Chapter 6

Answer : Ruth Benedict was an Anthropologist who focused much of her work on culture and personality. She entered the field of Anthropology from a strong humanistic background and continued that throughout her work. During her career in the Social Sciences she thought of cultures as total constructs of intellectual, religious, and aesthetic elements. Benedict is considered a founder in the “culture and personality” school of anthropological thought which was popular until World War ....

Answer : In 20th century there evolved Neo-Evolutionism with Leslie White, Julian Steward, Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service as main propounders.

Neo-evolutionism as a social theory attempts to explain the evolution of societies by drawing on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution while discarding some dogmas of the previous theories of social evolutionism. Neo-evolutionism is concerned with long-term, directional, evolutionary social change and with the regular patterns of development that may be seen in unrelated, widely-separated cultures.

Neo-evolutionary theories are ....

Answer : Structural-Functionalism was developed by Radcliffe-Brown as reaction to functionalism and removes the shortcomings he viewed in functionalism. It is defined as ‘The central function of the various aspects of a society is to maintain the social structure of the society’s pattern of social relations and institutions.’

Structural functionalism is one type of consensus theory it posits that society is based on mutual agreements. It sees the creation and maintenance of shared values and ....

Answer : Literally, the word ‘function’ (from Latin, fungi, functio, to effect, perform, execute) means ‘to perform’ or ‘to serve’ (a purpose). As a distinct approach, as a way of looking at and analysing society, functionalism emerged first in social anthropology in early twentieth century, and later in Sociology, beginning in the 1930s. Functionalism is a complex sub-topic of cultural anthropology encompassing many broad terms and definitions. Bronislaw Malinowski, the founder of functionalism coined ....

Answer : Clifford James Geertz, American anthropologist is known for his work on symbolic anthropology. In his essay “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” (in book “The interpretation of Cultures”) he displays the symbolic expression of Balinese social and cultural life through a cockfight.

“Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” is one of Clifford Geertz’s most influential articles which illustrates not only the meaning of a given cultural phenomenon, the Balinese Cockfight, but also Geertz’s ....

Answer : Claude Levi Strauss was a French philosopher, social scientist, and one of the founding fathers of Anthropology. In his seminal work “The Elementary Structures of Kinship” Claude Levi Strauss dealt with kinship and identified the structure as the underlying principle of social life, which can be found by identifying the logic of the human mind, i.e., cognitive model.

Kinship studies of Levi Strauss are contrary from his predecessors. Instead of explaining incest taboo ....

Answer : L. H. Morgan is considered as the classical evolutionist from USA. He worked on the study of cultural traits and social institutions present in a society to identify the growth pattern and evolutionary features of them. Two theories of evolution are used: an idealistic and a materialistic one.

According to the idealistic one, institutions are explained as the accumulated product of germs of thought in the human mind; this concept was widely held ....

Answer : Post-modernism is a theoretical approach that arose in the 1980s to explain an historical period, post-modernity, which is generally accepted to have begun in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is a period related to the Cold War and social upheaval in many parts of the world. As an intellectual movement post-modernism was born as a challenge to several modernist themes that were first articulated during the Enlightenment. These include scientific positivism, the inevitability ....

Answer : The theoretical school of Symbolic and Interpretive Anthropology assumes that culture does not exist beyond individuals.

Rather, culture lies in individuals’ interpretations of events and things around them. With a reference to socially established signs and symbols, people shape the patterns of their behaviours and give meanings to their experiences.

Therefore, the goal of Symbolic and Interpretive Anthropology is to analyse how people give meanings to their reality and how this reality is expressed by their cultural ....

Answer : What the people think about their own culture is emic and what an outsider thinks about a culture other than his own is etic. The term emic refers to what insiders do and grasp about their own culture. It includes people’s view of reality and their explanation of why they do and the way they do. The words Emic and Etic had been coined by a linguist Kennath Pike. It has been taken from the ....

Answer : Diffusionism and evolutionism are the two earliest schools of anthropological theories with diffusionism rising as a reaction to the evolutionist school perspective on culture change.

Cultural Evolutionism

According to this theory, all cultures undergo the same development stages in the same order. To develop a better understanding of these various development stages it is important to briefly review these various stages and their sub stages. Savagery, barbarism and civilization were three classifications that classical anthropologists used to ....

Answer : Historical particularism is an approach to understand the nature of culture and cultural changes of specific populations of people.

Franz Boas argued that the history of a particular culture lay in the study of its individual traits unfolding in a limited geographical region. After many different cultures have been studied in the same way within a region, the history of individual cultures may be reconstructed. By having detailed data from many different cultures as a common ....

Answer : Functionalism is a complex subtopic of cultural anthropology encompassing many broad terms and definitions. Bronislaw Malinowski, the founder of functionalism coined the basic strand of functionalism opposing evolutionism and historical particularism. Malinowski used the term needs functionalism, believing that “humans had set of universal biological needs, and that customs developed to fulfil those needs.” His form of functionalism focused on the individual and satisfying the basic seven needs of humans which include ....

Answer : Functionalism says that every aspect of society culture, norms, social practices, institutions has an inevitable and indispensable role to play. When institutions play their roles, structures come out of it. For example, a place where supplier can sell its product and consumer can buy it without any external constraints, the function of buyer-supplier gives rise to a free market economy. Functionalism theory was developed by Malinowski as a theory that “All elements ....

Answer : The theoretical school of Symbolic and Interpretive Anthropology assumes that culture does not exist beyond individuals. Rather, culture lies in individuals’ interpretations of events and things around them. With a reference to socially established signs and symbols, people shape the patterns of their behaviours and give meanings to their experiences.

Therefore, the goal of Symbolic and Interpretive Anthropology is to analyse how people give meanings to their reality and how this reality is expressed by their ....