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CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
THEORY
Anthropology & Theory
 As anthropologists began to accumulate data on
different cultures during the mid-nineteenth
century, they needed to be able to explain the
cultural differences and similarities they found
 The desire to account for the vast cultural variation
that had been observed gave rise to anthropological
theory.
Anthropology & Theory
 Anthropological theories attempt to answer
questions such as “Why do people behave as they
do?” and “How do we account for human diversity”?
evolutionism
 In an attempt to account for
the diversity of human
cultures, the first
anthropologists, writing
during the last half of the 19th
century suggested the theory
of cultural evolutionism.
evolutionism
 All societies pass through a series of distinct
evolutionary stages. We find differences in
contemporary cultures because they are at different
evolutionary stages of development.
evolutionism
 Edward Tylor
 Lewis Henry Morgan
Evolutionism
 Euro-American cultures were at
the top of the evolutionary ladder
and ‘less-developed’ cultures on
the lower rungs.
 The evolutionary process was
thought to progress from simpler
(lower) forms to increasingly more
complex (higher) forms of
culture.
Evolutionism: Lewis Henry Morgan
*Hired to represent the Iroquois in a land
grant dispute
>began a study of the Seneca culminating in
the book “Systems of Consanguinity and
Affinity”(1871)
>wrote “Ancient Society” (1877) and
developed a system of classifying cultures to
determine their evolutionary niche
Lewis Henry Morgan
 Morgan used the categories , savagery, barbarism
and civilization according to the presence or absence
of certain technological features.
1. Lower savagery-from earliest forms of humanity
subsisting on fruits and nuts
2. Middle savagery-began with the discovery of
fishing technology and the use of fire
3. Upper savagery-began with invention of bow and
arrow
Lewis Henry Morgan
4. Lower barbarism-began with the advent of pottery
making
5. Middle barbarism-began with the domestication of
plants and animals in the Old World and irrigation
cultivation in the New World
6. Upper barbarism-began with the smelting of iron
and use of iron tools
7. Civilization-began with the invention of the
phonetic alphabet and writing.
Criticisms of Evolutionism
 Ethnocentrism
 Armchair speculators
*Both Morgan and Tylor were trying to
establish secular evolutionary rationales
rather than relying on the supernatural
Diffusionism
 During the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
diffusionists addressed the question of cultural
differences in the world by determining that humans
were essentially uninventive
 Certain cultural features developed in one or several
parts of the world and then spread, through the
process of diffusion, to other cultures.
diffusionists
 All societies change as a result of
cultural borrowing from one another
 A deductive approach is used, with
the general theory of diffusion being
applied to explain specific cases of
cultural diversity
 Diffusionism overemphasized the
essentially valid idea of diffusion
American Historicism
 A reaction to the deductive
approach and headed by Franz
Boas, this school of anthropological
thought was prominent in the first
part of the 20th century and insisted
upon the collection of ethnographic
data through direct fieldwork prior
to making cross-cultural
generalizations
American Historicism
 Ethnographic facts must precede the development of
cultural theories (induction)
 Any culture is partially composed of traits diffused
from other cultures
 Direct fieldwork is absolutely essential
 Each culture is, to some degree unique
 Ethnographers should try to get the view of those
being studied (emic) not their own view (etic)
Functionalism
 Theory of social stratification holding that social
stratification exists because it contributes to the
overall well-being of a society
 No matter how bizarre a cultural item might at first
appear, it had a meaning and performed some useful
function the well-being of the individual or the
society; the job of the researcher is to become
sufficiently immersed in the culture and language to
be able to identify these functions
Functionalism-Bronislaw Malinowski
 Like Boas, Malinowski was a strong
advocate of fieldwork, but he had no
interest in asking how a cultural item got
to be the way it is. Focused on how
contemporary cultures operated or
functioned
 Ex: the kula among the Trobriand
Islanders
Funtionalism-Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown
 Like Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown held that the various
aspects of a society should be studied in terms of the
functions they perform.
 Whereas Malinowski viewed functions mostly as meeting
the needs of the individual, Radcliffe-Brown saw them in
terms of contributions to the well-being of the society
A.R. Radcliffe-Brown
 Because of the emphasis on
social functions rather than
individual functions,
Radcliffe-Brown’s theory
has taken the name
STRUCTURAL
FUNCTIONALISM
functionalism
 The functionalist approach is based on two
fundamental principles:
Universal Functions-every part of a culture has a
function
2. Functional Unity-a culture is an integrated whole
composed of a number of interrelated parts; a
change in one part of the culture is likely to
produce change in other parts
1.
Psychological Anthropology
 Looks at the relationships among
cultures and such psychological
phenomena as personality,
cognition and emotions
 As early as the 1920s American
Anthropologists became interested
in the relationship between culture
and the individual
Psychological Anthropology
 Some of Boas’s students began asking questions
about what role personality played in human
behavior, should personality be viewed as a part of
the cultural system or if personality variables are
part of culture, how are they causally related to the
rest of the system
Edward Sapir
 Individuals learn their cultural
patterns unconsciously in the
same way that they learn
language
 Culture can be found within the
interaction of individuals
Margaret Mead
 Early interest in adolescence in the
U.S.
 Coming of age in Samoa (1928)
 Research on Gender
*Sex and Temperament in Three
Primitive Societies (1935)
Psychological Anthropology
 Anthropologists need to explore the relationships
between psychological and cultural variables
 Personality is largely the result of cultural learning
 Universal temperaments associated with males and
females do not exist
Neoevolutionism
 School of thought that attempted to refine the earlier
evolutionary theories of Tylor and Morgan
 Boas and others were extremely critical of 19th
century evolutionists, in part because they made
sweeping generalizations based on inadequate data.
Yet no one was able to demonstrate that cultures do
not develop or evolve in certain ways over time
Leslie White
 Resurrected the theories of the
evolutionists
 Felt their major shortcoming was an
absence of data
“Culture evolves as the amount of energy
harnessed per capita per year increases
or as the efficiency of the means of
putting energy to work is increased”
*C=E x T
Julian Steward
 More interested in developing
propositions about specific
cultures or groups of cultures
*unilinear evolution-an attempt to
place particular cultures into
specific evolutionary phases
Julian Steward
*multilinear evolution-suggestion that specific cultures
can evolve independently of all others even if they
follow the same evolutionary process
*cultural ecology-assumption that people who reside
in similar environments are likely to develop similar
technologies, social structures, and political
institutions
Neoevolutionism
 Cultures evolve in direct proportion to their capacity
to harness energy
 Culture is shaped by environmental conditions
 Through culture, human populations continuously
adapt to technical-environmental conditions
 Because technological and environmental factors
shape culture, individual factors are de-emphasized
French Structuralism
 Theoretical orientation holding that cultures are the
product of unconscious processes of the human mind
 Claude Levi-Strauss
French Structuralism
 Human cultures are shaped by certain
preprogrammed codes of the human
mind
 Theory focuses on the underlying
principles that generate behavior rather
than the observable empirical behavior
itself
 Emphasizes repetitive structures rather
than sociocultural change
French Structuralism
 Rather than examining attitudes,
values and beliefs, structuralists
concentrate on what happens at
the unconscious level
 The human mind categorizes
phenomena in terms of binary
oppositions.
Ethnoscience
 Theoretical school popular in the 1950s and 60s that
tries to understand a culture from the point of view
of the people being studied
Ethnoscience
 Attempts to make ethnographic description more
accurate and replicable
 Describes a culture by using the categories of the
people under study rather than by imposing
categories from the ethnographers culture
 Because it is time-consuming, ethnoscience has been
confined to describing very small segments of a
culture
 Difficult to compare data collected by ethnoscientists
Feminist Anthropology
 Seeks to describe and
explain cultural life from
the perspective of women
Feminist Anthropology
 All aspects of culture have a gender dimension that
must be considered in any balanced ethnographic
description
 Theory represents a long overdue corrective to male
bias in traditional ethnographies
 More subjective and collaborative than objective and
scientific
 Largely critical of a value-free orientation
Cultural Materialism
 Cultural systems are most
influenced by such material
things as natural resources and
technology
*Marvin Harris
Cultural Materialism
 Material conditions determine human thoughts and
behavior
 Theorists assume the viewpoint of the
anthropologist, not the native informant
 Anthropology is seen as scientific, empirical and
capable of generating causal explanations
 De-emphasizes the role of ideas and values in
determining the conditions of social life
Postmodernism
 Human behavior stems from the way
people perceive and classify the world
around them
 Interpretive Anthropology: the critical
aspects of cultural systems are subjective
factors such as values, ideas and
worldviews
*Clifford Geertz
Postmodernism
 Calls on anthropologists to switch from cultural
generalization and laws to description, interpretation
and the search for meaning
 Ethnographies should be written from several voicesthat of the anthropologist along with those of the
people under analysis
 Involves a return to cultural relativism