Julian Steward
Encyclopedia
Julian Haynes Steward was an American anthropologist
best known for his role in developing "the concept and method" of cultural ecology
, as well as a scientific theory of culture change.
, where he lived on Monroe Street, NW, and later, Macomb Street in Cleveland Park
.
At age 16, Steward left an unhappy childhood in Washington, D.C.
to attend boarding school in Owens Valley, California, at the edge of the Great Basin
. Steward's experience at the newly-established Deep Springs Preparatory School (which later became Deep Springs College
), high in the south-eastern Sierra Nevada had a significant influence on his academic and career interests. Steward’s “direct engagement” with the land (specifically, subsistence through irrigation and ranching) and the Northern Paiute that lived there became a “catalyst” for his theory and method of cultural ecology. (Kerns 1999; Murphy 1977)
As an undergraguate, Steward studied for a year at Berkeley
under Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie
, after which he transferred to Cornell University
, from which he graduated in 1925 with a B.Sc. in Zoology. Although Cornell, like most universities at the time, had no anthropology department, its president, Livingston Farrand, had previously held appointment as a professor of anthropology at Columbia University
. Farrand advised Steward to continue pursuing his interest (or, in Steward's words, his already chosen "life work") in anthropology at Berkeley
(Kerns 2003:71-72). Steward studied under Kroeber and Lowie at Berkeley, where his dissertation The Ceremonial Buffoon of the American Indian, a Study of Ritualized Clowning and Role Reversals was accepted in 1929.
, where he taught until 1930. The department later gained notoriety from the appointment and guidance of Leslie White
, with whose model of "universal" cultural evolution Steward disagreed. In 1930, Steward moved to the University of Utah, which appealed to Steward for its proximity to the Sierra Nevadas, and nearby archaeological fieldwork opportunities in California, Nevada, Idaho, and Oregon.
Steward’s research interests centered on “subsistence” — the dynamic interaction of man, environment, technology, social structure, and the organization of work — an approach Kroeber regarded as “eccentric,” original, and innovative. (EthnoAdmin 2003) In 1931, Steward, pressed for money, began fieldwork on the Great Basin Shoshone under the auspices of Kroeber’s Culture Element Distribution (CED) survey; in 1935 he received an appointment to the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnography (BAE), which published some of his most influential works. Among them: Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Sociopolitical Groups (1938), which “fully explicated” the paradigm of cultural ecology, and marked a shift away from the diffusionist orientation of American anthropology.
For eleven years Steward became an administrator of considerable clout, editing the Handbook of South American Indians
. He also took a position at the Smithsonian Institution
, where he founded the Institute for Social Anthropology in 1943. He also served on a committee to reorganize the American Anthropological Association
and played a role in the creation of the National Science Foundation
. He was also active in archaeological pursuits, successfully lobbying Congress to create the Committee for the Recovery of Archaeological Remains (the beginning of what is known today as 'salvage archaeology') and worked with Wendell Bennett to establish the Viru Valley project, an ambitious research program centered in Peru
.
Steward searched for cross-cultural regularities in an effort to discern laws of culture and culture change. His work explained variation in the complexity of social organization as being limited to within a range possibilities by the environment. In evolutionary terms, he located this view of cultural ecology as “multi-linear,” in contrast to the unilinear typological models popular in the 19th century, and Leslie White’s “universal” approach. Steward’s most important theoretical contributions came during his teaching years at Columbia (1946–53).
Steward's most theoretically productive years were from 1946-1953, while teaching at Columbia University
. At this time, Columbia saw an influx of World War II
veteran
s who were attending school thanks to the GI Bill. Steward quickly developed a coterie of students who would go on to have enormous influence in the history of anthropology, including Sidney Mintz
, Eric Wolf
, Roy Rappaport
, Stanley Diamond
, Robert Manners, Morton Fried
, Robert F. Murphy
, and influenced other scholars such as Marvin Harris
. Many of these students participated in the Puerto Rico Project, yet another large-scale group research study that focused on modernization in Puerto Rico
.
Steward left Columbia for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
, where he chaired the Anthropology Department and continued to teach until his retirement in 1968. There he undertook yet another large-scale study, a comparative analysis of modernization in eleven third world societies. The results of this research were published in three volumes entitled Contemporary Change in Traditional Societies. Steward died in 1972.
. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, American anthropology was suspicious of generalizations and often unwilling to draw broader conclusions from the meticulously detailed monographs that anthropologists produced. Steward is notable for moving anthropology away from this more particularist approach and developing a more nomothetic, social-scientific direction. His theory of "multilinear" cultural evolution examined the way in which societies adapted to their environment. This approach was more nuanced than Leslie White
's theory of "universal evolution," which was influenced by thinkers such as Lewis Henry Morgan. Steward's interest in the evolution of society also led him to examine processes of modernization. He was one of the first anthropologists to examine the way in which national and local levels of society were related to one another. He questioned the possibility creating a social theory which encompassed the entire evolution of humanity; yet, he also argued that anthropologists are not limited to description of specific, existing cultures. Steward believed it is possible to create theories analyzing typical, common culture, representative of specific eras or regions. As the decisive factors determining the development of a given culture, he pointed to technology and economics, while noting that there are secondary factors, such as political systems, ideologies, and religions. These factors push the evolution of a given society in several directions at the same time.
Julian Haynes Steward is regarded as a significant contributor to the field of anthropology and as a major player in the field’s progression and innovation. He is perhaps best known for his writings on his Great Basin experiences between the years of 1918 and 1943, where he published an impressive number of papers and made substantial achievements in his career (Clemmer 1999: ix). While Steward’s career was a diverse and evolving one, he was generally known and praised for his systematic analysis and empirical approach to the field of anthropology, as well as his contribution to the creation of the field of “cultural ecology
”. Steward’s impressive career and extensive education, combined with a well rounded and multifaceted personality make him stand out as significant participant and catalyst in the continuing expansion and progression of the field of Anthropology.
Coming from a scientific background, Steward initially focused on ecosystems and physical environments, but soon took interest on how these environments could influence cultures (Clemmer 1999: ix). It was during Steward’s teaching years at Columbia, which lasted until 1952, that he wrote arguably his most important theoretical contributions: “Cultural Causality and Law: A Trial Formulation of the Development of Early Civilizations (1949b), “Area Research: Theory and Practice” (1950), “Levels of Sociocultural Integration” (1951), “Evolution and Process (1953a), and “The Cultural Study of Contemporary Societies: Puerto Rico” (Steward and Manners 1953). Clemmer writes, “Altogether, the publications released between 1949 and 1953 represent nearly the entire gamut of Steward’s broad range of interests: from cultural evolution, prehistory, and archaeology to the search for causality and cultural “laws” to area studies, the study of contemporary societies, and the relationship of local cultural systems to national ones (Clemmer 1999: xiv).” We can clearly see that Steward’s diversity in subfields, extensive and comprehensive field work and a profound intellect coalesce in the form of a brilliant anthropologist.
In regard to Steward’s Great Basin work, Clemmer writes, “ … [his approach] might be characterized as a perspective that people are in large part defined by what they do for a living, can be seen in his growing interest in studying the transformation of slash-and-burn horticulturists into national proletariats in South America" (Clemmer 1999: xiv). Clemmer does mention two works that contradict his characteristic style and reveal a less familiar aspect to his work, which are “Aboriginal and Historic Groups of the Ute Indians of Utah: An Analysis and Native Components of the White River Ute Indians” (1963b) and “The Northern Paiute Indians” (Steward and Wheeler-Vogelin 1954; Clemmer 1999; xiv).
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
best known for his role in developing "the concept and method" of cultural ecology
Cultural ecology
Cultural ecology studies the relationship between a given society and its natural environment as well as the life-forms and ecosystems that support its lifeways . This may be carried out diachronically , or synchronically...
, as well as a scientific theory of culture change.
Early life and education
Steward was born in Washington, D.C.Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
, where he lived on Monroe Street, NW, and later, Macomb Street in Cleveland Park
Cleveland Park
Cleveland Park is a residential neighborhood in the Northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C.It is located at and bounded approximately by Rock Creek Park to the east, Wisconsin and Idaho Avenues to the west, Klingle and Woodley Roads to the south, and Rodman and Tilden Streets to the north...
.
At age 16, Steward left an unhappy childhood in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
to attend boarding school in Owens Valley, California, at the edge of the Great Basin
Great Basin
The Great Basin is the largest area of contiguous endorheic watersheds in North America and is noted for its arid conditions and Basin and Range topography that varies from the North American low point at Badwater Basin to the highest point of the contiguous United States, less than away at the...
. Steward's experience at the newly-established Deep Springs Preparatory School (which later became Deep Springs College
Deep Springs College
Deep Springs is a private, all-male , alternative college in Deep Springs, California, in the United States. A two-year college, the institution currently aims for a student body size of 26, though the number is occasionally lower...
), high in the south-eastern Sierra Nevada had a significant influence on his academic and career interests. Steward’s “direct engagement” with the land (specifically, subsistence through irrigation and ranching) and the Northern Paiute that lived there became a “catalyst” for his theory and method of cultural ecology. (Kerns 1999; Murphy 1977)
As an undergraguate, Steward studied for a year at Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
under Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie
Robert Lowie
Robert Harry Lowie was an Austrian-born American anthropologist. An expert on North American Indians, he was instrumental in the development of modern anthropology.-Biography:...
, after which he transferred to Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
, from which he graduated in 1925 with a B.Sc. in Zoology. Although Cornell, like most universities at the time, had no anthropology department, its president, Livingston Farrand, had previously held appointment as a professor of anthropology at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
. Farrand advised Steward to continue pursuing his interest (or, in Steward's words, his already chosen "life work") in anthropology at Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
(Kerns 2003:71-72). Steward studied under Kroeber and Lowie at Berkeley, where his dissertation The Ceremonial Buffoon of the American Indian, a Study of Ritualized Clowning and Role Reversals was accepted in 1929.
Career
Steward went on to establish an anthropology department at the University of MichiganUniversity of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
, where he taught until 1930. The department later gained notoriety from the appointment and guidance of Leslie White
Leslie White
Leslie Alvin White was an American anthropologist known for his advocacy of theories of cultural evolution, sociocultural evolution, and especially neoevolutionism, and for his role in creating the department of anthropology at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor...
, with whose model of "universal" cultural evolution Steward disagreed. In 1930, Steward moved to the University of Utah, which appealed to Steward for its proximity to the Sierra Nevadas, and nearby archaeological fieldwork opportunities in California, Nevada, Idaho, and Oregon.
Steward’s research interests centered on “subsistence” — the dynamic interaction of man, environment, technology, social structure, and the organization of work — an approach Kroeber regarded as “eccentric,” original, and innovative. (EthnoAdmin 2003) In 1931, Steward, pressed for money, began fieldwork on the Great Basin Shoshone under the auspices of Kroeber’s Culture Element Distribution (CED) survey; in 1935 he received an appointment to the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnography (BAE), which published some of his most influential works. Among them: Basin-Plateau Aboriginal Sociopolitical Groups (1938), which “fully explicated” the paradigm of cultural ecology, and marked a shift away from the diffusionist orientation of American anthropology.
For eleven years Steward became an administrator of considerable clout, editing the Handbook of South American Indians
Handbook of South American Indians
The Handbook of South American Indians is a monographic series of edited scholarly and reference volumes in ethnographic studies, published by the Smithsonian Institution between 1940 and 1947....
. He also took a position at the Smithsonian Institution
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution is an educational and research institute and associated museum complex, administered and funded by the government of the United States and by funds from its endowment, contributions, and profits from its retail operations, concessions, licensing activities, and magazines...
, where he founded the Institute for Social Anthropology in 1943. He also served on a committee to reorganize the American Anthropological Association
American Anthropological Association
The American Anthropological Association is a professional organization of scholars and practitioners in the field of anthropology. With 11,000 members, the Arlington, Virginia based association includes archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, biological anthropologists, linguistic...
and played a role in the creation of the National Science Foundation
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...
. He was also active in archaeological pursuits, successfully lobbying Congress to create the Committee for the Recovery of Archaeological Remains (the beginning of what is known today as 'salvage archaeology') and worked with Wendell Bennett to establish the Viru Valley project, an ambitious research program centered in Peru
Peru
Peru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....
.
Steward searched for cross-cultural regularities in an effort to discern laws of culture and culture change. His work explained variation in the complexity of social organization as being limited to within a range possibilities by the environment. In evolutionary terms, he located this view of cultural ecology as “multi-linear,” in contrast to the unilinear typological models popular in the 19th century, and Leslie White’s “universal” approach. Steward’s most important theoretical contributions came during his teaching years at Columbia (1946–53).
Steward's most theoretically productive years were from 1946-1953, while teaching at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
. At this time, Columbia saw an influx of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
veteran
Veteran
A veteran is a person who has had long service or experience in a particular occupation or field; " A veteran of ..."...
s who were attending school thanks to the GI Bill. Steward quickly developed a coterie of students who would go on to have enormous influence in the history of anthropology, including Sidney Mintz
Sidney Mintz
Sidney Wilfred Mintz is an anthropologist best known for his studies of Latin America and the Caribbean. Mintz studied at Brooklyn College earning his B.A in 1943. He got his doctoral degree from Columbia University under the supervision of Julian Steward and Ruth Benedict...
, Eric Wolf
Eric Wolf
Eric Robert Wolf was an anthropologist, best known for his studies of peasants, Latin America, and his advocacy of Marxian perspectives within anthropology.-Early life:...
, Roy Rappaport
Roy Rappaport
Roy A. Rappaport was a distinguished anthropologist known for his contributions to the anthropological study of ritual and to ecological anthropology.-Biography:...
, Stanley Diamond
Stanley Diamond
Stanley Diamond was an American poet and anthropologist. As a young man, he identified as a poet, and his disdain for the fascism of the 1930s greatly influenced his thinking....
, Robert Manners, Morton Fried
Morton Fried
Morton Herbert Fried , was a distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University in New York City from 1950 until his death in 1986. He made considerable contributions to the fields of social and political theory.Fried attended Townsend Harris High School and then the City College of New...
, Robert F. Murphy
Robert F. Murphy (anthropologist)
Robert Francis Murphy was a distinguished anthropologist and professor of anthropology at Columbia University in New York City, from the early 1960s to 1990...
, and influenced other scholars such as Marvin Harris
Marvin Harris
Marvin Harris was an American anthropologist. He was born in Brooklyn, New York. A prolific writer, he was highly influential in the development of cultural materialism...
. Many of these students participated in the Puerto Rico Project, yet another large-scale group research study that focused on modernization in Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico , officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico , is an unincorporated territory of the United States, located in the northeastern Caribbean, east of the Dominican Republic and west of both the United States Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands.Puerto Rico comprises an...
.
Steward left Columbia for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...
, where he chaired the Anthropology Department and continued to teach until his retirement in 1968. There he undertook yet another large-scale study, a comparative analysis of modernization in eleven third world societies. The results of this research were published in three volumes entitled Contemporary Change in Traditional Societies. Steward died in 1972.
Work and influence
In addition to his role as a teacher and administrator, Steward is most remembered for his method and theory of cultural ecologyCultural ecology
Cultural ecology studies the relationship between a given society and its natural environment as well as the life-forms and ecosystems that support its lifeways . This may be carried out diachronically , or synchronically...
. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, American anthropology was suspicious of generalizations and often unwilling to draw broader conclusions from the meticulously detailed monographs that anthropologists produced. Steward is notable for moving anthropology away from this more particularist approach and developing a more nomothetic, social-scientific direction. His theory of "multilinear" cultural evolution examined the way in which societies adapted to their environment. This approach was more nuanced than Leslie White
Leslie White
Leslie Alvin White was an American anthropologist known for his advocacy of theories of cultural evolution, sociocultural evolution, and especially neoevolutionism, and for his role in creating the department of anthropology at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor...
's theory of "universal evolution," which was influenced by thinkers such as Lewis Henry Morgan. Steward's interest in the evolution of society also led him to examine processes of modernization. He was one of the first anthropologists to examine the way in which national and local levels of society were related to one another. He questioned the possibility creating a social theory which encompassed the entire evolution of humanity; yet, he also argued that anthropologists are not limited to description of specific, existing cultures. Steward believed it is possible to create theories analyzing typical, common culture, representative of specific eras or regions. As the decisive factors determining the development of a given culture, he pointed to technology and economics, while noting that there are secondary factors, such as political systems, ideologies, and religions. These factors push the evolution of a given society in several directions at the same time.
Julian Haynes Steward is regarded as a significant contributor to the field of anthropology and as a major player in the field’s progression and innovation. He is perhaps best known for his writings on his Great Basin experiences between the years of 1918 and 1943, where he published an impressive number of papers and made substantial achievements in his career (Clemmer 1999: ix). While Steward’s career was a diverse and evolving one, he was generally known and praised for his systematic analysis and empirical approach to the field of anthropology, as well as his contribution to the creation of the field of “cultural ecology
Cultural ecology
Cultural ecology studies the relationship between a given society and its natural environment as well as the life-forms and ecosystems that support its lifeways . This may be carried out diachronically , or synchronically...
”. Steward’s impressive career and extensive education, combined with a well rounded and multifaceted personality make him stand out as significant participant and catalyst in the continuing expansion and progression of the field of Anthropology.
Coming from a scientific background, Steward initially focused on ecosystems and physical environments, but soon took interest on how these environments could influence cultures (Clemmer 1999: ix). It was during Steward’s teaching years at Columbia, which lasted until 1952, that he wrote arguably his most important theoretical contributions: “Cultural Causality and Law: A Trial Formulation of the Development of Early Civilizations (1949b), “Area Research: Theory and Practice” (1950), “Levels of Sociocultural Integration” (1951), “Evolution and Process (1953a), and “The Cultural Study of Contemporary Societies: Puerto Rico” (Steward and Manners 1953). Clemmer writes, “Altogether, the publications released between 1949 and 1953 represent nearly the entire gamut of Steward’s broad range of interests: from cultural evolution, prehistory, and archaeology to the search for causality and cultural “laws” to area studies, the study of contemporary societies, and the relationship of local cultural systems to national ones (Clemmer 1999: xiv).” We can clearly see that Steward’s diversity in subfields, extensive and comprehensive field work and a profound intellect coalesce in the form of a brilliant anthropologist.
In regard to Steward’s Great Basin work, Clemmer writes, “ … [his approach] might be characterized as a perspective that people are in large part defined by what they do for a living, can be seen in his growing interest in studying the transformation of slash-and-burn horticulturists into national proletariats in South America" (Clemmer 1999: xiv). Clemmer does mention two works that contradict his characteristic style and reveal a less familiar aspect to his work, which are “Aboriginal and Historic Groups of the Ute Indians of Utah: An Analysis and Native Components of the White River Ute Indians” (1963b) and “The Northern Paiute Indians” (Steward and Wheeler-Vogelin 1954; Clemmer 1999; xiv).