Anthropolgy- social theory

social theory

explanations, arguments, hypotheses, and speculations about the nature of humans and human social life. Social theory seeks to understand various social phenomena, including power relationships, gender, religion, race, social change

• Explaining Human Behavior

• Why Things Are As They Are

• Why We Do What We Do

• Unity vs Diversity

• Individual vs Group

• *Socially and Culturally Constructed Nature of Human Realities *

Functionalism

looking at society as a whole and theorizing the role that social interactions play in maintaining social order

Structuralism

Claude Levi-Strauss

– Search for universal characteristics of human minds (the need to classify!)

– Linguistics (de Saussure)

– Patterned, Binary Oppositions

– Implications: all humans organize and structure our experiences by way of using binary principles of opposition; only real differences are in the tools for observing the world; cultural diversity emerges from the differences in the materials (“forms”) by which people express universal meanings

— study the underlying social structure that determined human action and social organization

Post-structuralism

• response and criticism of structuralism.

• post-structuralism rejected the idea that cognitive, literary, linguistic, and social systems have an underlying structure

Social Action Theory

attempting to theorize the relationship between a person's actions and the meanings behind those actions within a social context

• major criticisms (impact of material and biological factors is often neglected, fails to account for impact of class, gender, ethnicity in decision making)

Cultural Materialism

2 forms: history literature and anthropology

• history lit: cultural and material conditions that influence the production of a text

• Anthropology: similar but focuses on culture, believes social institution and culture is best. understood as products of the same kind of complex historical and material factors

Marxism (conflict theory)

– Karl Marx and Frederich Engels (also 19th century)

– Human work (labor), its social organization over time (historical context), and

material outgrowths of human labor

– Labor creates society, as well as the conditions for human existence

– Capitalism, private property (control of capital [wealth/money/assets] by few; alienation of others), stratification and class struggle

– Critical of economic exploitation of members of the “proletariat” (or, workers) by the “bourgeoisie” (or, owners of capital)

Critical Theory

a philosophical approach to culture, and especially to literature, that seeks to confront the social, historical, and ideological forces and structures that produce and constrain it. The term is applied particularly to the work of the Frankfurt School.

Symbolic interactionism

• (used more in sociology)

• George Mead

• The meaning of human behavior is subjective

• Humans don’t just react to one another’s actions, but rather interpret/define them and “respond” according to that interpreted meaning

Critical Race Theory

– Race is social construct that is used to maintain racial inequality that serves white economic and political interests to the disadvantage of people and communities of color

– Law and legal institutions rooted in racism

Feminist Theory

how feminism is a political movement has influenced the theoretical and institution development of different acedmeic disciplins

• Critique of male- and Euro-centric bias

• Critique of inequality, marginalization, subordination by gender, sex, sexuality

• Seeks to understand how power works in gender, sex, and sexuality

• How differential power is constituted

• Gender diversity/difference

• Gender practices

Intersectional Analysis

a theoretical framework in anthropology that examines how social identities overlap to create unique experiences of privilege, oppression, and marginalization