b

What is functionalism and what are some examples of anthropologists beneath it?

• Functionalism: states that culture is built on a system of structures that maintain societal balance. These systems also worked to replace individuals within a status if need be to keep the structure in place.

• Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown

• Malinowski: approached culture at the macro level, looking at how the systems maintained allyship

  • Kula

  • system of exchange in a broader lens opened up opportunities to trade goods

  • Function of the ritual works to drive societal benefit and create relationships

  • Maintains conflict from not arising because of the relationships formed through ritual exchange

  • Focused on how cultures used rituals to serve other functions in their societies

  • Made it so everyone’s role in a culture could be replaced by another if something happened

• Radcliffe-Brown: took a much more micro approach to culture

  • Claimed that if you can grasp one aspect of culture, you can understand how the whole society functions

  • Looked at Joking Relationships and importance of kinship

  • Two individuals have a joking relationship, but it serves a deeper purpose of having close ties to someone

  • The person who teases you will also be the first at your side to diffuse conflict

  • Serves to integrate a new member into a kinship group and form close relationships

• Role of Individual:

  • Cared more about the system of culture

  • Individual exists, but has no role in theory itself

Who were some of the Nineteenth-Century Evolutionists

• Herbert Spencer: The Social Organism

• Tylor: The Science of Culture

• Morgan: Ethnical Periods

  • Both Morgan & Tylor Believe that there is a bounded culture and that less complex = worse

• Karl Marx and Engels: Opposition of Materialist and Idealist Outlook

Spencer

• Human development can be applied to social setting

• applies a similar concept as Tylor and Morgan

Morgan

• Believes in monogenesis (common ancestor, one human species, ppl got stuck and thus de-evolve)

• Sees technological development as a driver

• Degeneration: idea that some societies are limited by what is available in your environment and get stuck

• Made a checklist for civilization

  • Speech/language (especially written language)

  • Family

  • religion

  • House-life

  • assumption that market based economy is more complex

  • Achieving complexity= allowing population to grow

Tylor

• Civilized = western and the goal

• society is a complex whole

• there is a static set of attributes that make up culture as a bounded thing

• culture doesn’t change you, you just move through stages

• Individual does not matter

• variations do not matter

• rational thinking/science- thinks that you get from one stage to the next via rational thinking

• argues that humans can rise above animalistic instincts

• Biology limits how far you can go

• Progression via diffusion

Marx & Engels

• It is not your biology that is limiting, it is your physical circumstances and what you have access to

• Complexity stems from needs frowing and people learning they can provide those provision s

• Argues humans create those conditions and we impose them on one another

• Problems started from property ownership

• Theory of alienation

• property= controlling land, means of production, labor, and access

  • Limits what other groups can achieve

Connection between Spencer, Morgan, Tylor, and Marx/Engels

• All authors are trying to explain how society got to the place it is at

  • Tylor and Morgan - culture

  • Spencer- social society/competition

Degeneration

• There are factors that can limit your path

  • Morgan: based on idea that some societies are limited by what is available in your environment and get stuck, you can’t invent things without resources to do so

  • Not only is environment shaping us biologically, but is also limits societal development (connects to Tylor)

  • Rudest forms of religion and such are holding them back

What authors focused more on sociological thought?

• Durkheim: Social fact

• Mauss: The Gift

• Weber: Class, status, party

Durkheim, do they care about individual, goal, argument

• social fact: there are certain ways of doing things that are driven by society and that determine behavior

  • things that make a speicifc society and allow it to function

• What does it take for society to maintain itself?

• sociology should be a separate field of study

• Individuals do not create their society, but rather are born into pre-existing duties, obligations, rights, ways of speaking, and believing

• Social facts are real because they are felt. people may be unaware of them until they violate them

• morality of life

• Acknowledges that society has evolved and argues that societies are limited by their technologies, which are limited by environments

  • also requires social interaction

• Pre-industrial (lacks complexity) and industrial world (more specialized and variety)

• Mechanical: pre-industrial, going through mechanics of culture to meet basic needs, simple

  • Individual is not important

• Organic: Industrial, more variation across and within culture. Exposure to new ideas, constantly observing, borrowing, and growing

Mauss

• Gift economy

• Kula

• Not purely economic basis

• prestation: both gift and return are obligatory and enacted under systems of reciprocity

• influenced by Strauss

• looking for concrete examples of social fact

• argues that rationality of society is maintained by understanding rules of Gift Exchange, as long as everyone follows it, it remains neutral

  • political and social

• gifts reflect status

• if gift exchange breaks down, social structure can also break down

• Universal behaviors, across culture —> relate to soical fact

• Status of individual matters, but personality does not

Weber

• Class, status, party

• Individual identity is not subsumed by class identity

• Power is not the same as status and authority

• Reacting/rebuttal to Marx

  • Marx favors collective, weber favors individual

• Argument: you need individual to organize masses and needs (coercion to be a revolutionary

  • individual needs to maintain emotional reaction to bring about structural change

  • class struggles are often not truly between classes

  • you need a certain person to galvanize an d lead these moral movements

• Social structures are fluid not stagnant

• Wealth vs social honor

  • New wealth = money without social honor

  • Links social order to distribution of wealth and social honor

  • Legal honor: codes and laws are based on our sense of morality and who holds that power

  • Status: related to honor, not equal to economic standing

• Emphasis on morality, success rate

Connection between Durkheim and Mauss, Marx, Wever

• What is uniquely common that makes us have culture?

  • Consciousness

  • What drives people and their behavior, what role does consciousness and morale play vs economic wealth or social facts

  • What determines order and power?

• Mauss follows Durkheim’s idea of social evolution from mechanical to organic

• Lack of communication/breaking of social order can cause breakdown

• All authors reflect on time of which they lived

• The role of the individual vs external forces and the masses/community

• 
  

Weber vs Marx

• Class (Marx): specific relationship to means of production

  • classes are born from the struggle of production control

• Weber: Charisma influence

  • Sees society as divided into those with and without property

  • Further divided by the property’s meaning

  • 
    

What is the Evolutuion of culture as a theory, and who are some theorists underneath it?

• Evolution of culture: a theory assuming that all cultures are on a track leading to modern post-industrial civilization

• Coincides with the idea of a collective consciousness, where all people collectively want to strive for the same society

• Examples: white and Steward both take a multilinear approach to this evolution,

• White:

• A lot of similarities among authors align with the fact that all cultures utilize some form of technology to break through the limits of their environment

• A culture evolves by advancing their technology to better adapt to their environment

• Differences among authors:

  • Tylor, Morgan, and Spencer lean on the idea that all cultures will aend up becoming like White, European societies.

    • Morgan notes that societies are either savage, barbaric, or have some form of writing/alphabet

      • Cultures will also not regress or else something is seriously wrong with how they’re evolving

    • Believe that the environment is something the culture will adapt and gain control over

  • White and Steward (multilinear evolutionists) , on the other hand, disagree with this and lean on energy and technology.

    • A culture does not regress, but will minimize their population as to not exceed their existing natural resources

    • Their path is linear but does not need to progress if their current culture operates well in their environment

    • Also believe that the environment has an influence on the culture and how it functions

    • Share similarities and differences with that of Tylor, Morgan, and Spencer

  • The environment and culture both influence on another to operate in the most optima capacity

  • It is through technology that a culture advances in their evolution, as they further adapt to their environment

Who were the Boasians and what did they believe about the individual

• Historical particularism

  • People’s cultures are tied to their past. Just because a society isn’t developed doesn’t mean it’s lacking

• Cultural relativism

  • cultures are not better than one-another

• Attacks evolutionists and then diffusionists

• Rooted in ethnography

• Knowing the historical context of a culture helps grasp the reasons as to how and why it operates in a particular way

• sui-generis: cultures create themselves

• Everybody has consciousness, they may not have tapped into it yet

• Outside and inside forces affect culture

  • cause and effect

  • result and cause

• Authors:

  • Boas: Methods of ethnology

  • Kroeber: On the Principle of Order in Civilization as Exemplified by Changes of Fashion

  • Mead: Introduction to Coming of Age in Samoa (Adolescence)

  • Benedict: Science of custom

  • Hurston: Of Mules and Men

  • Whorf: The Relation of habitual Thought and Behavior to Language

Boas

• Historical particularism

• Cultural relativism

• Ethnology

Kroeber

• analyzed fashion

• Boas student

• Bigger picture of culture

• Trying to find a genearl law/reason without a racist perspective

• superorganic: individual humans had little, if any effect on culture

• Culture = series of integrated parts

• Focused on the whole

• Basic and secondary features

• Historical cicumstances

  • focuses on diffusion

  • Uses scientific method life Boas

• Cycle is superorganic outside of individual

Boas vs Kroeber

Boas: interested in motivation, Kroeber just showing trends

Kroeber wants quantitative, Boas wants qualitative

Boas: historical particularism, cultural relativism, scientific approach, why

Kroeber: info, broader, scientific approach

Who are unilineal evolutionists and what do they believe?fo

• Spencer, Morgan, Tylor

  • More concerned with how culture evolved through time

  • Did not care much for individual

Neo-evolutionism and the individual

• White

• Looked at the population of a culture in an enviornment

• Concerned with carrying capacity, energy, and how an environment influenced a population, not an individual

• 
  

Did Weber see the individual as important?

• Saw the individual as important in this, arguing that they can serve as a reflection of the whole culture

• claimed if social change needs to happen, enough people will come together to overthrow the old system and form a more beneficial one

• Not necessarily about who the individual is, but more so on the charisma he has

Structuralism

• Looks back at the individual and how language shapes their perception of themselves

• Tramps: the argument was concerned with seeing how these groups viewed themselves.

• Decoding the language could debunk how individuals view themselves and othe people in a society

• Culture and personality used the indiivdual to reflect the greater population

Sociobiology

• An individual may “show off” for the potential best mate at the cost of the most optimal energy gain

  • Reflecting how the greater culture as a whole prioritizes its mean of longevity and reproduction

• Wilson

• Bird: Hunting,

Feminist Anthropology

• Slocum

• Leacock

Social Fact

• Durkheim

structuralism

• Strauss

• Spradley