Leslie White

Leslie White was an American anthropologist who revived evolutionary theory in twentieth-century anthropology after decades of dominance by Boasian historical particularism, arguing that culture evolves as a general, measurable process rather than only through unique, historically contingent local sequences. In works including The Evolution of Culture (1959) he proposed that the level of cultural development in a society could be measured by the amount of energy it harnessed and put to work per capita, so that the domestication of plants and animals, and later the harnessing of fossil fuels, marked major thresholds of general cultural evolution. White's energy theory of culture and his insistence on the culture concept as a superorganic system operating by its own laws, independent of any individual member, made him a central and often polemical figure in the mid-century debate over evolutionary versus historical approaches in American anthropology.