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Much as primitive man believed he could control the weather
through ritual, modern man is convinced that he can control and direct his culture.
Yet one of the most recent discoveries of social science is that culture has an
identity of its own, and that cultural systems behave in accordance with their
own principles and laws rather than in response to man's desires and purposes.
In this work, Leslie A. White deals with the youngest child
in the family of science - the science of culture. Culturology, first described
in 1871 by the British anthropologist, E. B. Taylor, has finally emerged from
the long developmental process of science, making clear man's true relationship
to his culture. After tracing the growth of science
from the physical to the cultural field, Dr. White goes on to illustrate the fundamental
difference between the mind of man and of the lower species that has made culture
possible. It is his belief that history may be interpreted in terms of culture
and that the modern interpretation of human behavior in psychological terms is
only partially justified. Although man has no control
over his future, he may predict its course of change. The vast mechanism of civilization
is at his disposal for harnessing the forces of nature and putting them to work
in his service. Like many a science before it, culturology
has and will encounter violent opposition. But the new science is making headway
nevertheless. In this first sustained work on the subject, the author has provided
us with a new explanation of why man acts as he does. Its importance will be gauged
perhaps not in the present, but in the future, when these revolutionary ideas
may eventually affect the church, the school, the family, the state, and society
as a whole. Born in Salida, Colorado, Leslie A.
White attended high school in Louisiana and, after serving as an educated man
in the Navy, entered Louisiana State University. Two years later he transferred
to Columbia, where he received his B.A. and in 1924, his M.A. In 1927 he received
his Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago and began his teaching career
at the University of Buffalo. In 1930 Dr. White
went to the University of Michigan, where he has been chairman of the Department
of Anthropology since 1945. He is the author of a number of scientific studies,
and has edited Pioneers in American Anthropology
and Extracts from the Travel Journals of Lewis. H. Morgan. | 
