Chapter 9 Flashcards
Describe Structural functionalism
is a framework for building theory that sees society as a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability.
- Related to RB, applied to colonial powers.
- Interested in two things, corporate groups where individuals come and go but the group persists. Roles and Statuses.
Describe Corporate Groups
- Social structure
- Clans, secret society’s (people come and go into groups), religion/membership in a church (Group interest that is not dependent on any specific person). Social entities that essentially persist in time despite changes in their membership.
Describe Roles/status
- Social Structure
- positions such as father, son, clan elder, shaman etc. At the same time, as the occupant of a role, a person has a certain status, i.e the rights and responsibilities he or she enjoys relative to other people. Kinship status: have two roles in society.
- it is an ethnographic study
Describe Scientific per RB
-RB understanding of social structure was non-evolutionary. Therefore, he rejected the explanation of cultural traits in terms of evolution. “Culture only exists in your head”, you can ask individuals, however. Ex:// how do you feel when you see someone burning the flag.
Describe Synchronic study
The anthropologist resides in a society for about a year or so, studying. RB assumed that the synchronic “snapshot” made at the time of the anthropologists residence provides a portrait that would be of lasting relevance. Alternative to synchronic studies are longitudinal studies, when anthropologists continue to come back to the same location to see how it has changed or remained consistent over time.
Describe Reification
Creating a concept that helps to understand a society and then attributing real force to that concept in people’s actions, even though they themselves are unaware of the concept.
Describe Indirect rule
The British adopted this policy, which converted existing leaders of African and other colonized societies into functionaries of the colonial government turning once an independent leader into what were essentially puppets of the colonial administration. Anthropologists collaborated in this effort.
Describe the “imponderabilia of actual life”
a series of phenomena of great importance which cannot possibly be recorded by questioning or computing documents, but have to be observed in their full actuality….such things as the routine of a man’s working day, the details of his care of the body, of the manner of taking food and preparing it. Used in Malinowski’s book Argonauts of the Western Pacific. (Objects that defy understanding). Subjective knowledge and specific behaviors and dispositions of people taking part in daily activities.
Describe Psychological functionalist
Two versions of functionalism developed between 1910 and 1930: Malinowski’s biocultural (or psychological) functionalism; and structural-functionalism, the approach advanced by Radcliffe-Brown. Malinowski suggested that individuals have physiological needs (reproduction, food, shelter) and that social institutions exist to meet these needs. There are also culturally derived needs and four basic “instrumental needs” (economics, social control, education, and political organization) that require institutional devices. Radcliffe-Brown focused on social structure rather than biological needs. He suggested that a society is a system of relationships maintaining itself through cybernetic feedback, while institutions are orderly sets of relationships whose function is to maintain the society as a system.
Describe Prestige Goods
Valued for their emotional and historical associations rather than their intrinsic properties or aesthetics. Necklaces are being traded in one direction while arm bands are being traded in another direction. Only can be traded for one another.
Describe Kula
A ring showing how Trobriand men undertake perilous ocean voyages of hundreds of miles to exchange shell armbands and necklaces with trading partners on other islands.
Who is Radcliffe-Brown?
Cited as the founder of the structural functional viewpoint in British social anthropology. RB structural functionalism was largely unaltered version of Durkheim’s sociology as applied to “primitive” societies. He believed the study of society should be directed toward what he called “social structure” and emphatically not culture. RB usage of social structure encompasses two different phenomena. Corporate groups and social roles.
-structural functionalism
Who is Malinowski?
He set the standard for anthropological field research few anthropologists since have equaled.
- Psychological or pure functionalism
- His belief that society is a system of “interrelated parts” as well as the thought of the Kula as a physical system directly mirrors Spencer’s “organic analogy.” Though Malinowski was influenced by Durkheim, similar to Radcliffe-Brown; Malinowski studied behavior in cultural context, dissimilar to Radcliff-Brown who observed social structures as an abstract concept that exist separate from the individuals. Malinowski incorporated the Boasian concepts of participant observation and integration of culture in his work, but he also vehemently opposed Boasian Historical Particularism and Marxist doctrine; respectively, focusing on the “interrelation of elements within a society” instead of the history of the group in question and his having called idea of “the primitive communism of savages” a “widespread misconception.”
- Malinowski, had a core list that needed to be filled out. Needed to gather a preponderance of data, a lot people didn’t think you could gather this kind of data.
- Malinowski identified the instrumental needs that he believed every society had to satisfy with institutions. He advocated participant/observation methods to understand how each need was fulfilled.
RB’s argument that culture can’t be studied scientifically and the critique of his position.
- RB contended that culture was only “thoughts” Because “thoughts” can’t be observed it would be impossible to formulate a scientific study of them, he argued.
- This was debated because even if this is true, we could just ask them
- Also, RB argued that social structure is somehow more “real” than culture, he was not addressing actual behavior with that concept or any other.
The interest and influence of the British government on anthropological studies (indirect rule).
Indirect rule is a system of government used by the British and French to control parts of their colonial empires, particularly in Africa and Asia, through pre-existing local power structures. These dependencies were often called “protectorates” or “trucial states”. By this system, the day-to-day government and administration of areas both small and large was left in the hands of traditional rulers, who gained prestige and the stability and protection afforded by the Pax Britannica, at the cost of losing control of their external affairs, and often of taxation, communications, and other matters, usually with a small number of European “advisors” effectively overseeing the government of large numbers of people spread over extensive areas.
