used for major changes in social organization that have taken place over the length of human prehistory and history, involving the emergence of ranking and stratification, states and bureaucracies, specialized occupations, cities, and so on. Empirical generalizations about and theories of cultural evolution abounded in the 18th and 19th century.
At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, Franz Boas emphatically criticized the flaws of stage theories, such as their rigidity and egregious speculation. Nevertheless, he also addressed change as a kaleidoscopic flow of influences among culturesβso-called historical particularism. His interest in social change waned, however, when confronted by recent changes in non-Western cultures impacted by the West, which he tended to ignore.
The late Boasians such as Alexander Lesser initiated the study of recent history among Native Americans, but this was overshadowed by the revival of stage theories [Page ] of cultural evolution under the auspices of Leslie White and Julian Steward.
