Final Flashcards
Radcliffe-Brown
Social functionalist
Followed Durkheim
The function of magic is to intensify social actions. society over the individual
Established anthropology as a science
Kinship and descent - determined the social structures and actions of a society
Social Anthropology - The British
Cultural anthro = US, Social Anthro = Brits
Sociality is the central point of study. The brits studied the social statuses and roles of groups, institutions, and relationships.
Joking Relationship vs Avoidance Relationship
Joking: an institutionalized form of interaction between certain pairs of people. Interaction.
Avoidance: familial relationship that is forbidden in some traditional societies. No or less interaction.
Structuralism
4 fathers
Basic assumptions:
all humans endowed with a reasoning, rational mind = culture = man
the mind actively structures a world - the mind is not simply a passive mirror reflecting its environment
meaning is underneath and hidden from the things of daily counsciousness - all forms of behavior are coded by unconscious structures
the code (meaning) is formed from dualistic nature of thought or binary oppositions in a field of binary opposites (signs), and these opposing signs are often mediated in a way to reconcile their difference or show how one is tranformation of the other
Ferdinand de Sausurre
Father of structuralism Language was key diachronic --> synchronic history --> structure philology --> system of communication Grammar and speech
Roman Jakobson
Structuralism
analysis of distinctive features in a total field of signs
speech sounds
total systems of binary features: i.e. voiced/unvoiced and aspirated/unaspirated
How words are distinguished from one another
Vladimir Propp
Structuralism
study of folktales
“Morphology of the Folk Tale” - analysed the basic plot components of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest irreducible narrative elements
31 generic “narrateme” in all folk tales
Claude Levis-Strauss
Structuralism - mind (Durkheim was society, Tylor was culture)
French
studied kinship and mythology
The mind has its own emergent characteristics apart from behavior
“marry out or die out”
“The Savage Mind” (we are no different than savages, we are savages because we all have the same kind of reasoning - all nature turns into culture)
what makes the human family important
Post-structrualism
Postmodernism
There is an instability in human sciences because humans are so complex
Cultural Materialism
Marvin Harris
Practical reasoning as discerned by scientific observer.
Native (emic) and ideal , or real (etic) models
Culture is practical systemic decision-making for survival. systems of rational behavior
Leslie White
Culturology, Neo-Evolutionism (unilineal)
Brought back materialist evolutionary approach to cultural anth.
Student of E. Sapir
Symbolic nature of culture
Rejected Boasian concept of culture because of his relativism and unwillingness to theorize
Supported the works of morgan, spencer, and tylor
The universe is a natural, progressive process of increasing complexity measured in terms of the differential capacity to organize energy as measured in caloric heat. Humans take part in this process by means of culture.
Culture = human mode of adaptation (human evolution)
Sahlins was a student
Julian Steward
Cultural Ecology
multilineal evolution
Student of Kroeber, Marxian oriented. Focused on Great Basin and Shoshone
Cultural core - explains evolutionary levels of adaptation. Level of technology - food niche - population density - type of social organization
Looked for cause and effect relationships - something that boas was not interested in. Boas looked for patterns but not explanations.
Steward wanted to know how people made a living
Marvin Harris
Cultural Materialism
Marxist
“Why Nothing Works” - rejects Marx’s scheme of historical stages, believes in pure science.
People’s actions are direct results of physical forces in their environment.
Marxists view his work as “crude materialism” and more relatable to Darwin than Marx because he defines culture as practical and functional with no consideration of historical consciousness
Roy Rappaport
(from the web) Ecological anthropology
“Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People”
Looked at the roles of culture and ritual in the ecology of a people. He looked at populations and how they played a part in their land’s ecology
Learned that they needed to even the numbers between pigs and humans to supply enough pork to the community and prevent rapid land degradation
Rituals, religion, and the environment
World System Theory
US Marxism
International division of labor; Dependency theory
