University:
Tyler Junior College
Course:
ANTH 2301 | Anthropology
Academic year:

2024
Views:

236

Pages:

1
Author:

Dave D.

Theories of Cultural Change ANTH 2301 Functionalism Some cultural anthropologists established a completely different approach, rejecting comparative unilineal models that placed every civilization in an evolutionary stage and attempting to comprehend each modern society on its own terms. Functionalism aims to comprehend the current function of cultural components and aggregates. An early supporter of this theory, Bronislaw Malinowski, contended that culture serves to satisfy human wants. Every human being has to fulfil their needs for clothes, food, and shelter. The primary objective of culture is to offer a way to fulfil such desires. Humans in all cultures acquire a set of derived wants, or needs that are derived from the fundamental ones, in the process of addressing those basic needs. The requirement to allocate resources and organise tasks are examples of derived needs. Gender roles and family structures are two examples of how cultural components meet these inferred demands. Lastly, cultures also meet a set of integrative requirements by giving individuals a sense of purpose and guiding principles in life. These integrative demands are satisfied by ideologies, religion, and the law. Malinowski aimed to comprehend culture's biological and psychological aspects. This method may initially appear to be somewhat similar to evolutionary methods that pinpoint the essential cultural traits linked to human survival. Malinowski's attempt to demonstrate that even socalled primitive nations had intricate cultural structures that functioned to satisfy the whole range of human wants was what set his method apart from others. This feature was strikingly and elaborately detailed in Malinowski's three-volume ethnography of the economy, religion, and kinship of the Trobriand people of Papua New Guinea. The British anthropologist Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown promoted a second interpretation of functionalism that defined the roles of distinct cultural components in a slightly different way. Structural functionalism placed greater emphasis on how different social institutions support one another than it did on how culture fulfils biological or psychological requirements. Culture is a collection of structures that come together to form a logical whole, not a random array of structural elements. A culture's political system, economics, religion, and family structure are all woven together with common standards and values. Cultural theory was viewed by structural functionalists as akin to a machine with several tiny pieces that must all cooperate to keep the machine running well. Although modern anthropologists acknowledge the usefulness of this method, they have complicated the mechanical model of culture by highlighting the fact that the many components of culture are not always mutually reinforcing. This crucial theoretical underpinning is the source of the holistic approach to culture as an interconnected system, even if few anthropologists would today identify as structural functionalists.

Theories of Cultural Change - Functionalism

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