Leslie White

Leslie Alvin White (January 19, 1900, Salida, Colorado – March 31, 1975, Lone Pine, California) was an American anthropologist known for his advocacy of the theories on cultural evolution, sociocultural evolution, and especially neoevolutionism, and for his role in creating the department of anthropology at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor.

[citation needed] He volunteered to fight in World War I, serving in the US Navy before enrolling at Louisiana State University in 1919.

White studied at Columbia, where Franz Boas had lectured, however he supported cultural evolution as defined by writers such as Lewis.

White's interests were diverse, and he took classes in several other disciplines, including philosophy at UCLA, and clinical psychiatry, before discovering anthropology via Alexander Goldenweiser courses at the New School for Social Research.

White developed an interest in Marxism in 1929, he visited the Soviet Union and on his return joined the Socialist Labor Party, writing articles under the pseudonym "John Steel" for their newspaper.

In any case by war's end White had broken with Titiev, who would go on to found the East Asian Studies Program, and the two were hardly even on speaking terms.

This could take on personal overtones: White referred to Boas's prose style as "corny" in the American Journal of Sociology.

The historical view was dedicated to examining the particular diachronic cultural processes, "lovingly trying to penetrate into its secrets until every feature is plain and clear."

The formal-functional is essentially the synchronic approach advocated by Alfred Radcliffe-Brown and Bronisław Malinowski, attempting to discern the formal structure of a society and the functional interrelations of its components.

This stance can be seen in his views of evolution, which are firmly rooted in the writings of Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, and Lewis H. Morgan.

Advances in population biology and evolutionary theory passed White by and, unlike Steward, his conception of evolution and progress remained firmly rooted in the nineteenth century.

His theory, published in 1959 in The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome, rekindled the interest in social evolutionism and is counted prominently among the neoevolutionists.

His materialist approach is evident in the following quote: "man as an animal species, and consequently culture as a whole, is dependent upon the material, mechanical means of adjustment to the natural environment.