FUNCTIONALISM AND STRUCTURAL FUNCTIONALISM    1900w

Functionalism is a pragmatic – even materialistic – application of the concepts of culture to the physical needs of humans, but it does not address in any way the cultural evolutionary steps espoused by Lewis Henry Morgan, and does not in any way assume that war, hierarchical stratification and class systems are universal in all forms of society. Class struggle and exploitation are contingent and deterministic, not general and ubiquitous phenomena. The idealization of pre industrial societies, so dear to Rousseau and the romantics, was merely a manifestation of support for the postulated evolutionary inevitability of class formation in technologically complex societies. Such support succeeded, for a time, in transforming an academic discipline with philanthropic aims into an arm of European colonialism.

A preference for “functionalist” explanations dominated the social sciences from the turn of the twentieth century through the 1950s, which is to say that anthropologists and sociologists were preoccupied with the purpose of a social act or institution rather than its mechanisms of self-perpetuation. The only strong alternative to that kind of analysis were historical explanations, accounting for the existence of a social fact by stating how it came to be. What came to per understood as social function followed two very distinct trajectories. In England, under the influence of Alfred Raginals Radcliff-Brown, who was in turn a follower of the sociologist Émile Durkheim, it was argued that the goal of anthropology is to extrapolate the collective benefit of any given function. In this view, institutions like marriage and religions are to be explored for what they contribute to the social order and the public good. Radcliffe-Brown has traditionally been called the father of structural functionalism although he never quite saw his theory of befitting that particular theoretical current. He went to great length to distinguish his idea of function from Malinowski’s, who was the greatest proponent of functionalism.

Malinoski’s belief that any social practice exists to satisfy physical and biological needs, Radcliff-Brown adamantly rejected the assertion as devoid of merit and insisted on detaching social practices