Communism And Cultural Evolution

In interpreting Chinese Communist writings about prehistory, it is useful to have some background knowledge about the intellectual framework the Communist Party still requires.

XIXth-Century Unilineal (Unilinear) Evolutionism

The American author Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) is one of the most prominent names among the XIXth century writers associated with the development of now discredited theories of unilineal evolution. These theories attempted to argue that all human societies are programmed to pass through exactly the same "stages" of development (from savagery through barbarism to civilization, with a certain inventory of universal hallmarks at each stage and substage).

Morgan is remembered for three books:

1. League of the Iroquois (1851) stands as one of the first general Anglophone ethnographies of a non-western society, and it grew out of long and intense contact with and interest in Iroquois customs.
2. Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871) noted structural similarities in systems of kinship terms around the world, despite differences in the actual terms used. (Two unrelated languages might each use only one word to refer both to a father and his brother, for example, or might distinguish older from younger brothers terminologically but not older from younger sisters.) Morgan brilliantly noted a logical fit between systems of terms and features of social structure (especially as concerns descent lines). Morgan arranged the various systems he discovered into a uniform "evolutionary" sequence. Similar systems often existed among historically unrelated peoples at quite different "levels of development," so Morgan argued that the "advanced" people associated with them preserved them as the historical traces from earlier stages of in their evolutionary history.
3. Ancient Society (1877) proposed Morgan's mature scheme for the ordering of all human societies upon a single "evolutionary" continuum.

The second and third of these books, taken together, were considered a major methodological advance, based on two assumptions, both later shown to be incorrect:

1. Wrong Assumption #1: Systems of kinship terms do not change over time, so that the terms we collect from living informants reflect earlier stages of a society.
2. Wrong Assumption #2: These unchanging systems of kinship terms can generally be classified on a single evolutionary scale and reveal a gradual change from primitive promiscuity through agnatic group marriage (including polyandry and polygyny) to monogamy, and an evolution of political authority from primitive chaos through matriarchy to patriarchy.

The general evolutionary scheme, lacking convincing evidence, came to be dismissed after a time as too speculative to sustain research. But it was most definitively put to rest in 1937 by an influential paper by Fred Eggan demonstrating that kinship terms, being in fact linked to social structure, are also responsive to changes in that structure and therefore are not pointers to earlier society and cannot be used in the way in which Morgan and other XIXth-century evolutionists sought to employ them. This deprived the speculative evolutionary scheme of its most powerful putative evidence.

Morgan and Engels

Meanwhile, however, Morgan's work had come to the attention of Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx's collaborator on The Communist Manifesto (1848). Engels' book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) was very dependent upon the writings of the Anglophone unilinear evolutionists in the 1870s, and especially upon the work of Morgan, although it went much further in arguing for the inevitability of the communist revolution and state. When unilineal evolution was discredited in the early XXth century, the key arguments against it generally applied to the derivative writing of Engels as well. But Engels' proposition about the inevitability of future communism had already been enshrined in Communist political movements, and the arguments against it were not permitted in Communist countries, where they were seen as doubting the intellectual foundations of Communist states and the authority of their dictators.

Engels in China

Although Engels' scheme had been dismissed outside the Communist world before Communism arrived in China, Communist ideology was imported wholesale into China from the Soviet Union, and included the obsolete evolutionary scheme, already a point of Soviet political doctrine.

Like Stalin, Lenin, and other poster-children of world Communism, Engels retains semi-divine (or at least heroic) status in China, and his 1884 adherence to Morgan's evolutionary scheme for the history of marriage remains the way in which Chinese authors describe prehistoric Chinese society. For example, the famous Neolithic archaeological site of Bànpō 半坡 near Xī'ān 西安 (in Shǎanxī 陕西 Province), like other sites dating to the same Yǎngsháo 仰韶 period, is by definition "matriarchal with matrilineal clans" for Communist Chinese writers, who are forced to offer in evidence embarrassing non-sequiturs such as, "there is a trench around the settlement."

Ethnographically, the wide range of marriage customs among the peoples of western China is interpreted, under Engels' continuing influence, as representing different, more primitive stages of the general human condition. (This provides a convienent justification for Hàn 汉 domination of Chinese minority peoples. Although Hàn superiority is seldom spelled out, the implication is probably not lost on anybody: it can be understood to represent progress from barbarism (minority customs) into civilization (Hàn customs).

For an American student of early China, it is frustrating to see scholarly people being required to toe a party line long discredited in the rest of the world. However, knowing the situation, we are in a position to read past unsubstantiated claims about matriarchy and matrilineal clans (and the "slave society" and "feudalism" and the origin of marriage in group grope) and move on to developing our understanding of Neolithic China without worrying about Engels. Perhaps Neolithic China really was matriarchal — history's only example — but at least outside of China we can hope to reach such a conclusion based on real evidence, if any should eventually emerge.