2.  Structural Functionalism developed from the British reaction to Evolutionism, which was also a school of diffusionism › Unlike the school in America, which flourished, the British school led by W.H.R. Rivers at Cambridge University quickly died out  One of Rivers’ students, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, started as a diffusionist, but after discovering the works of Emile Durkheim and Bronislaw Malinowski, he turned to social anthropology, following what became known as the structural functional model  For almost 50 years, up into the early 1960s, the model was highly popular in both British anthropology and British sociology › It was so popular that Kingsley Davis once argued that structural functionalism was the sociological model

3. 1. Organic analogy: society is supposedly like a biological organism, with structures and functions comparable to the heart, lungs, and blood. 2. A natural science orientation: Structural functionalists were thoroughly committed to a natural science model of society. Social life was deemed to be empirical, orderly, and patterned, and therefore amenable to rigorous, positivistic, scientific study. 3. Narrow conceptual territory: Structural functionalists pretty much agreed that their investigations should be restricted to the social structure (society) and its subsystems (e.g. the family, the economy, the polity, worldviews). Unlike American anthropologists, structural functionalists rarely paid much attention to art, language, child-rearing, ideology, the individual, or technological and environmental factors. 4. Functional unity, indispensability, and universality: In the cruder versions, it was assumed that all the institutions and roles of society meshed neatly together, that existing structures and institutions in any particular society contained indispensible functions without which the society would fall apart, and that these structures and functions or their equivalents were found in all healthy societies.

4. 5. Anti-reductionism: Following the assumption of a narrow conceptual territory, and thus manageable, the structural functionalists were generally opposed to explanations from other disciplines, particularly psychology. The idea was that social anthropology provided a type of explanation, concerned particularly with social structure, that no other discipline provided. Theoretical progress depended on the careful and cautious exploration of the exact properties of the social structure, and the relationships among its substructures 6. The significance of kinship and the family: it was assumed that in most pre- industrial societies, one subsystem, in this case kinship, had more impact than any other. Supposedly, these societies organized all other social systems (economic, political, religious, etc.) at least partly in terms of kinship 7. Equilibrium: Society was thought to be highly patterned, but also in a state of equilibrium, characterized by harmony, a central value system, and internal consistency. When there were disruptions, mechanisms existed to bring the equilibrium back 8. Static analysis: Following #7, if society was in equilibrium, then it also exhibited long-term stability, so invited static instead of dynamic analysis 9. Anti-historical: Partly because of #7&8, and partly because of the assumption that the past is unknowable in societies without written records, structural functionalism didn’t encourage a historical perspective 10. Fieldwork orientation: Structural functionalists were totally devoted to first- hand, participant observational research. At first, more emphasis was placed on high-quality data than theory, but there was an implicit theoretical framework that went along with the guided model of structural functionalism. They were also inductivists.

6.  Born in France and trained in philosophy  Joined the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bordeaux in 1887 › Ten years later he was appointed to the first professorship in the social science in France  By that point he had already publishes The Division of Labour, The Rules of Sociological Method, and Suicide, among others  He was totally committed to building a natural science of society; he believed that social phenomena were as real as natural or physical phenomena, in the sense that they simply can’t be gotten rid of.  He agreed with Boas that social life is driven by emotion and sentiment instead of reason and utility, but he was vehemently opposed to psychological explanations (which focused on the individual) › He believed that the individual’s beliefs, emotions, sentiments, and actions were a product of the social structure – the collective conscience  He expressed his belief in the controlling role of society over the individual with “Social Facts”, external to the individual, coercive over the individual, and general throughout society. The most inclusive was the collective conscience, which we now might call the central value system

7.  He argued that group behavior was grater than the sum of its parts (i.e. the members of a society) because the very fact of interacting in a group transformed the emotions and sentiments of each participant in a unified direction. The implication was that there was no point in focusing on the individual  The collective conscience had 2 subtypes: mechanical and organic solidarity › Mechanical solidarity: dominated pre-industrial societies; based on homogeneity, a tendency towards group interaction, and the absence of individual choice › Organic solidarity: appeared as society began to industrialize and became more complex; based on heterogeneity, an emphasis on individualism, and choice – keep in mind that the last two were still products of social structure  Durkheim’s big example: suicide. He claimed it was actually a societal phenomenon. Supposedly, there are two main types: altruistic and egoistic (the third, anomic, was atypical and only used when a society was breaking down.) Altruistic suicide occurred when there was too much solidarity in a society (not enough individualism – especially in mechanical societies). Egoistic suicide occurred when there was too much individualism, which was especially in organic societies › He used statistics and the comparative method to prove this, and also contended that the comparative method was the sociological method.

8.  While Durkheim did some fieldwork, he was really an armchair scholar, but he had enormous influence on anthropology, particularly on Radcliffe-Brown › Born in England, he did fieldwork from 1906-1908 in the Andaman Islands, west of Thailand, but he was particularly a theorist. › Like Durkheim, he was anti-reductionist, and committed to the natural science view of society.  He identified three stages of scientific investigation: observation (data collection), taxonomy (data classification), and generalization (theorizing). He viewed the comparative method as the anthropologist’s alternative to lab experiments and assumed that it was essential to the discipline › He made outstanding contributions to classic topics such as joking relations (ritualistic verbal exchange between people in potentially hostile relations, like in- laws), and the significance of the mother’s brother, who takes on some of the father’s role in matrilineal societies  But his view of the natural science approach to the discipline were more impressive in classrooms and as lectures than out in societies. As fieldwork became more popular, the natural science model was shown to be unable to cope with the complexities of social life

9.  Born in Poland, taught at the London School of Economics for most of his career › Radcliffe-Brown’s rival for leadership of British social anthropology; known to be an exceptional fieldworker – most anthropologists credit him with establishing modern fieldwork, with the emphasis on participant observation in a small community and the emic approach › He introduced a major ethnographic example: the kula ring, in which necklaces were passed clockwise ceremonially around the Trobriand Islands, and armshells were passed counter-clockwise, increasing the level of interaction and decreasing the degree of hostility between the islands  Although both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown were structural functionalists, Malinowski placed much more emphasis on function than Brown, who placed a high emphasis on structure, and was less sensitive to the potential flaws in the school › He argued that the function of institutions was to satisfy biological needs, which Brown greatly disagreed with; he defined the discipline as the study of culture, not social structure, would occasionally focus on personality in his work, and agreed with Boas about collecting native texts. › Radcliffe-Brown hated all this  However, the two men’s approaches did have similarities, and one of their main points of contention – the culture vs. social structure label – could be considered no more than semantics