Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942)

It is important to remember that Malinowski is a product of his times and those who came before him. 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 was a Polish-born British anthropologist, known for his theories in Psychological Functionalism. He thought that culture and cultural practices fulfilled an individual’s biological needs, therefore concluding that humans can never be without culture because they would not be able to survive. From the book, these biological needs included nutrition, reproduction, bodily comforts, safety, relaxation, movement, and growth. Without fulfilling these needs, individuals would not help in contributing to a culture’s success. In his research, Malinowski looked into how people pursued their own goals while working within the confines of cultural limitations. How does he view native populations? What were Malinowski’s views on colonialism and racial hierarchy?

Malinowski originated the school of social anthropology known as functionalism. In contrast to Radcliffe-Brown's structural functionalism, Malinowski argued that culture functioned to meet the needs of individuals rather than society as a whole. He reasoned that when the needs of individuals, who comprise society, are met, then the needs of society are met. To Malinowski, the feelings of people and their motives were crucial knowledge to understand the way their society functioned:

Besides the firm outline of tribal constitution and crystallized cultural items which form the skeleton, besides the data of daily life and ordinary behavior, which are, so to speak, its flesh and blood, there is still to be recorded the spirit—the natives' views and opinions and utterances.

Malinowski likewise influenced the course of African history, serving as an academic mentor to Jomo Kenyatta, the father and first president of modern-day Kenya. Malinowski also wrote the introduction to Facing Mount Kenya.

Strength and Weakness 

His methodology in achieving this involved a three part system:

1.     Complex relationships recorded in Synoptic charts:
Just as kinship charts detail complex familial relations, these synoptic charts illustrate relationships in other dimensions of culture economic, legal, magical, rights to territory, etc.

2.     Nuances of behavior (the imponderabilia of actual life) Malinowski reminded ethnographers that their subjects are living humans, not museum specimens.

3.     Subjective mental states, derived from

According to Malinowski, culture exists to meet the basic biological, psychological, and social needs of the individual.  

Weakness 

1. Malinowski extrapolated from the particular case of the Trobriand islanders to all traditional societies.
2. Non-falsifiable: you can always come up with some functional explanation of a particular practice in terms of needs. But dont societies do things which are counter-productive for the individuals, or that are maintained because they are simply customary, not having any particular function?

 

Radcliffe Brown

Radcliffe Brown (1881 – 1955) was an English social anthropologist who developed the theory of Structural Functionalism.
He shared with Lévi-Strauss the notion that a major goal of social anthropology was to identify social structures and formal relationships between them, and that qualitative or discrete mathematics would be a necessary tool to do this. In that sense Radcliffe-Brown may be considered one of the fathers of social network analysis.
In addition to identifying abstract relationships between social structures, Radcliffe-Brown argued for the importance of the notion of a 'total social structure', which is the sum total of social relations in a given social unit of analysis during a given period. The identification of 'functions' of social practices was supposed to be relative to this total social structure.
Society is an organism
Radcliffe-Brown drew from Durkheim the idea that social institutions perform a ‘function’ which corresponds to the needs of the social organism, society. Durkheim attempted to find objective criteria by which to judge whether a given society at given time is normal or pathological, eunomic or dysnomic. He argued that the increase in the rate of suicide was symptomatic of a dysnomic or in his terminology, anomic social condition.

Radcliffe-Brown made an analogy between social life and organic life. An animal organism is an agglomeration of cells, an integrated living whole, an integrated system of complex molecules. The system of relations by which these units are related is the organic structure.

The life of an organism is conceived as the functioning of a structure. It is through the continuity of the functioning that the continuity of the structure is preserved. The function of any part is the part it plays in, the contribution it makes to, the life of the organism.

If we examine such a community as an African or Australian tribe we can recognise the existence of a social structure. Individual human beings, the essential units in this instance, are connected by a definite set of social relations into an integrated whole.

Criticisms

Radcliffe-Brown was often criticized for failing to consider the effect of historical changes in the societies he studied, in particular changes brought about by colonialism, but he is now considered, together with Bronisław Malinowski, as the father of modern social anthropology

Emile Durkheim

Émile Durkheim ( 1858 – 1917) was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.
Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity; an era in which traditional social and religious ties are no longer assumed, and in which new social institutions have come into being. His first major sociological work was The Division of Labor in Society (1893). In 1895, he published his Rules of the Sociological Method and set up the first European department of sociology, becoming France's first professor of sociology. Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a study of suicide rates in Catholic and Protestant populations, pioneered modern social research and served to distinguish social science from psychology and political philosophy. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), presented a theory of religion, comparing the social and cultural lives of aboriginal and modern societies.
Society as collective representation
Regarding the society itself, like social institutions in general, Durkheim saw it as a set of social facts. Even more than "what society is", Durkheim was interested in answering "how is a society created" and "what holds a society together". In his Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim attempted to answer the question of what holds the society together. He assumes that humans are inherently egoistic, but norms, beliefs and values (collective consciousness) form the moral basis of the society, resulting in social integration.Collective consciousness is of key importance to the society, its requisite function without which the society cannot survive. Collective consciousness produces the society and holds it together, and at the same time individuals produce collective consciousness through their interactions. Through collective consciousness human beings become aware of one another as social beings, not just animals.

The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or common consciousness.

 

In Suicide (1897), Durkheim explores the differing suicide rates among Protestants and Catholics, arguing that stronger social control among Catholics results in lower suicide rates. According to Durkheim, Catholic society has normal levels of integration while Protestant society has low levels. Overall, Durkheim treated suicide as a social fact, explaining variations in its rate on a macro level, considering society-scale phenomena such as lack of connections between people (group attachment) and lack of regulations of behavior, rather than individuals' feelings and motivations.

Strength and Weakness:

It is right to see Durkheim's work as a unity of thought, even though it shows development between works and within them. It is possible to see The Division of Labour, The Rules of Sociological Method, Suicide and The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life as phases, but...
It will not do, in short, to divide Durkheim's thought into mutant and disconnected phases labelled evolutionary, metaphysical, empirical and functional-institutional and to assert that these reflect, in order, his four major published works. What all four works have in common - and this applies also to the books posthumously published as well as the articles that appear in L'Année and elsewhere - is a social metaphysic and a methodology rooted in the conviction that took shape in Durkheim's mind as he wrote The Division of Labour: that all human behaviour above the strictly physiological must be regarded as emanating from, or else sharply conditioned by, society: that is, by the totality of groups, norms and institutions within which every human being consciously and unconsciously exists from the moment of his birth. (Nisbet, 1970, 87-88).
For Durkheim any need for reduction did not go beyond the social. The social is the concern of sociology, and if it wasn't then there was no sociology. The collective conscience, or the conscience collective, exists above and beyond individual psychology. This is our understanding of and commitment to society through its many norms. The Rules of Sociological Method (1982), itself an interesting title, argues the case for social facts. We are born into collective institutions and we face them in making ourselves individuals. Suicide (1951) is where he demonstrated the level of the social, that its rate of change is reflected in collective events. There is a more than a hint towards the symbolic (linguistic) too with collective representations, being the communication of general ideas and beliefs.
Social facts rise above individual circumstances and have their own existence. They meet us from the outside, as it were, and seem to strike everyone as being the same. Durkheim categorised them into mechanistic and organic, but did not give much in the way of a causal relationship of development, a legitimate area of sociological enquiry at the social level, but said more about how they functioned.
In The Division of Labour in Society (1982) Durkheim was interested in the moral density of society - how people interact. This "moral" meant the method of interaction.
Mechanistic society was self-same in its parts, well defined as a collective conscience and strongly disciplined.
Increasing specialisation and diversity leads to organic solidarity from mechanistic solidarity and a weakening in the collective conscience.
Nevertheless the collective conscience is important because it underpins the potential anarchy of individualistic economic contracts with shared assumptions and understandings. An example would be, "My word is my bond" in the City of London, which came from the British upper class society of gentlemen. The guiding collective conscience however is more far reaching than this example.

Structural functionalism

Structural functionalism, or simply functionalism, is a framework for building theory that sees society as a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability. This approach looks at society through a macro-level orientation, which is a broad focus on the social structures that shape society as a whole, and believes that society has evolved like organisms.This approach looks at both social structure and social functions. Functionalism addresses society as a whole in terms of the function of its constituent elements; namely norms, customs, traditions, and institutions.
A common analogy, popularized by Herbert Spencer, presents these parts of society as "organs" that work toward the proper functioning of the "body" as a whole.In the most basic terms, it simply emphasizes "the effort to impute, as rigorously as possible, to each feature, custom, or practice, its effect on the functioning of a supposedly stable, cohesive system".
For Talcott Parsons, "structural-functionalism" came to describe a particular stage in the methodological development of social science, rather than a specific school of thought.The structural functionalism approach is a macrosociological analysis, with a broad focus on social structures that shape society as a whole.

G. Elliot Smith

G. Elliot Smith (1871-1937) was a prominent British anatomist who produced a most curious view of cultural distribution that Egypt was the source of all higher culture. He based this on the following assumptions: (1) man was uninventive, culture seldom arose independently, and culture only arose in certain circumstances; (2) these circumstances only existed in ancient Egypt, which was the location from which all culture, except for its simplest elements, had spread after the advent of navigation; (3) human history was full of decadence and the spread of this civilization was naturally diluted as it radiated outwardly.

British anthropologists Arthur Keith and Grafton Elliot Smith both supported the European origin of humankind as opposed to models of Asian and African origin. In several of his works, Smith argued that Europe was the cradle of humanity, identifying a European Mediterranean race as the occupants of the original home of modern humans. His cradle was large, as he claimed the Mediterranean race had occupied the Levant, Egypt and western Europe, including the British isles. He especially linked the Mediterranean race to the civilization of Egypt. Smith's arguments later became known as his theory of diffusionism. According to Smith and William James Perry Egypt was the source of all cultural innovations and the ultimate source of human civilization.
According to Smith “Man did not become truly erect until his brain had developed in a very particular way to make it possible for him to use his hands”, this line of reasoning reinforced the European origin of human which both Smith and Arthur Keith supported as the mostly large brained specimens such as the Cro-magnon had been found in Europe.

Strength:
Smith and other British Diffusionists developed an assumption that to understand culture and society we should understand the diffusion process.This emerged a new perspective in anthropology. He mention Egypt as a favourable place and environment for emergence of culture. He developed that culture and civilization go head to head.

Weakness:
1.Culture is not the subject that emerges on a specific place and time, therefore ancient Egypt only cannot be taken as cultural cardle.
2. The analysis of British diffusionist is so narrow line.
3. Smith has given name as uncivilized societies to those societies which are out of influence of the civilization and culture of Egypt.
4. There is a lack of scientific interpretation and analysis about cultural diffusion.
 

Diffision and Franz Boas

Diffusionism
Diffusionism as an anthropological school of thought, was an attempt to understand the nature of culture in terms of the origin of culture traits and their spread from one society to another. Versions of diffusionist thought included the conviction that all cultures originated from one culture center (heliocentric diffusion); the more reasonable view that cultures originated from a limited number of culture centers (culture circles); and finally the notion that each society is influenced by others but that the process of diffusion is both contingent and arbitrary.
Diffusion may be simply defined as the spread of a cultural item from its place of origin to other places (Titiev 1959:446). A more expanded definition depicts diffusion as the process by which discrete culture traits are transferred from one society to another, through migration, trade, war, or other contact.
Diffusionist research originated in the middle of the nineteenth century as a means of understanding the nature of the distribution of human culture across the world. By that time scholars had begun to study not only advanced cultures, but also cultures of nonliterate people (Beals and Hoijer 1959:664). Studying these very diverse cultures created the major issue of discerning how humans progressed from primeval conditions to superior states (Kuklick 1996:161). Among the major questions about this issue was whether human culture had evolved in a manner similar to biological evolution or whether culture spread from innovation centers by diffusion.


Franz Boas
Franz Boas (1858 – 1942) was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology"
Among Boas' main contributions to anthropological thought was his rejection of the then popular evolutionary approaches to the study of culture, which saw all societies progressing through a set of hierarchic technological and cultural stages, with Western-European culture at the summit. Boas argued that culture developed historically through the interactions of groups of people and the diffusion of ideas, and that consequently there was no process towards continuously "higher" cultural forms. This insight led Boas to reject the "stage"-based organization of ethnological museums, instead preferring to order items on display based on the affinity and proximity of the cultural groups in question. Boas also introduced the ideology of cultural relativism which holds that cultures cannot be objectively ranked as higher or lower, or better or more correct, but that all humans see the world through the lens of their own culture, and judge it according to their own culturally acquired norms. For Boas the object of anthropology was to understand the way in which culture conditioned people to understand and interact with the world in different ways, and to do this it was necessary to gain an understanding of the language and cultural practices of the people studied. By uniting the disciplines of archeology, the study of material culture and history, and physical anthropology, the study of variation in human anatomy, with ethnology, the study of cultural variation of customs and descriptive linguistics, the study of unwritten indigenous languages, Boas created the four field subdivision of anthropology which became prominent in American anthropology in the 20th century.
<sup>Strength
Boas is an important person with the logic of the understanding of the development of culture through the diffusionist perspective in anthropology. He empowered diffusionst interpretation in the study of culture by saying the culture goes ahead through expand and develop. Franz Boas became able to make establish the study of the relationship between human and culture in anthropology. Likewise he conducted the study of ethnic groups and their historical development process especially focused on their language, culture, traditions, magic, folk tales, art, song, dance, etc. Therefore he is also known as mythologist who determines the subject matter of anthropology. He conducted the study of physical growth and change of human beings. He used historical approach in anthropological study.

Weakness:
How much he emphasized the process of diffusion in the development of culture the much he became unable to the interrelated interpretation about the impact of geographical, environmental and ecological aspects in culture. He has not mentioned well about the condition of culture diffusion depends on the interaction of human beings. How much the culture differs in the course of time and how much culture does on changing with the lapse of time is also not mentioned well in his study.</sup>

E B Tylor

Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) is often considered the father of the discipline of anthropology. Despite such eminence, his biography has never been written and the connections between his life and his work have been largely obscured or ignored. This article presents Tylor's main theories in the field of anthropology, especially as presented in his four published books, the most famous of which is Primitive Culture, and in the manuscript sources for his last, unpublished, one on ‘The natural history of religion’. One of Tylor's major areas of interest was the use of anthropological evidence to discover how religion arose. This preoccupation resulted in his influential account of ‘animism’. Drawing upon biographical information not known by previous scholars, Tylor's Quaker formation, later religious scepticism and personal life are connected to his intellectual work. Assumptions such as his evolutionary view of human culture and intellectualist approach to ‘savage’ customs, his use of the comparative method, and distinctive notions of his such as ‘survivals’ are first explained, and then the discussion is taken a step further in order to demonstrate how they were deployed to influence contemporary religious beliefs and practices. Tylor argued that the discipline of anthropology was a ‘reformer's science’. Working within the warfare model of the relationship between faith and science, I reveal the extent to which this meant for him using the tools of this new field of inquiry to bring about changes in the religious convictions of his contemporaries.

Tylor and Interpretation of Culture:

Tylor provided the macro-meaningful of culture as 'Culture or civilization is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, laws, custom and any other compabilities and habits acquired by men as a member of society. Tylor believes on unilinear concept for the study of historical process of civilization and culture, and further emphasis that it has to be accepted. In this regard he has defined cultural development process as a process of lower level to higher level heading process. The conclusion by him about the interpretation of the culture are:-

• The concept of culture includes holistic aspect.
• Human creates culture.
• Culture slowly develops simple to complex being purified.
• The process of cultural evolution always goes forward through unilinear process.

Tylor and Evolutionary Interpretation:-

 Tylor has forwarded a logic that society and culture and their evolution process goes on in  unilinear model and always forwards from simple to complex and progressive situation. He has divided the stages of evolution of civilization and culture into three levels as:-

1. Savagery Stage

2. Barbarism Stage

3. Civilization Age

The initial age of human society and culture was savagery. The society was simple and nomadic. The second stage is barber age. In this age , stable settlement, the us of mud and metal weapons has started. The latest stage is civilized age in which human uses brain and developed language, art, literature, politics etc. Tylor has mentioned the fact that the development of human civilization and culture was done in these three stages gradually from simple to complex.

Tylor and Interpretation of Religion

In the context of the interpretation of evolution Tylor has also mentioned about religion. He has mentioned the stages of the development of religion like this:-

1. Animism

2. Polytheism

3. Monotheism

Tylor has taken religion as important element in the socio-cultural aspects. In this regard he has a logic that the emergence and development process of society and culture should be analysed. Among these stages in the process of socio-cultural evolution, animism was the first stage. There was a strong belief of human beings towards animism. In the second, polytheism concept emerged among human beings and they started to worship gods and goddesses and based on these values, socio-cultural lifestyle developed. The development stage of religion development ended on monotheism. According to this, today people find a single main god of a family taken as virtual and tradition.

Strength:-

Tylor contribution is considered as:-

• The conclusion of him remained that there is greater impact of culture in the explanation of culture and human life.
• In anthropological study field work study and comparative study got the applied form which proved as the important achievement for the anthropological study.
• Emphasized on historical process of society and culture.

The contribution of him in anthropology is incomparable. He has developed a concept  by the scientific interpretation of culture that is acquired. He is able to do the interpretation of evolution of religion.

Weakness:-

In anthropology Tylor is called chair-lover anthropologist. The meaning is that he could do interpretation and analysis of the facts brought by his students. Next allegation is that he emphasized more to the secondary data rather than primary data. He did not do the interpretation of social aspect of religion and stayed on spiritualism.