Functionalism, Structural Functionalism And Structuralism

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Early anthropology

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First anthros: us and them.
Evolutionism: hierarchy/stratification. A linear concept of time.
Why change from dichotomy to trajectory? Industrialisation and rapid social change. Mirroring other societies' development on the West's.

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Diffusionism

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1920s-30s.
Herbert Spencer, Auguste Comte.
Ideas are copied and transformed.
Haddon and Rivers: Torres Strait Expedition 1898.
Rivers found that you could map entire societies based on kinship structures: similar findings to Morgan.
Diffusionism properly develops in 1911: people do not stay still, there is not necessarily the endogenous development of culture. In Polynesia people move around the archipelago.
Lost appeal when Grafton Elliot Smith argued that all major inventions were derived from Ancient Egypt- 'Egyptcentric hyperdiffusionism'

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Functionalism

Basic argument

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Human's do things for a purpose, a function. There is no social evolution.
Theory of needs:
- We have needs which are met by biological and cultural responses
- Societies begin with a core set of needs which expand and the society expands
Piddington: biological rationale: "that specifically human form of biological adjustment which we call culture"

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Basic methodological features of functionalism

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Holism: should look at society overall an the interrelation of all the constituent parts: cannot understand a baloma without understanding kinship without understanding etc.

Synchronic: Looks at society at present. Contra Boas. Otherwise problem of historical interpretation, as societies like Trobrianders did not have written histories.

Nomothetic: generalises rather than specifies. Contra Boas who was ideographic because of historical particularism.

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Trobrianders- Malinowski

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Reproduction: the Baloma, a spirit of the island of Tuina and an ancestor from the mother's clan, enter the woman and combine with menstrual blood to form a foetus.
No causal relationship between sex and reproduction.
Despite them having very good anatomical knowledge due to being hunters and having regular contact with local cannibalistic tribes.
Why? So that the mother can maintain her privileged status in the matrilineal system.

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Functionalism- Audrey Richards

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'Hunger and Work in a Savage Tribe' based on review of literature already there.
The people were cattle herders and did low-level agriculture, almost entirely in hands of women whereas men did cattle herding.
Cattle owned by King, therefore had the labour of the youth and could mobilise large numbers for war.
Households polygamous- father had cattle and wives their own agricultural plots. Children taught to fit gender roles at early age.
Kinship/marriage: man takes wife from more distant community, process includes exchange of cattle.
Function: cattle bring in the reproductive instrument who produces workers.

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Functionalism- Raymond Firth

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'We The Tikopia'
When Firth gets there one side of island more Christianised than the other.
Notices they have very complex society, but no form of monetary exchange.
How do they negotiate relationships without money? Through kinship.
There are rugs in household that must not be sat on as they cover the ancestors of the male.
Patrilineal and patrilocal as women come to live with the men.
Cluster of houses in each village all belong to a patrilineage, therefore house is not just your but is a larger house for the patrilineage/clans.
But villages contains mixture of clans as marriage only works with a mixture. A man and his children will have access to both the mother and father ancestry, therefore a good marriage will have a broad clan access network.
Function: the kinship system serves the needs of the individual because it regulates relationships.

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Structural-Functionalism

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Treats observable social relations as variables in a system.
Society should be viewed as an organism.
Instead of looking at needs, look at overall structure.
E.g. Andaman Islands: people who have not seen each other in a while will burst into tears: not because they really love each other but because they are fulfilling their role in the overall structure.
This can only be understood when looking at the broader social structure.
Hence RB's sea shell analogy: explaining the features of a sea shell can only be achieved through studying its entire structure, rather than simply its constituent parts.
Method: RB committed to making anthro a fully-fledged social science: "a theoretical natural science of human society". Observation --> induction --< theory.
Critique of functionalism: study of one atom helpful up to a point but does not explain all of its behaviours because it interacts with other atoms in a wider system.

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Structural-functionalism

Evans-Pritchard

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'The Nuer', 1940.
Less detailed than Firth's because more focused on overall structure: how politics works in a society without government.
1. Argues that the Nuer focus everything on cattle. Highest compliment for a woman is to be called a cow!
2. Ecology: wet and dry seasons. Eat fish and milk in dry season and people disperse over the Savannah; eat grain and meat in wet season and people congregate in small villages.
3. Time: determined by ecology and social processes. Time organised according to kinship distance.
4. Political system: Nuerland an "expanding series of opposed segments". "Ordered anarchy".
People would feud with neighbours over cattle theft, then between clans, tribes, the Dinka.
Leopard Skin Chief: helps resolve blood feuds. No power to dictate but could curse people.
5. Lineage system: hierarchical patrilineage: immediate kinship --> clans --> tribes --> Nuer.
"Structural amnesia" (Barnes) when people could not remember exactly how they were related but had some idea. Patrilineage acted as a "jural principle".
Kinship a structural principle which coordinated group action and reaction, in coordination with ecological determinants.

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Structural-functionalism

Firth

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Writes 'Elements of Social Organisation' (1951).
Inclusion of persons as agents, and therefore time.
Distinguished between:
Social structure = what you are meant to do (abstract ordered relations of the whole).
Social organisation = what you actually do.

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Problems of structural functionalism

Evans-Pritchard Marret Lecture

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Calls for a move towards history.
Argued against RB's scientism: anthropological method should mimic historical method and have a greater focus on meaning and interpretation.
We should not seek scientific laws but significant patterns.

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Problems of structural functionalism

Synchronism, holism, structure, scientism

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Synchronism- means functionalism becomes limited to interpretations from the present. Historical knowledge now far superior to then.
Holism- Potential for oversimplification, especially when anthropology began studying larger, more complex societies. Started to question- where are the boundaries of society?
Structure- assumes a pre=set framework for society, but what if people do not conform to that role? What about sudden internal change?
Scientism- can lead to the anthropologist failing to deal with the "flesh and blood" (EP); the people they are actually studying.

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Transition between structural functionalism and structuralism

Leach- Political Systems of Highland Burma

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Kachin live in mountains in northern Burma.
Socially permeable society due to location on popular trade routes.
Nearby Shan had caste system; people seen as fundamentally different. Similar to India and China.
Kachin seemed to switch between gumsa (hierarchy) and gumlao (egalitarian). Different depending on the village.
Slash and burn agriculture whereas Shan were rice cultivators. EP argues this limits the extent of gumsa because there has to be a limit on population.
Marriage:
Each village patrilineal. Necessary for villagers to marry out of the village. Man will find wife from mother's village.
Puts man in debt to that lineage, so he works for them. Can create a kind of hierarchy.
Senior lineages begin talking about being a grandparental lineage and say they should become chiefs.
Other lineages recognise this and give them the best gifts: leads to gumsa.
But highest lineage still needs to marry its sons to another lineage which takes system back to gumlao.
Leach: this system is an ever-shifting structure and therefore that structure is changeable, a social construction.
No one wants a totally caste-based system because they do not know where they would end up.

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Development of idea of structure

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RB: an actual structure made up of constituent parts.
Firth: function says what should happen, but does not always say what does happen. Therefore also idea of social function.
Leach: structure is mental. A hypothesis about reality, therefore also an expectation.

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Defining structuralism

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"The view that meaning in sociocultural life rests in the positional configuration of elements relative to each other in a structure of system" (Stasch, 2006).
Meaning comes through knowing how things fit together.
The presence or absence of one particular feature, in culture as in language, can explain a lot.

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Levi-Strauss' structuralism

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Cultural phenomena the product of universal patterns of thought- anthro's duty to discover these mental structures.
Method = cross-cultural analysis, deductive reasoning beginning with premises and seeing where they lead.
Analogy of the crystal: in studying its scientific properties, a physicist is not concerned with the actual crystal but rather with a hypothetically perfect one. Because social structure is an ideal.
All humans have same mental structure of thought, e.g. seen in binary oppositions.

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Levi-Strauss

Caduveo

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Notices they have simple society but very complex bodily decorations which are more complicated than the material circumstances they lived in.
LS argues it is a reflection of a deeper structural principle: our awareness and attraction towards symmetry and asymmetry.
Links it to their kinship system: they used to have a caste system where there was both symmetry and asymmetry- some castes could marry each other, others could not.
Therefore central feature of culture is symmetry and duality.

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Levi-Strauss

'The Elementary Structures of Kinship', 1949

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Argued the incest taboo was the essence of culture and that it governed the rules of marriage everywhere.
Relationships between humans either:
Elementary structures: positive marriage rule (you must marry a particular class of kin e.g. cross-cousin marriage)
Complex structures: negative marriage rules. (you must not marry someone belonging to a particular class of kin).
Complex structures include most marriage structures.
Although some societies e.g. Native North America and West Africa have so many negative marriage rules that the structure resembles generalised exchange.