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.

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

In 1921, he transferred to Columbia University, where he studied psychology, receiving a B.A. in 1923 and a M.A. in 1924.

His Ph.D. in Anthropology and Sociology came from the University of Chicago(1925).

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

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 also spent a few weeks with the Menominee and Winnebago in Wisconsin during his Ph.D. His thesis proposal was a library thesis, which foreshadowed his later theoretical work.

He conducted fieldwork at Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico.

In 1927 White began teaching at the University at Buffalo.

Teaching at University of Buffalo marked a turning point in White's thinking.

It was here that he developed a worldview—anthropological, political, ethical—that he would hold to and advocate until his death.

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.

White went to Michigan when he was hired to replace Julian Steward, who departed Ann Arbor in 1930.

Although the university was home to a museum with a long history of involvement in matters anthropological, White was the only professor in the anthropology department itself.

He remained here for the rest of his active career.

In 1932, he headed a field school in the southwest which was attended by Fred Eggan, Mischa Titiev, and others.

White brought Titiev, his student and a Russian immigrant, to Michigan as a second professor in 1936.

However, during the Second World War, Titiev took part in the war effort by studying Japan.

Perhaps this upset the socialist White.

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.

No other faculty members were hired until after the war, when scholars like Richard K. Beardsley joined the department.

Most would fall on one side or the other of the split between White and Titiev.

As a professor in Ann Arbor, White trained students such as Robert Carneiro, Beth Dillingham, and Gertrude Dole who carried on White's program in its orthodox form, while other scholars such as Eric Wolf, Arthur Jelinek, Elman Service, and Marshall Sahlins and Napoleon Chagnon drew on their time with White to elaborate their own forms of anthropology.

Over time, White's views became framed in opposition to that of Boasians, with whom he was institutionally at odds.

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

Robert Lowie, a proponent of Boas's work, referred to White's work as "a farrago of immature metaphysical notions", shaped by "the obsessive power of fanaticism [which] unconsciously warps one's vision."

One of White's strongest deviations from Boas's philosophy was a view of the nature of anthropology and its relation to other sciences.

White understood the world to be divided into cultural, biological, and physical levels of phenomena.

Such a division is a reflection of the composition of the universe and was not a heuristic device.

Thus, contrary to Alfred L. Kroeber, Kluckhohn, and Edward Sapir, White saw the delineation of the object of study not as a cognitive accomplishment of the anthropologist, but as a recognition of the actually existing and delineated phenomena which comprise the world.

The distinction between 'natural' and 'social' sciences was thus based not on method, but on the nature of the object of study: physicists study physical phenomena, biologists biological phenomena, and culturologists (White's term) cultural phenomena.

The object of study was not delineated by the researcher's viewpoint or interest, but the method by which he approached them could be.

White believed that phenomena could be explored from three different points of view: the historical, the formal-functional, and the evolutionist (or formal-temporal).

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.

The evolutionist approach is, like the formal approach, generalizing; but it is also diachronic, seeing particular events as general instances of larger trends.

Boas claimed his science promised complex and interdependent visions of culture, but White thought that it would delegitimize anthropology if it became the dominant position, removing it from broader discourses on science.

White viewed his own approach as a synthesis of historical and functional approach because it combined the diachronic scope of one with the generalizing eye for formal interrelations provided by the other.

White was president of the American Anthropological Association (1964).

White lived first in Kansas and then Louisiana.