Chapter 4, The Growth of Anthropological Theory

1. Chapter 4, The Growth of Anthropological Theory

2. Chapter Outline • Evolutionism • American Historicism • Psychological Anthropology • Neoevolutionism • French Structuralism • Ethnoscience • Cultural Materialism • Postmodernism • Concluding Thoughts on Anthropological Theory

3. Anthropological Theory • Attempt to answer questions such as: • Why do people behave as they do? • How do we account for human diversity?

4. Evolutionism in Brief • All cultures pass through the same developmental stages in the same order. • Evolution is unidirectional and leads to higher levels of culture. • A deductive approach is used to apply general theories to specific cases. • Ethnocentric because evolutionists put their own societies at the top.

5. Morgan’s Evolutionary Stages • Lower savagery: From the earliest forms of humanity subsisting on fruits and nuts. • Middle savagery: Began with the discovery of fishing technology and the use of fire.

6. Morgan’s Evolutionary Stages • Upper savagery: Began with the invention of the bow and arrow. • Lower barbarism: Began with the art of pottery making. • Middle barbarism: Began with domestication of plants and animals in the Old World and irrigation cultivation in the New World.

7. Morgan’s Evolutionary Stages • Upper barbarism: Began with the smelting of iron and use of iron tools. • Civilization: Began with the invention of the phonetic alphabet and writing.

8. Diffusionism in Brief • Societies change as a result of cultural borrowing from one another. • A deductive approach is used by applying general theories to explain specific cases. • Overemphasized the essentially valid idea of diffusion.

9. American Historicism in Brief • Ethnographic facts must precede development of cultural theories (induction). • Any culture is partially composed of traits diffused from other cultures. • Direct fieldwork is essential. • Each culture is, to some degree, unique. • Ethnographers should try to get the view of those being studied, not their own view.

10. Functionalism in Brief • Through fieldwork, anthropologists can understand how cultures work for the individual and the society. • Society is like a biological organism with many interconnected parts. • Empirical fieldwork is essential. • The structure of any society contains indispensable functions without which the society could not continue.

11. British Functionalists • Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown were strong advocates of fieldwork. • Concentrated on how contemporary cultures meet the needs of individuals and perpetuate the society. • All parts of a culture are interconnected so a change in one part of the culture is likely to bring about change in other parts.

12. Psychological Anthropology in Brief • Anthropologists need to explore the relationships between psychological and cultural variables. • Personality is largely the result of cultural learning. • Universal temperaments associated with males and females do not exist.

13. Psychological Anthropologists Benedict and Mead • Interested in exploring relationship between culture and the individual. • Benedict described whole cultures in terms of individual personality characteristics. • Mead’s early research brought her to Samoa to study the emotional problems associated with adolescence and later to New Guinea to study male and female gender roles.

14. Neoevolutionism in Brief • Cultures evolve in proportion to their capacity to harness energy. • Culture is shaped by environmental conditions. • Human populations continuously adapt to techno-environmental conditions. • Because technological and environmental factors shape culture, individual factors are de-emphasized.

15. Lévi-Strauss • Maintained mental structures preprogrammed in the human mind are responsible for culture and social behavior. • The human mind thinks in binary oppositions—opposites that enable people to classify the units of their culture and relate them to the world around them.

16. French Structuralism in Brief • Human cultures are shaped by preprogrammed codes of the human mind. • Focuses on underlying principles that generate behavior rather than observable behavior. • Rather than examining attitudes, values, and beliefs, structural anthropologists concentrate on the unconscious level.

17. Ethnoscience in Brief • Attempts to make ethnographic description more accurate and replicable. • Describes a culture using the categories of the people under study rather than categories from the ethnographer’s culture. • Because it is time-consuming, has been confined to describing very small segments of a culture.

18. Cultural Materialism in Brief • Material conditions determine human thoughts and behavior. • Theorists assume the viewpoint of the anthropologist, not the native informant. • Anthropology is seen as capable of generating causal explanations. • Deemphasizes the role of ideas and values in determining the conditions of social life.

19. Postmodernism in Brief • Calls on anthropologists to switch from cultural generalization and laws to description, interpretation, and the search for meaning. • Ethnographies should be written from several voices—that of the anthropologist along with those of the people under analysis. • Involves a return to cultural relativism.