FUNCTIONALISM - Anthropology



FUNCTIONALISM

2/14/02

Sources: I.C. Jarvie (1973) Functionalism. Minneapolis, Minn: Burgess.

Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942)

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Malinowski was the first anthropologist to describe his method of analysis as functionalist in his magnum opus, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, published in 1922.

This work takes as its central task the explanation of the kula exchanges.

"The kula is thus an extremely big and complex institution...It welds together a considerable number of tribes, and it embraces a vast complex of activities, interconnected, and playing into one another, so as to form one organic whole" (Malinowski 1922: 83).

Malinowski’s Functionalism.

1. Currently existing societies could not be treated as living fossils, preserved specimens of earlier forms of social life (No "Stone Age" societies in New Guinea)

2. Any living society is viable, but it is not the only viable society. (Mal and R-B ignore this point...why this functional solution as opposed to any other? Maybe Boas has a better solution than either of them)

NOTE: Analogy with elements of randomness & order in dreams

3. Survival shows fitness, not the greatest possible fitness..."Hence, that a society knitted together by the kula is fit, does not show that it is the fittest possible." Jarvie 1973: 10

Notion of “surplus repression” (Marcuse)

Notion of “sick societies” (Edgerton)

A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955)

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The Andaman Islanders (1922) , seeks to describe and account for the myths and rituals of the Andamanese of the Indian Ocean .

[NOTE: It is interesting to note that the two works which launched functionalist analysis in anthropology both examined fundamentally expressive, rather than instrumental, features of the societies in question. This ties in with the overall emphasis on latent rather than manifest functions]]

R-B began his fieldwork with the notion of reconstructing the history of Andaman society, but he abandoned that effort (partly because the lack of historical sources left him only with the alternative of speculation).

Eschewing historical analysis R-B turned instead to examining the function or the significance of the religious beliefs and practices he beheld rather than ponder their remoter origins.

R-B came to the conclusion that, in Jarvie's words, "Society is not the way it is because of religious ideas; religious ideas are what they are because of society" (Jarvie 1973: 7)

Society depends for its existence on a system of sentiments which regulate the conduct of the individual in accord with the needs of society.

Religious ceremonies are a means of giving collective expression to these sentiments, hence reinforcing them and transmitting them from one generation to the next. Hence their "social function" is their effect on the solidarity or cohesion of the society." Jarvie 1973: 7

• a theory both of how social order is maintained

• The assumptions here are, first, that there exists social harmony and social continuity and, second, that its is these that have to be explained

• R-B rejected Malinowski's brand of functionalism:

o For example, the case of the relationship between ritual and anxiety

R-B on Taboo

"...taboos relating to the animals and plants used for food are means of affixing a definite social value to food, based on its social importance. The social importance of food is not that it satisfies hunger, but that...an enormously large proportion of ...activities are concerned with the getting and consuming food, and that in these activities, with their daily instances of collaboration and mutual aid, there continuously occur those interrelations of interests which bind the individual men, women and children into a society." R-B 1952: 151.

But why is pork prohibited? or dog? or kangaroo?

Society as an Organic Whole

Hence social features appeared peculiar only on first sight; upon closer inspection (especially or ideally through fieldwork) they could be seen as integral parts of the whole social system...What such a scientific approach disclosed was that there were underlying patterns of principles in each social organization.

Such unchanging patterns of relationships he came to call the social structure. It was his hypothesis that if the social structures of societies were compared it would be possible to classify them into a small number of groups and discover the general principles governing their operation. These would be the laws of a scientific anthropology. The main area of anthropology in which he attempted this was kinship...solidarity of the lineage and solidarity of the sibling group." Jarvie 1973:12

A Functionalist Game:

Find a custom that is seemingly odd and pointless and demonstrate how it actually is somehow crucial to maintaining ongoing social life.

Later Advances in Funcitonalism

E.E. Evans-Pritchard [1902-1972(?) ] (1940) The Nuer

"The main problem in the book is how Nuer society holds together although segments of it are constantly fueding and there are no chiefs. E-P's argument is that the exten of feuding is strictly regulated by kinship ties, which ensure that it never gets out of hand and becomes a war of all against all. The clue lay in lineages." Jarvie 1973:13

Principle of Segmentary Opposition

Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore (1945) "Some Principles of Stratification" American Sociological Review 10: 242-247.

"...social stratification is a functional necessity because not all the tasks that need to be performed in a society are equally pleasant, equally easy, equally important to social survival. Roughly, stratification, or a system of status and rewards, is a filter to help ensure that the right people get into the right jobs and that they are then given social rewards for doing them properly. Stratification is, of course, only one form of reward: there are others, such as wealth, power, greater sexual opportunity, and so on." Jarvie 1973: 14

Contrast with Marx's analysis of social stratification

The Ted Kennedy/Dan Quayle Effect (key to why Ted stuck up for Dan)

Merton, Robert K. (1957) "Manifest and Latent Functions" In Social Theory and Social Structure. Glencoe: The Free Press.

"...a custom or institution could have two analytically distinct functions: overt or manifest, such as the function of marriage to beget children, of films to provide entertainment, of welfare to alleviate poverty; and covert or latent, such as the function of the kula to bind together achain of islands, or of the pork taboo to encourage the integrity of the pastoralist way of life, or of the Nuer lineage in maintaining social cohesion in a feuding society, or the function of social class in ensuring that those most suited to them will get the crucial jobs in society.

Anthropologists are mainly interested in latent functions

NOTE: Spiro's further elaboration to include psychodymanic as well as sociological functions. E.g, Burmese Monkhood as a Culturally Constituted Mechanism of Defense. A custom can serve both psychodynamic and sociological functions simultaneously.

Kingsley Davis (1959) "The Myth of Functional Analysis as a Special Method in Sociolgoy and Anthropology" American Sociological Review 24: 757-772

High water mark of functionalism in sociology.

In Davis's presidential address to the American Sociological Association he arguemnt that there is no special and homogeneous method called functionalism. Although it began as a distinct doctrine, it had become coterminous with the disciplines of social anthropology and sociology. "Such special features as it is alleged to have are merely the features of scientific method in general." Jarvie 1973: 15.

In other words Functionalism is Sociolgoical Explanation.

Walter Goldschmidt (1966) Comparative Functionalism. Berkeley: UC Press.

"Repudiating as too limited the sociological functionalism of R-B, he opts for viewing social systems as adaptive mechanisms for coping with both social and biological human needs. What anthropology must do is seek the universal imperatives of human sand social existence. these functional requisites need to be postulated and then tested for. They can then be used to explain the particular forms societies take." jarvie 1973: 16

Criticisms of Functionalism:

Jarvie lists some of the criticisms leveled at Functionalism:

At one time or another Functionalism has been accused of...

1. reifying abstractions;

2. stressing the static rather than the dynamic aspects of society;

3. confusing cause with effect;

4. introducing teleology or purpose;

5. serving colonialism;

6. being uncritical or unscientific;

7. being anti-individualistic

Functionalism as Theory, Functionalism as Method

"Because he was weak at this level of theory, Mal's influence tended to wane once fieldwork was over. Once the anthropologist was back in his study digesting, writing-up and trying to explain what he had observed, the thought of R-B came into its own."

In other words R-Bs functionalism provided a guide to writing that Mal's lacked.

Look at what people do, not what they say.

"....functionalism was not exhausted by its docrinre: it was also, if you ike a practice or mewthod, and this aspect of it was far less often subject to criti\cism than the theories that apparently underpinned that method." Jarvie 1973: 1973.

Perhaps this is no longer true two decades after Jarvie wrote this observation. POMO in many ways seeks to attack functionalism as method as well as theory.

Alexander Lesser " Is history to be impugned because of the errors in a particular conception of its nature?" In (1935) "Functionalism in Anthropology" AA 37: 386-393.

Ernest Gellner's Views

E.A. Gellner (1958) "Time and Theory in Social Anthropolgy" Mind 67: 182-202.

"Gellner has maintained...that as a doctrine functionalism is mistaken, as a method it is salutary." jarvie 1973:24

Degrees of Funcitonal Importance

"...(functionalism as practiced) has obscured the even more important truth that some things are far more functional than others. Even the organisms on analogy with which so much functionalism turns, have functionless tails and appednices. It needs no great leap of imagination to think that soicties might have such redundant parts as well. to suggest that all socities are finely tuned and completely functional is grotesque; to say that many things in society connectup with many others in complicated and unexpected ways is obvious. Sojewhere between absurdity and trivial truth the interesting tyruth must lie, but funcitonalism is sem-vacuous bercause it fails to say just where. Moreover when the exteeme forumulation is adopted social change vbecomes not only inexpicable, but unimaginable, unless exogenously induced."

E.A. Gellner (1962)

"Gellner concludes (1962,1967) that functionalism is best regarded as a method of seeking non-superficial causal explanations of social phenomena, and that this method happens to have been framed in a rather overstated doctrine mainly bcause of the debates that were taking place in anthorpolgoy at the time it was formulated.."

"Gellner points out that if functionalist explanations are read backwards, they become pefectly respectable attempts at causal explanation. To say of the kula that it promotes the cohesionof widely scattered island socities, is simply to give an explanaiton of that cohesion. In its turn the kula will be explained by other institutions which function to maintain the kula." jarvie 1973: 25.

Gellner argues for a moderate functionalism, funcitonalism lite.

Carl G. Hempel (1959) "The Logic of Functional Analysis"

Argues for functional alternatives and against the notion of functional indispensabiltiy.

"Hempel argues that a cuatious predictionof the kind that states, "if system s functions adequately, then there must be a trait or traits satisfying each of its necessary conditions," is about all that funcitonalsim can muster.

Problem is socities don't die.

Hempel's approach to the problem of teleology.. Human behavior is purposive.

Functional for What System Exactly?

Ernest Nagel (1961) The Structure of Science

"...in biology functional explanations presuppose a system and a state of the system which is maintained. Usually the system is an organism, the state maintained is life. But societies are difficult to demarcate as systems, and moreover they may disappear, but they don'ts die (or get sick). If survival is merely the continuance of some humans in some groups then functionalism is compatible with any form of organization and hence is tautologous." Jarvie 1973:28.

What constitutes a society? How bounded is one?

World Systems Theory...the whole world is the system.

"Nagel concludes that specificationof the relevant system and the relevant state of thesystem is essential--but also difficult. Functionalism will be untestable unless, when a function is attributed to a particular variable, say the kula ceremony, the Nuer lineage, or to magic, that function is made relative to a particular system

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jarvie, I.C. (1973) Functionalism. Minneapolis, Minn: Burgess.

Turner, Jonathan H. and Alexadra Maryanski (1979) Functionalism. Menlo Park, CA: The Benhamin/Cummings Publishing Company

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