Final answer:
Elman Service is the anthropologist who eschewed the social evolutionist ideas, proposing a more nuanced categorization of social organizations: band, tribe, chiefdom, and state, which are linked to different subsistence patterns and marked by an evolutionary sequence rather than a unilinear progression.
Step-by-step explanation:
The anthropologist who replaced social evolutionist ideas with more neutral descriptions of different societies is Elman Service. Service proposed four types of social organizations; band, tribe, chiefdom, and state. He linked these categories to subsistence patterns and was critical of the earlier 19th-century frameworks suggested by Tylor and Morgan, which largely depended on unilineal evolution models. Service's focus was more on understanding how societies move from one form to another, viewing the progress not as a linear trajectory but as an evolutionary sequence. As per the anthropological theory of unilinear cultural evolution (UCE), societies were thought to evolve in a single line from 'savagery' through 'barbarism' to 'civilization'. But, this notion received critique by scholars like Franz Boas, who emphasized the unique historical trajectories and interactions among cultures, thereby countering the simplistic and ethnocentric views held by earlier evolutionists like Tylor and Morgan.