Anthropology

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The Influence of Boas

In the 1920s and 1930s anthropology assumed its present form as a four-field academic profession in the United States under the influence of German-born American anthropologist Franz Boas. Boas wanted anthropology to be a well-respected science. He was interested in all areas of anthropological research and had done highly regarded fieldwork in all areas except archaeology. As a professor at Columbia University in New York City from 1899 until his retirement in 1937, he helped define the discipline and trained many of the most prominent American anthropologists of the 20th century. Many of his students—including Alfred Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead—went on to establish anthropology departments at universities throughout the country.

Boas stressed the importance of anthropologists conducting original fieldwork to get firsthand experiences with the cultures they wished to describe. He also opposed racist and ethnocentric evolutionary theories. Based on his own studies, including his measurement of the heads of people from many cultures, Boas argued that genetic differences among human populations could not explain cultural variation.

Boas urged anthropologists to do detailed research on particular cultures and their histories, rather than attempt to construct grand evolutionary stages for all of humankind in the tradition of Morgan and Tylor. Boas’s theoretical approach became known as historical particularism, and it forms the basis for the fundamental anthropological concept of cultural relativism.

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Functionalism

Many other anthropologists working in Boas’s time, mostly in Europe, based their research on the theories of 19th-century French sociologist Émile Durkheim. Like Sir Edward Tylor, Durkheim was interested in religions across cultures. But he was not interested in the evolution of religion. Durkheim instead proposed that religious beliefs and rituals functioned to integrate people in groups and to maintain the smooth functioning of societies.

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Durkheim’s ideas were expanded upon by Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, two major figures in the development of modern British anthropology beginning in the 1920s and 1930s. Their approach to understanding culture was known as structural functionalism, or simply functionalism.

A typical functionalist study analyzed how cultural institutions kept a society in working order. For example, many studies examined rites of passage, such as initiation ceremonies. Through a series of such ceremonies, groups of children of the same age would be initiated into new roles and take on new responsibilities as they grew into adults. According to functionalists, any unique characteristics of the rites of passage of a particular society had to do with how initiation ceremonies worked in the function of that society.

Functionalists based their approach to doing fieldwork on their theories. They lived for long periods with the people they studied, carefully recording even very small details about a people’s culture and social life. The resulting ethnographies portrayed all aspects of culture and social life as interdependent parts of a complex model. Functionalist research methods became the blueprint for much anthropological research throughout the 20th century.

During the first half of the 20th century, many anthropologists conducted functionalist ethnographic studies in the service of colonial governments. This research allowed colonial administrators to predict what would happen to an entire society in response to particular colonial policies. Administrators might want to know, for instance, what would happen if they imposed taxes on households or on individuals.

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Structuralism

In the 1950s French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss developed an anthropological theory and analytic method known as structuralism. He was influenced by the theories of Durkheim and one of Durkheim’s collaborators, French anthropologist Marcel Mauss. Lévi-Strauss proposed that many common cultural patterns—such as those found in myth, ritual, and language—are rooted in basic structures of the mind.

He wrote, for instance, about the universal tendency of the human mind to sort things into sets of opposing concepts, such as day and night, black and white, or male and female. Lévi-Strauss believed such basic conceptual patterns became elaborated through culture. For example, many societies divide themselves into contrasting but complementary groups, known as moieties (from the French word for “half”). Each moiety traces its descent through one line to a common ancestor. In addition to many shared ritual functions, moieties create a system for controlling sex and marriage. A person from one moiety may only marry or have sexual relations with a person from the other moiety.

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Cultural Materialism and Cultural Ecology

In the 1960s, American anthropologists such as Julian Steward, Roy Rappaport, and Marvin Harris began to study how culture and social institutions relate to a people’s technology, economy, and natural environment. All of these factors together define a people’s patterns of subsistence—how they feed, clothe, shelter, and otherwise provide for themselves.

Economic and ecological approaches to understanding culture and societies are known as cultural materialism or cultural ecology. Harris, for instance, analyzed the religious practice in India of regarding cows as sacred. He suggested that this religious practice developed as a cultural response to the value of cows as work animals for farming and other essential tasks and as a source of dung, which is dried as fuel.

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Symbolic Anthropology

In the 1970s many anthropologists, including American ethnologist Clifford Geertz and British ethnologist Victor Turner, moved away from ecological and economic explanations of people’s cultures. Instead, these anthropologists looked for the meanings of particular cultural symbols and rituals within cultures themselves, an approach known as symbolic anthropology.

Symbolic anthropological studies often focus on one particularly important ritual or symbol within a society. Anthropologists using this approach attempt to demonstrate how this one symbol or ritual shapes or reflects an entire culture. Geertz, for example, attempted to show how the culture of the people of Bali, Indonesia, could be understood by examining the important Balinese ritual of staging and betting on cockfights.