翰唐的后翻译时代

Best known for:
   7. Its fieldwork was its crucial discovery and key contribution. Functionalism emerged as a 
	sharp methodological break with the facile and de-contextualised comparisons of evolutionary 
	anthropology and grand narratives illustrating the progress of reason (Frazer). 
   8. Required a comparative method: looking at what institutions/beliefs mean for people in a 
	socially interconnected way [e.g.how myth regulates and codifies behavior]. 
   9. Commitment to sociologically contextualised comparisons and refusal to allow theoretical 
	categories of the West to pass as unexamined universal parameters.  

Essentially:
The theory uses a body/organic idea that is similar to social analogy.
	1. Radcliffe-Brown: structure, roles, social groups, organization, relations, norms. 
		a. [A.R. Radliffe-Brown (1952) Structure and Function in Primitive Society. Cohen & West LTD: London] 
	2. Frazer: defines social anthropology as the branch of sociology that deals with primitive societies. 
   	3. 1895, Emile Durkheim's Rules of Sociological Method: The function of a Social Institution is the 
	correspondence between it and the needs of the social organism. 
		a. Social structure = the network of existing relations between individuals. 
   		b. Function = fulfills a need (bio & cultural) and humans have to organize to fulfill 
			that function. 
		c. In order to provide for individual needs humans have to organise, so there are integrative 
			functions for certain institutions which ensure that the society is able to fulfill individual needs. 

Malinowski 
   1. Malinowski does have this analogy implicitly by reference to the context [which requires 
		certain institutions and functions, and how things are related functionally], but his 
		is a more individualistic and utilitarian functionalism. 
   2. Sees the basic function of culture and society as being the satisfaction of human needs 
		(both material and spiritual) and suggests that individuals have physiological needs,
		and that social institutions develop to meet these needs. His interest is not limited 
		to rules and norms but extended to individual responses to them. Thus, he makes a 
		distinction between belief, words and action. 
   3. He sees myth as bridging gap of uncertainty and legitimating magic. In describing the KULA, 
		he sets his position vs. the utilitarian man (thereforecontradicting his theory). 
		He demonstrates: the sophistication and realism of the natives, difference in the exchange 
		system, priority of social and cultural context to understanding any form of life and brings 
		to forefront key political relations of hierarchy, honorific standing and social recognition. 
   4. Unlike Durkheim's individual, Malinowski's was calculated and not robotic, weighting the 
		options available to him within his culture. 
   5. One of his main theoretical inspirations was Frazer - Malinowski declared that magic, 
		like empirical/rational, knowledge has an instrumental purpose.    
   6. Had a naïve theory of culture based on biological need. 
   7. Malinowski's functionalism was highly influential in the 1920s and 1930s. As applied 
		methodology, this approach worked, except for situations of social or cultural change. 
		With Radcliffe-Brown, Malinowski pushed for a paradigm shift in British anthropology, 
		a change from the speculative, historical to the ahistorical study of social institutions. 
		This theoretical shift gave rise to functionalism and established fieldwork as the constitutive 
		experience of social anthropology (Kuper 1973, Young 1991). 
   6. Malinowski made his greatest contribution as an ethnographer (studied around 30 societies); 
		his work became a canon for continual reanalysis. He emphasized the importance of studying 
		social behavior and social relations in their concrete cultural contexts. He considered 
		it crucial to consider the observable differences between norms and action, that is, 
		between what people say they do and what they actually do. His detailed descriptions 
		of Trobriand social life and thought are among the most comprehensive in world ethnography 
		and his Argonauts of the Western Pacific is one of the most widely read works of anthropology. 
		Malinowski's enduring conceptual contributions lay in the areas of kinship and marriage 
		(e.g., the concept of "sociological paternity"); in magic, ritual language and myth 
		(e.g., the idea of "myth as social charter"); and in economic anthropology (notably the 
		concept of "reciprocity") (Young 1991:445). He envisaged a method of collecting data as 
		vernacular in a community. 
	7. He was an empiricist - his explanations were based on function to which motives are added. 

Radcliffe-Brown 
   1. He focused on social structure and saw anthropology as a global, cross-cultural comparative 
		sociology, closely modeled upon natural sciences. 
   2. He argued that social structure was the essential framework for social analysis.    
   3. He suggested that a society is a system of relationships maintaining itself through cybernetic 
		feedback, while institutions are orderly sets of relationships whose function is to maintain the 
		society as a system. 
   4. Following Comte, he believed that the social constituted a separate "level" of reality 
		distinct from those of biological forms and inorganic matter. Furthermore, he believed that 
		explanations of social phenomena had to be constructed within the social level. 
   5. He believed that individuals were replaceable, transient occupants of social roles. Unlike 
		Malinowski's emphasis on individuals, Radcliffe-Brown considered individuals irrelevant (
		Goldschmidt 1996:510).

E.E. Evans-Pritchard
   1. Belongs to the second functionalist generation. 
   2. Emphasized the need for the inclusion of history in the study of social anthropology.    
		In opposition to Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard rejected the idea of social anthropology 
		as a science and viewed it, rather, as a comparative history.
   3. His work on witchcraft shows how systems of argumentation protect themselves from falsification,
		 and emphasizes the fact that pragmatic explanations cannot resolve moral questions. 

Methodology 
   1. Functionalism emerged as a sharp methodological break with the decontextualised comparisons 
		of the evolutionary anthropology. 
   2. The functionalists also shared an emphasis on intensive and extended fieldwork, involving 
		participant observation. 
   3. This methodological emphasis has resulted in a series of excellent monographs on native 
		societies which unravel the structure of a society in a realist style, from a native's
		point of view, which translates the exotic into familiar by employing a tripartite strategy 
		of translation: supplying the transcript of the native text (1), providing a word by word 
		translation and explication (2) and producing a glossary in English (3). He shows that 
		other cultures have a cognitive and social logic. 
   4. They also employ a textual strategy that represents the whole by the part through the analysis 
		of essential institutions (KULA, witchcraft) cultural performances or privileged structures 
		(kinship systems, rituals). 
   5. Gellner notes somewhere that for anthropology functionalism is a methodological obligation 
		to probe for interconnection rather than a theory of society. 

Criticism 
   1. Functionalist theory has been criticized for its disregard of the historical process and
		for its presupposition that societies are in a state of equilibrium (Goldschmidt 1996:511). 
		The problem of change is more so in case of theoretical functionalism rather than the 
		ethnographies themselves. However, in the case of ethnographies there is little historical 
		context, the significance of people is lost. This leads to the further problem of the relationship 
		between functionalism and colonial authority. The theory plays down power and conflict. 
		Functionalism fitted well with Britain's colonial policy of indirect ruling. 
   2. Logical problems of functional explanations have been pointed out, namely that they are 
		teleological and tautological. It has been argued that the presence of an institution can 
		not precede the institution's existence. Otherwise, such a teleological argument would suggest 
		that the institution's development anticipated its function. This criticism can be countered 
		by recognizing an evolutionary or a historical process at work; however, functionalism 
		specifically rejected such ideas. The structure is reified (ontological critique). 
   3. Functional analysis has also been criticized for being circular: needs are postulated on 
		the basis of existing institutions that are, in turn, used to explain their existence. 
		This criticism can be countered by establishing a set of universal requisite needs, or 
		functional prerequisites. It has been argued, however, that to account for phenomena by 
		showing what social needs they satisfy does not explain how it originated or why it is 
		what it is (Kucklick 1996:250).
   4. Furthermore, functionalism's antihistoric approach made it impossible to examine social 
		processes, rejection of psychology made it impossible to understand attitudes and sentiments, 
		and the rejection of culture led to a lack of recognition of the ecological context 
		(Goldschmidt 1996:511).