One of the first schools of thought within the discipline was that of Evolutionism which looked at the sociocultural aspects of society through the lens of scientific method, “treating sociocultural phenomena as part of nature, subject to its laws” (Barrett, 2011, p49). Evolutionists believed that culture is purposeful and functional, and it will progress along a unilinear scheme, from savagery to civilization. Its gaze was entirely ethnocentric and anthropologists of this time relied on armchair speculation, doing none of their own fieldwork. Suited to the colonial time period it sprung out of Evolutionism was polluted with the racism that reinforced the ideologies of imperialism and colonialism (Barrett, 2011, p54). American anthropology’s
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Differing drastically from Particularism though, it stressed social structures within society and claimed that all societies were stable and in equilibrium. It downplayed historical data as it claimed that history was unknowable without records and it completely ignored social change and conflict within societies. Not unlike Evolutionism supporting colonialist ideologies, structural functionalism supported the maintenance of current colonial empires; why change things if society is in balance? (Barrett, 2011, …show more content…
Postmodernists viewed fieldwork as grounds where “powerful Westerners… misrepresented the lives of non-westerners… objectified them as scientific specimens, and indirectly propped up the West’s hegemony over the rest of the world” (Barrett, 2011, p155). They thought that the ability to write about a group leveraged power over that group and that previous ethnographers tended to portray them radically different then the west. Because of this view, they pushed for more equal dialogue between all actors within an ethnography and that the ethnography itself be seem more as a fiction to be deciphered. They believed that this was the best way in order to give the other a proper voice. They discarded the notion of over-riding speculations and strongly re-established the concept of relativism within the
Differing drastically from Particularism though, it stressed social structures within society and claimed that all societies were stable and in equilibrium. It downplayed historical data as it claimed that history was unknowable without records and it completely ignored social change and conflict within societies. Not unlike Evolutionism supporting colonialist ideologies, structural functionalism supported the maintenance of current colonial empires; why change things if society is in balance? (Barrett, 2011, …show more content…
Postmodernists viewed fieldwork as grounds where “powerful Westerners… misrepresented the lives of non-westerners… objectified them as scientific specimens, and indirectly propped up the West’s hegemony over the rest of the world” (Barrett, 2011, p155). They thought that the ability to write about a group leveraged power over that group and that previous ethnographers tended to portray them radically different then the west. Because of this view, they pushed for more equal dialogue between all actors within an ethnography and that the ethnography itself be seem more as a fiction to be deciphered. They believed that this was the best way in order to give the other a proper voice. They discarded the notion of over-riding speculations and strongly re-established the concept of relativism within the