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Functionalism/British Social Anthropology

Both early British anthropology and American anthropology (in quite distinct ways) rejected social evolutionism in favor for the notion of relativism in social change. There was the belief that social evolutionism was both empirically flawed and ethnocentric and that societies should be understood on their own terms. American anthropology, under the leadership of Franz Boas, concentrated on a holistic perspective of "primitive societies" as products of historical contingency (see section on Historical Particularism). Early British Anthropology, however, believed that very little reliable information could be secured on the history of primitive peoples and hence, anthropology should focus more on the present incorporation of social phenomena into a functioning and integrated social system that operates to maintain and reproduce itself. This theoretical paradigm is known as Functionalism and was prominent in Britain from the early 1920's until the 1960's.

The principle approach of functionalists was to identify the habits and beliefs (the social structures) that maintained the social system in a condition of dynamic equilibrium. Functionalist studies generally focused on unraveling the social structures (not necessarily culture as understood in the American holistic sense) through key institutions: kinship, political organization, and mode of subsistence. There were two different approaches to functionalism developed by the leading figures of this school. The first was a type of biological or psychological functionalism advanced by Bronislaw Malinowski. Malinowski believed that social systems functioned to meet the physiological needs of individuals. Within his theory, one could derive "culture" (in the sense of the total social system), from the pre-cultural needs of individuals within a society. The second form of functionalism was named structural-functionalism and was developed by Radcliffe-Brown who explicitly used the metaphor of society as a live organism. The French sociological school, particularly the work of Emile Durkheim, influenced Radcliffe-Brown. Durkheim argued that social phenomena (or "social facts") exist beyond and independently of the individual's psychobiological needs. Humans are connected by a set of relations and institutions to maintain the whole, just as an organism is made up of cells and organs with particular functions that keep it alive and functioning.

The historical division between cultural anthropology and British social anthropology has, in large part, been a question of culture vs. society. Functionalists critiqued the American anthropological focus on culture as a vague abstraction of worldviews and too focused on individual experience. Functionalists argued for the analytic priority to be on the organizational basis of society and the isolation of social relations as something more tangible and less ambiguous. The extrapolation of that system of organization to a higher ideational level of cultural totality was of secondary importance.

The argument that social structure was less ideational and more tangible than American notions of "culture" came under heavy scrutiny as anthropologists increasingly questioned whether the theories of social and political organization were actually the models of the people studied or the creations of anthropologists themselves. There were, however, movements in post-war British social anthropology that recognized the more symbolic and ideational dimensions of culture. Evans-Pritchard, a senior second generation British anthropologists, was one such advocate with his work on African kinship and political organization.

Definitions:

Bronislaw Malinowski:
"It [culture] obviously is the integral whole consisting of implements and consumers' goods, of constitutional charters for the various social groupings, of human ideas and crafts, beliefs and customs. Whether we consider a very simple or primitive culture or an extremely complex and developed one, we are confronted by a vast apparatus, partly material, partly human and partly spiritual by which man is able to cope with the concrete specific problems that face him" (Malinowski 1944:36).

Radcliffe-Brown:
"[E]ach custom and belief of a society has a specific function that serves to perpetuate the structure of that society-its ordered arrangements of parts-so that the societies continued existence is possible."

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