Condensed ANTH 341 Important Figures

Roy Rappaport

• human cultures aren’t unique but formed population by forming food webs, biotic communities, and ecosystems

• Religion is not just a system that binds communities together

Neofunctionalism

Culture is a functional adaptation to the ecosystem (Rappaport)

Who had the approach through synchronic and functionalist exploration of religion and ecology

Roy Rappaport

Marvin Harris

• society’s material conditions significantly influence cultural values/behaviors

• Perplexing practices make sense as environmental adaptations when viewed in infrastructural and etic terms

Who Developed the Idea of cultural materialism and emic/etic?

Marvin Harris

Neomaterialism

The way that cultural beliefs, practices, and institutions allowed populations to maintain and reproduce themselves successfully within specific physical, political and economic environments

Leslie White

• Cultural development = energy consumed x technological efficiency

• The capture of efficient use of energy drives cultural evolution/change

• Rejected “neoevolution” and abandoned savagery/barbarism/civilized

General Evolution

Long-term trends present in all cultures (White)

Theory of Diminishing Returns

Suggests that the increase of energy expended resulted in a decline in energy gained (white)

Claude Levi-Strauss

• structuralism

• Culture arises from universal structures of the human mind

• Cultural practices are universal processes of thought organized by contrasts

Who wrote the book “The Elementary Structures of Kinship”?

Claude Levi-Strauss

Universal Binaries

• raw:cooked culture:nature

• Created through the human mind from meditating categories (Levi-Strauss)

Second Wave Feminism

Focused on critiquing patriarchal or male-dominated institutions

Theory of Cultural Ecology

Adaption through cultural means; understanding how humans adapt to a wide variety of environments (Steward)

Refined Determinism

• specific environmental factors shape particular cultural features (Steward)

The Cultural Core

The most vital beliefs, values, and institutions; its fundamentally shaped by how a group interacts with its environment, manages resources, and adapts to ecological conditions (Steward)

Multilinear Evolution

Rejected the idea of a single straight line of history progress proposing instead that cultures evolve in multiple directions based on their specific, local environment and technology (Steward)

Specific Evolution

Specific forms of adaptation that arose within environmental contexts and subsistence traditions (Steward)

Julian Steward

• human cultures aren’t unique closely linked to environmental conditions

• Implies that cultural features are of two kinds: those related to the environment and those that are not

Radcliffe-Brown

• ignored historical evolution in favor of observing how a society functions at a single moment

• Science of culture is impossible

• No need in behavioral study; focused on patterned relations rather than individuals, emphasizing how social structure dictates behavior

Structural Functionalism

Society is an integrated organism where institutions (parts) function together to maintain the whole, similar to organs in a body (Radcliffe-Brown)

Marcel Mauss

• Structural Functionalism

• The Gift: these exchanges are “total social facts” intertwining economic, social, religious, and legal obligations rather than being purely economic transactions

• Gift never leaves their owner, their spirit is carried to the receiver which compels them to reciprocate

Who is concerned with social cohesion, social fact, and total social phenomenon

Marcel Mauss

Psychological Functionalism

All cultural institutions, beliefs, and practices function together satisfy basic biological and psychological human needs (nutrition, reproduction, safety, hygiene) (Malinowski)

Brownislaw Malinowski

• Kula Ring: exchange shell armbands and necklaces with others

• “The function of magic”

• Three main forms of data: social structures/institutions, “imponderables of actual life”, and ethnographic texts

• Exchanges were undertaken with the goals of prestige and alliance, rather than material self-gain

Zora Neale Hurston

• celebrated black cultural authenticity and individual agency, resisting the portrayal of Black life primarily through the lens of victimhood or racial struggle

• Rejected the idea that Black people should be defined solely by the “white gaze” or political oppression

Who made contributions to multimodal anthropology, feminist anthropology, explorations of race, and gender/class?

Zora Neale Hurston

Margaret Mead

• Studies in Samoa of the adolescence and concluded that the stress and rebellion associated with adolescence in western culture were not universal, but rather products of that specific society

• Gender roles are not fixed; women can be dominant, while both genders were cooperative or aggressive

Nature vs Nurture

Argued that human behavior is primarily learned from culture, not determined by biology (Mead)