Chapter 9: Structure and Function © 2014 Mark Moberg

Much as psychological anthropologists dissented from the Boasian “shreds and patches” metaphor, so did the functionalists. Structural functionalists subscribed to the Durkheimian “organismic analogy” in which institutions stand in some functional relationship to one another, much like the organs of the body. From the 1930s until the1950s, British anthropology centered around two charismatic scholars: Bronislaw Malinowski and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown. The focus of R-B’s structural functionalism was to be a society’s social structure. This consisted of corporate groups, or entities which persist beyond the life of any one member; examples might be lineages, voluntary associations, tribes, etc. Secondly, social structure comprises the rules governing relations between people in these groups. The assumption was that if people followed these rules, social structure would be reproduced over time with little or no change. As if to set himself apart from Malinowski and American anthropologists, R-B declared that a study of culture was not possible, as he regarded culture as “thoughts” that could not be observed. What is curious about this claim is that social structure is also an abstraction that cannot be observed, but is rather a creation of structural functionalists as a heuristic device to better understand society. © 2014 Mark Moberg

Malinowski, in contrast, examined how cultural practices fulfill what he believed to be the needs of the individual. While agreeing with R-B that solidarity is a precondition for social life, he went beyond him by postulating seven basic human needs that underlie all cultural practices. The task of the ethnographer was to identify how various practices met each of these seven needs. This turned out to be a huge undertaking. Under the basic need of “safety,” for example, the ethnographer might include how houses are constructed to prevent flooding, the organization of armed defense, patterns of socialization to turn young men into potential combatants, and the magical recruitment of supernatural forces for defense against enemies. There have been many criticisms of functionalism since its heyday. These include its inability to account for change or conflict. Functionalism has also been criticized for its conservatism and defense of the status quo: i.e. the implication that all cultural practices serve an essential need, and any alteration in them is likely to be disruptive. Such assumptions were altogether ill-suited to a rapidly changing research context as the British Empire began to dissolve in the years after WWII. © 2014 Mark Moberg