There are a number of objections to the ethnological, diffusion/evolution approach to culture. That it is ethnocentric is one: observers took themselves as the “end” or
“goal” of culture, and compared all other cultures to themselves. The more unlike
“us” they were, the further down the scale they went. That it is not particularly useful is another: even if the evolutionary order is correct, whydo cultures evolve, and why
Durkheim, Emile. 1965 [1915]. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.
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Morgan, Lewis Henry.
1877. Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery, through Barbarism to Civilization.
New York: Henry Holt and Company.
did those surviving fossil cultures notevolve? Both of those objections troubled subsequent scholars, but another objection that bothered them as much or more was that it is so speculative: theorists did not know anything concrete about the past of those societies (or, at the time, even much about the current cultures of those societies), so they were merely speculating or worse. Other later critics would complain that, more than guessing, (white European) ethnologists/anthropologists were using(non-white non-European) natives as objects for their own selfish ends.
There is some merit to that complaint. But for now, the point is that by the turn of the twentieth century, a few observers were despairing of the ethnological/historical approach. Two men in particular would turn from it vehemently and put their stamps on the new science of cultural anthropology. They are Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski.
Boas (1858–1942) is widely regarded as the father of modern cultural anthro- pology. Trained originally in Germany in the late 1800s as a physicist and geographer, he brought a keen observer’s eye and a strict scientist’s method to the new science he shaped. In the 1880s he came to the Arctic coast of North America to study the color of sea water. While working there, he inevitably became acquainted with the local Inuit (Eskimo) people; soon, he realized that they were even more inter- esting than sea water, and not at all “primitive.” He soon turned his back on the nineteenth-century “comparative” model as inaccurate and ethnocentric; as a scientist, he knew that to judge or evaluate your subject is to not observe or understand it adequately. By this decision, he essentially invented cultural relativism.
PLATE 3.2 Franz Boas, one of the founders of modern anthropology, posing for a museum exhibit around 1895
One of Boas’ first and most important statements about what would become anthropology was his 1896 paper “The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology,” first published in the journal Science. In this classic essay, still read in anthropology, he proposed that there are no “higher” or “lower” cultures and that all such judgments are merely relative to one’s own standards of culture. Thus, any
“ranking” of cultures is suspect from the outset and probably says more about the student than about the cultures studied. He went on to state that the similarities or differences between cultures are not as significant as diffusionists and evolutionists think because widely separated cultures can arrive at similar adaptations due to environmental factors. Rather than ordering cultures on the basis of supposed progress or similarity, he recommended actually observing each single culture in maximal detail and each single part of a culture within the context of the whole. Thus, he gave voice to holism. He emphasized that the goal of this science should not be the construction of elaborate and speculative cultural histories but rather the careful and accurate description of individual cultures through intense and objective observation. This observation would require personal, close-up experience with the culture for prolonged periods of time. When he settled into his academic position in America, he became the teacher and mentor of the first generation of American anthropologists. Thus, he essentially invented American anthropology.
Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) did his work slightly later than Boas but has probably had an equally profound influence on the discipline, if only because Boas was so resistant to the idea of making any theories of culture. Boas in particular insisted that the data required to make good theories were still lacking, so any proposed theory would be premature. It would be better to collect data now – do the “science” now – and make theories later. But of course a science, even in its infancy, cannot proceed without theory. Theory helps to identify the question, suggest the method, and organize the evidence. Accordingly, Malinowski proposed one that would become extremely influential in the first half of the twentieth century.
Malinowski got his start in anthropology by accident, as did Boas. Originally trained in math and physics in Poland, he turned to the science of humanity after reading James George Frazer’s ethnological classic The Golden Boughin 1910. The Golden Boughhas affected many readers since it appeared in 1890 and is perhaps the “gold standard” of the nineteenth-century comparative project. Frazer took examples of myth and religion from all around the world and juxtaposed them in a fascinating but decontextualized way; on any one page, he could alternate from Mexico to Madagascar to India to Greece and back again. However, the cultural setting or context of each of these references was not and could never be developed by this procedure and in the space allotted to it.
Malinowski’s exposure to the comparative and evolutionary method came at a time when a few scholars had begun to call for more in-depth knowledge and description of particular societies. Boas had helped inspire this approach, and by the turn of the century expeditions were setting out intentionally to collect cultural data – a team from Cambridge to the Torres Straits in 1898 to 1899, another to India in 1901 to 1902, still another to Melanesia in 1907 to 1908. The future
anthropological star, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, made such a trip to the Andaman Islands in 1906 to 1908. However, most of these visits were extremely short (often only a few days), were conducted by people who were not specially trained in anthropological field methods (since such methods did not really exist yet), and necessarily involved working through interpreters and acculturated local people.
However, by this time some scholars like W. H. R. Rivers were beginning to recognize the need for and to call for more “intensive” research, which he defined as research:
in which the worker lives for a year or more among a community of perhaps four or five hundred people and studies every detail of their life and culture; in which he comes to know every member of the community personally; in which he is not content with generalized information, but studies every feature of life and custom in concrete detail and by means of the vernacular language. It is only by such work that one can realize the immense extent of the knowledge which is now awaiting the inquirer, even in places where the culture has already suffered much change. It is only by such work that it is possible to discover the incomplete and even misleading character of much of the vast mass of survey work which forms the existing material of anthropology.
(quoted in Kuper 1983: 7) Malinowski was one of the main figures to accept the challenge thrown down by the likes of Boas and Rivers. Malinowski started his fieldwork career at age 30 with six months in New Guinea. He returned to the Trobriand Islands for two more years of work in 1915 to 1916 and 1917 to 1918. In so doing, he helped establish the modern fieldwork methods of cultural anthropology.
Malinowski determined that there were three general types of cultural data, each requiring its own collection technique. The first was the description and analysis of institutions, which were to be studied by thorough documentation of concrete evidence. More precisely, this meant the creation of charts of activities and customs associated with a particular institution, based on accounts given by the natives as well as on observations by the investigator. This method would yield a literal visible representation of the “mental chart” that members of the society possess. The second type of data, constituting another dimension of cultural reality, was the minutiae of everyday life, which filled out and deepened (if complicated) the analysis of general institutions. As he noted, the emphasis on rules and structures and institutions left an impression of more precision and consistency than is actually seen in real life.
So, abstract or generalized presentations of social structures had to be complemented with particular and personal instantiations or uses of those rules and structures in the details of everyday life, anticipating the distinction between “structure” and “action”
that anthropologists like Raymond Firth would elaborate. The third type of data included cultural content like narratives, utterances, folklore, and other conventional sayings and activities. The immediate result of his methods was his epic ethnography Argonauts of the Western Pacific(1922), in which he modeled what a sensitive and informed fieldworker could do with the data he collected.
Kuper, Adam. 1983.
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Malinowski, Bronislaw.
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The other profound influence of Malinowski on the fledgling field of anthro- pology was his theoretical approach, which was significantly connected to his method. Like Boas, he rejected ccuullttuurraall eevvoolluuttiioonniissmm and speculative historical reconstructions. As he wrote: “I still believe in evolution, I am still interested in origins, in the process of development, only I see more and more clearly that answers to any evolutionary questions must lead directly to the empirical study of the facts and institutions, the past development of which we wish to reconstruct” (quoted in Kuper 1983: 9). Thus, anthropologists should study the present with all possible attention and clarity before they indulge in speculations about the past. What a fieldworker sees today is institutions, the individuals acting within them, and standard “narratives” or “scripts” which those individuals produce and reproduce in the process. These investigators can hunt for – and perhaps only for – the function of institutions and practices today, in the present. Hence, he recommended an approach known as functionalism. Rather than pursue its history (a potentially vain pursuit), the anthropologist can observe its function here and now. What is the function, for example, of marriage, or political systems, or religion?
For Malinowski, the essence of function was to be found in the needs of the individuals who comprise a society. Society, he asserted, is ultimately a collection of individual human beings. So, culture “functions” according to the needs and nature of those individuals, who have two kinds of needs – physical and psychological. Each item of culture, or culture as a whole, must serve to fill one or more of these needs.
It is the job of the ethnographer to determine what needs it fills and how.
Functionalism became a reigning idea during the early twentieth century and not only in anthropology (Durkheim had already elaborated it in sociology).
However, others began to turn the idea in new directions, if not turn against it altogether. Radcliffe-Brown argued that culture does in fact function, but not in the way that Malinowski imagined. Radcliffe-Brown maintained, rather, that individuals are relatively trivial; what is important – and enduring – is society itself, the com- munity, the social whole. In opposition to Malinowski’s functionalism, he advocated a “social” or “structural” functionalism, the social function of institutions defined by him as “the contribution that they make to the formation and maintenance of a social order” (Radcliffe-Brown 1965: 154). Radcliffe-Brown’s focus on institutions versus individuals and on order versus action was hugely influential on the British tradition of social anthropology, which came to emphasize law, kinship systems, and so on. Social order or social structure was not a mere idea, an abstraction in the mind of the anthropologist, in this view, but a real and concrete thing. He went so far as to assert that society can be studied, but culture cannot:
You cannot have a science of culture. You can study culture only as a characteristic of a social system. . . . If you study culture, you are always studying the acts of behavior of a specific set of persons who are linked together in a social structure.
(quoted in Kuper 1983: 55)
Cultural evolutionism The early ethnological or anthropological position or theory that Culture started at some moment in the past and evolved from its
“primitive” beginnings through a series of stages to achieve its “higher” or more modern form.