Analysis, Interpretation, Meaning; The Dilemma of Stuctural Anthropology

Extract

The not unimpressive degree of agreement which prevailed as regards theory and practice among British social anthropologists between about 1940 and the later fifties was produced by a variety of factors, including of course the opportunities for fieldwork in the British colonial empire, on which the sun was unobtrusively, but inexorably, setting. Other factors were the relatively high degree of cordiality between the small number of leading social anthropologists, almost all of whom had been in some way influenced by both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown, and who found it possible to teach and organise research on the basis of what was called ‘structural-functionalism’, a workable synthesis (to simplify slightly) of Malinowski’s fieldwork methods with Radcliffe-Brown’s stress on the classification of social structures. The range of interests of structural-functionalism was unduly narrow, myth and ritual being treated as supporting adjuncts to the social institutions on which attention was focused, and both linguistics and oral literature were very largely ignored. Much of the theoretical basis of structural-functionalism was also of the sort that survives by not being questioned; if ‘the function of exogamy is to increase the solidarity of kin groups’, are those kin groups which allow endogamy therefore lacking in solidarity, how does one measure solidarity, and if exogamy (or any other social institution) cannot be explained as useful, what sort of explanations do we give?

The turning away from the structural-functional orthodoxy would have come anyway, with the end of the colonial era and the increase in number of social anthropologists, but it is only fair to point out that the new directions of social anthropology in Britain from 1960 onwards did grow out of work done by the leading apostles of structural-functionalism.