Introduction
The concepts of 'Psychic Unity of Mankind' and 'Survivals' represent two fundamental theoretical pillars of 19th-century Classical Evolutionism. Formulated during the formative period of anthropology, these ideas were deployed by early theorists to explain universal cross-cultural parallels and reconstruct the sequential stages of human cultural development.
The Psychic Unity of Mankind
The doctrine of the psychic unity of mankind posits that all human beings, irrespective of geography or race, share a common cognitive, psychological, and intellectual architecture.
- Origin and Formulation: Rooted in German ethnologist Adolf Bastian's idea of Elementargedanken (elementary ideas), the concept argued that human minds operate under uniform mental laws when confronted with similar circumstances.
- Monogenist Stance: In the 19th-century debate between monogenesis (common human origin) and polygenesis (separate racial origins), psychic unity aligned with monogenism. It provided an anti-racist epistemological baseline by asserting that so-called 'primitive' and 'civilized' peoples possess identical inherent cognitive capacities.
- Explanation of Cultural Parallels: It explained the phenomenon of independent parallel evolution—how geographically separated societies developed identical technologies and customs (such as fire-making techniques or bow-and-arrow weapons) without direct cultural contact or diffusion.
Survivals
The concept of 'survivals' was formulated by British anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor in his seminal work Primitive Culture (1871).
- Definition: Tylor defined survivals as processes, customs, opinions, and habits that have been carried over by the force of habit into a new stage of society, thereby surviving into an era where their original meaning and practical function have ceased to exist.
- Methodological Tool as Cultural Fossils: Survivals served as the ethnological equivalent of fossils in palaeontology. By identifying vestigial traits—such as uttering 'God bless you' after a sneeze or ceremonial archery—evolutionary anthropologists sought to reconstruct unrecorded past stages of cultural history.
Critical Appraisal
While historically foundational, both concepts faced extensive critique from subsequent anthropological paradigms:
- Functionalist Critique: Bronislaw Malinowski and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown argued that no living cultural element is an inert relic. Every persistent custom performs a contemporary vital function or maintains social cohesion within the ongoing social structure.
- Historical Particularism: Franz Boas and his students criticized the unilineal developmental assumptions tied to psychic unity, emphasizing unique historical contexts and environmental particularities over speculative evolutionary trajectories.
Conclusion
Despite later methodological shifts toward fieldwork and functional analysis, the psychic unity of mankind and survivals provided the vital initial framework that elevated anthropology into a comparative, universal science of humanity, firmly dispelling biological determinism in the study of culture.