Cultural Sociology

Author: Simayun Jie / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2003-01-01
Features: Section 3: Several Schools of Classical Cultural Sociology If the pathed by Comte and Spencer before the 1860s had been largely unexplored, then by the 1970s and 1980s, it was bustling with activity. In the past, Comte was merely a "dead dog," and Spencer no more than a reclusive neurotic, yet at this time, not only did the scientific community regard them as towering figures to admire, but even officialdom had no choice but to elevate them to the sacred halls, publishing and distributing their works in large quantities. Everyone talked about empiricism, and everyone discussed evolution; the worldview of empiricism-evolution became the dominant ideology in Western intellectual circles at the time. They sought to explain all phenomena in nature and to provide scientific accounts of all social and cultural phenomena. In this research, they sometimes elevated natural factors to the forefront, while at other times emphasized the importance of natural factors, thus forming different schools of classical cultural sociology. These schools mainly included the cultural geography school, the cultural psychology school, the cultural ethnology school, and so on. These schools were not primarily connected in organization but rather shared a common natural factor in explaining cultural phenomena.
The views of the cultural geography school can be traced back to the sociogeographical ideas of Montesquieu, an 18th-century French Enlightenment thinker. In works such as On the Causes of the Decline of the Roman Empire, he excessively emphasized the influence of geographical conditions on the moral character, legal nature, and political systems of a nation. In the early 19th century, the French literary critic Madame de Sta?l (C. Sta?l) discussed the different characteristics of literary development in Northern and Southern Europe from the perspectives of natural environment and geographical conditions in her work On the Relationship Between Literature and Social Institutions (1800), commonly referred to as On Literature. The cultural geographical regional theory of Bastian, a German ethnologist, and the cultural regional distribution theory of Edward Burnett Tylor, a British anthropologist, can both be considered intellectual sources of the cultural geography school. By the late 19th century, some Western sociologists, cultural anthropologists, and ethnologists explained the origin, development, and distribution of social and cultural phenomena according to the theory of biological geographical distribution, forming a cultural geography school. The main representative of this school was Friedrich Ratzel. He was a German geographer, ethnologist, and sociologist, with major works including Human Geography (1882–1891), The East African Archipelago (1891), and Land and Life (1901–1902). Ratzel viewed society as an organic entity like biology, depicting the evolution and distribution of human culture from the perspective of geographical environment. He focused on material culture phenomena, believing that material cultural characteristics were markers of different ethnic developments and that various material cultural features revealed historical connections between different ethnic groups, as well as cultural movement and transmission. Ratzel was not only a representative of the 19th-century cultural geography school but also the founder of Germany's "culture circle" school in the early 20th century. In addition to Ratzel, other notable figures in the classical cultural geography school included the French Hippolyte Taine and the British Henry James Buckle. Taine primarily studied spiritual culture, such as literature and art, authoring The Philosophy of Art. Buckle, on the other hand, focused on ethnic consciousness, physical traits, and the accumulation of material wealth, writing The History of English Civilization. There were also other social geographers and geologists.
The cultural geography school's approach to studying the interaction between culture and the natural world from a geographical perspective and its related insights were quite important. However, this perspective was primarily applicable to the creation and development of primitive culture, as natural geographical environments were the main factors influencing cultural creation during that period. After the cultural world was created and developed, although it was still influenced by natural geographical environments, overemphasizing geographical conditions could overlook the independence of culture and its complex variable relationships of existence and development. The ideas of the cultural geography school had a significant influence on Germany's "culture circle" school in the early 20th century, Britain's diffusion school, the United States' historical school, and modern human geography schools.
The ideas of the cultural psychology school were already evident in the works of Bastian and Tylor. Bastian's "primitive ideas" and Tylor's "primitive beliefs" can be considered explanations within cultural psychology. By the late 19th century, with the development of empiricist psychology, a group of evolutionary psychologists emerged to explain social and cultural phenomena. The main representatives were the American William James Ward and George F. Giddings. Ward wrote works such as Dynamic Sociology (1883) and The Psychic Factors of Civilization (1893). He explained the original driving force of human social development from the perspective of human "desires." He divided this original driving force into two types: one was biological impulses, such as sexual desire and hunger; the other was spiritual impulses, such as moral and aesthetic demands. Therefore, Ward believed that cultural phenomena such as human intellect, morality, and aesthetics were the results of these human desires. Giddings wrote works such as Elements of Sociology (1896) and Socialization Theory (1897). He explained the origin of social and cultural phenomena using the theory of "similarity consciousness." He believed that any organism had an ideology distinct from other animals. In human society, due to political, economic, and racial reasons, various forms of "similarity consciousness" emerged. In his view, society was merely a psychological phenomenon constrained by natural processes, and its development was determined by "similarity consciousness." Cultural traditions, group thoughts, and value systems were all products of "similarity consciousness." In addition to Ward and Giddings from the United States, the British James Frazer and the Finnish Yrj? Hirn also explained cultural phenomena from the perspective of human psychology. Frazer was a folklorist, authoring The Golden Bough (1890), whose cultural ideas were rooted in Edward Burnett Tylor's theory of "animism." However, he also divided the development of human intelligence into three stages: magic, religion, and science. According to Frazer, primitive cultures were all produced by "sympathetic magic." Hirn primarily studied spiritual culture, such as literature and art. His work The Origin of Art (1900) was half psychological and half sociological, with its ideas mainly influenced by anthropologists such as Edward Burnett Tylor and James Frazer. The ideas of the classical cultural psychology school were primarily based on the theory of human evolution, and their research methods were also mainly empiricist. However, by the late 19th century and early 20th century, with the rise of instinct psychology, racial psychology, and group psychology in the anti-empiricist-evolutionist trend, they made some degree of revision to their own ideas.
The cultural ethnology school was an extremely reactionary school, with main representatives such as Joseph Arthur de Gobineau from France, Otto Ammon from Germany, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain from Britain. These individuals were primarily racists and social Darwinists. Starting from Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest in biology, they replaced human social essence with human biological instincts, believing that what influenced cultural development was not geographical environment, nor customs, morals, or other social conditions, but rather race itself. They attempted to explain the creative and mastering abilities of human culture using characteristics such as skin color, skull size, and physical qualities. In their view, all human cultures were created by the white race, and the cultures of other civilized nations were the results of the white race's dissemination. The culture of the white race was created by the Aryan race, and the Germans were the highest race among the Aryans, making them the flowers of humanity and the center of civilization. The cultural ethnology school provided a theoretical basis for German fascists to engage in expansionist and aggressive wars.
In addition to the above cultural schools, there were other schools, such as cultural mechanicism and cultural energism, which largely explained cultural phenomena using the theories of natural sciences. These theories were even farther from sociological ideas of culture and are therefore omitted here. As for the new cultural evolutionist ideas that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, they will be discussed in Chapter 5.