Main ideas of the theories

Question 1

Evolutionism

Answer 1

Simple things, overtime, become complex. Unilineal evolution. Every culture goes through the same development. “Savagery, barbarism, and civilisation” the ‘most civil’ being the Western society (of course)
Tylor & Morgan

Question 2

Diffusionism

Answer 2

The spread of certain ideas, customs, or practices from one culture to another.
Smith & Perry

Question 3

Historical Particularism

Answer 3

Follows an idiographic (dealing with specific cases) approach. Each culture has its own uniqueness, links to cultural relativism.
Franz Boas

Question 4

Functionalism

Answer 4

Organic theories, compares society with biological organisms. Society also has different parts, like a living body, that are interrelated and each of these parts has some specific functions to be performed.
Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski

Question 5

Structuralism

Answer 5

Things cannot be understood in isolation, they have to be seen in the larger context of the larger structures they are part of.
Lévi-Strauss

Question 6

Neo-Evolutionism

Answer 6

Factors like energy use and technology are the main causes of cultural evolution and change. Cultural change depends on the per capita use of energy in a year. More complex tech = more complex cultural development.
Leslie White

Question 7

Cultural Ecology

Answer 7

A social system is determined by its environmental resources. To determine whether cultural adaptation towards the natural environment initiate social transformations of evolutionary change.
Julian Steward

Question 8

Cultural Materialism

Answer 8

Socio-cultural systems can be divided into:
Infrastructure, structure and superstructure. 
Structure and superstructure depend on infrastructure and therefore change when the latter does.
Marvin Harris (Cattle ethnography)

Question 9

Symbolic Anthropology

Answer 9

Criticised materialist views of analysing a culture that focuses on ‘material phenomena’, highlights that culture is a mental phenomena. Should focus on the interpretation of symbolic actions (Postmodernists argue that languages are systems of signs and symbols that took their meaning from relationships with one another rather than relationship with the empirical world)
Culture is an organised collection of symbolic systems, argued that ethnography should consist of many voices from the native population.
Clifford Geertz // McGee and Warms

Question 10

Feminist Anthropology

Answer 10

Whether gender is biological or cultural, whether it is innate or natural or God-given, or whether it is socially constructed and therefore mutable. Focuses on gender inequality and variety of gender roles, making ‘cross-cultural analysis to explain differences in the roles and power of different gender groups’.
Women = nature, men = culture. More importance of culture in comparison to nature = men get more importance in the society. (Ortner)