Anthropologists

• Defined American cultural anthropology
• Cultural relativism and historical particularism (every society has unique progression)
• Studied inuits

• Inspired by Emile Durkheim
• Structural-functionalism (all the parts, or institutions, of a society filled a particular function)
• Ultimate goal of Anthro is precision like natural sciences
• Rejected psychological explanations
• Regarded individual as social product
• Ideas mostly abandoned
• Criticism: Believed his models were more truthful than social reality
• Students criticized Malinowski’s students for writing extensive field accounts without an explanation or model tying details together

• British anthropology, classical functionalist (assumed entire societies are perfectly integrated)
• Intensive fieldwork
• Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 1922
• Participant observation (ethnographer should live with people studied, participate in everyday activities, and make systematic observations)
• Lifelong interest in individual psychology
• Criticism: Unfocused and theoretically weak

• Nephew of Durkheim
• Reciprocity (the exchange of gifts and services, is the ‘glue’ that ties societies together in the absence of a centralised power)
• Criticism: Largely seen as irrelevant by young anthropologists studying conflict rather than integration

• Actual behaviour of societies is separated from idealized rules of behaviour within the particular society
• Critical of S-F faith in ability of norms and structure to regulate human interaction
• Social organisation(actual interaction) vs social structure (system of interrelated statuses. Abstract template)
• Persons acted according to their own will and modify social structure

• Founder of Structuralism
• Influenced by Durkheim
• How the human mind functions, cognitive structure
• Alliance, affinality
• 1962, "The Savage Mind"

• 1960s, “transactionalism” (Model of analysis putting acting individual as central. Does not assume social integration is necessary outcome of interaction.)
• Methodological individualism

Three types of reciprocity.
- 1. Balanced reciprocity: market trade, tit-for-tat
- 2. Generalized reciprocity: There is no acknowledged pricing mechanism and no explicit demands for returning gifts, but rules are known
- 3. Negative reciprocity: economic deception, where benefits are reaped without paying the cost.

Distinguishes between opinion and doxa. Free choices are not illusory, but integrated factors restrict them.

1. Status societies: each person has fixed relationships to others
2. Contract societies: Based on voluntary agreements

• Coined term “survival of the fittest”
• Introduced “structure” and “function” as concepts

Local community vs anonymous large-scale society. Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft.

• 1928, Coming of Age in Samoa
• 1930, Growing up in New Guinea
• Socialisation of children to understand cultural “variations in personality”

• Cultures have “personality traits”
• Like Radcliff-Brown, saw cultures as consistent and seamless, but explained with psychology

• Theory of Structuration, Holistic view.
• Social life is more than random individual acts, but is not merely determined by social forces.

• Development of the modern state goes hand in hand with development of modern market economies
• Societies could be economically integrated.

• 1951, confessed that structural-functionalism failed to produce a single general “social law” with precision as the natural sciences
• 1956, book on religion of Nuer (Sudanese cattle people). May have coloured native terms with own religion.
• Studies of witchcraft in Central Africa made him understand Stalinism
• Wanted social anthropology to become an interpretive science

• Distinguished between “cultural core” (technology, ecological adaptation, and property relations), and “rest of culture”
• Derives from Boas

Cultural materialism. Social life is response to practical problems of existence.

• Interpretive/symbolic anthropology
• Contrast to cultural materialism
• Culture – “shared meanings expressed through public communication”

• The definition of "nature" and "man-made" may change
• Artificial births

Culture = “complex whole which includes capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”

Established kinship as distinct domain

Societies are far from integrated equilibrium. Criticized definition of marriage in alliance.

The more energy a group or society exploited for its own ends, the higher it was placed on the evolutionary ladder.

Those two guys who took the word "culture" way too seriously.

• Applied ecological way of thinking to wide range.
• One of founders of cybernetics.
• Husband of Margaret Mead.

Darwinist view of societal progression.