Biography of Leslie White
The main scientific interests are theoretical problems of the evolution of culture. Backing with anti-evolutionism and relativism in American ethnography and sociology, White defends the idea of unity and progressiveness of the world-historical process. An explanation of the causality of this process is in his nature of technological determinism. Expressing a number of progressive ideas about the transient nature of private property and capitalism, considering himself close to Marxism, White, however, did not completely overcome the idealism and metaphysicality of bourgeois evolutionism.
White school represents a radical wing in American ethnography. Field research led among the Pueblo Indians. White is a biographer and researcher of the scientific heritage of L. Morgan; Protects him from indiscriminate criticism. Soviet historical encyclopedia. In 16 volumes. Tom White White Leslie Alvin for the evolutionist concept of White is characterized by the desire to substantiate the objective nature of culture.
Speaking against various attempts to present the concept of “culture” only as a convenient methodological abstraction, White considers it as an objective category expressing a specific “supersomatic” system of reality, which has property. Culture is divided into three subsystems: technological, social and ideological. The first includes production tools, means of existence, materials for the construction of dwellings, means for attack and protection, etc.
The main and determining is the technological subsystem, since a person primarily needs food, housing, clothing, as well as protective equipment from enemies. Social and ideological subsystems are secondary and derivatives. Thus, the Whita system of views can be regarded as the concept of technological determinism, the limitations of which are primarily due to the fact that the distinguished culture subsystems are considered by White in isolation from the socio-practical activity of people.
Therefore, the concept of “culture”, and not “society”, is, according to White, an extremely wide category covering the objects of all social sciences. The unambiguous determination of the “social” and “ideological” subsystems of the culture of its “technological” subsystem is also untenable. At the same time, some particular provisions of White concept deserve attention, for example, for ecology - an attempt to consider culture as a specific “thermodynamic” mechanism of accumulation, storage, transfer and transform the energy of society.
Philosophical Encyclopedic Dictionary. Ilyichev, P. Fedoseev, S. Kovalev, V. Works: The Science of Culture, N. Dillingham; The Concept of Cultural Systems: A Key to Understanding Tribes and Nations, N. Literature: E. Markaryan Next Read:.