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Structural Functionalism developed from the British
reaction to Evolutionism, which was also a school of
diffusionism
› Unlike the school in America, which flourished, the British school
led by W.H.R. Rivers at Cambridge University quickly died out
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One of Rivers’ students, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, started as a
diffusionist, but after discovering the works of Emile
Durkheim and Bronislaw Malinowski, he turned to social
anthropology, following what became known as the
structural functional model
For almost 50 years, up into the early 1960s, the model was
highly popular in both British anthropology and British
sociology
› It was so popular that Kingsley Davis once argued that structural
functionalism was the sociological model
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Organic analogy: society is supposedly like a biological organism, with
structures and functions comparable to the heart, lungs, and blood.
A natural science orientation: Structural functionalists were thoroughly
committed to a natural science model of society. Social life was deemed
to be empirical, orderly, and patterned, and therefore amenable to
rigorous, positivistic, scientific study.
Narrow conceptual territory: Structural functionalists pretty much agreed
that their investigations should be restricted to the social structure (society)
and its subsystems (e.g. the family, the economy, the polity, worldviews).
Unlike American anthropologists, structural functionalists rarely paid much
attention to art, language, child-rearing, ideology, the individual, or
technological and environmental factors.
Functional unity, indispensability, and universality: In the cruder versions, it
was assumed that all the institutions and roles of society meshed neatly
together, that existing structures and institutions in any particular society
contained indispensible functions without which the society would fall
apart, and that these structures and functions or their equivalents were
found in all healthy societies.
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Anti-reductionism: Following the assumption of a narrow conceptual
territory, and thus manageable, the structural functionalists were generally
opposed to explanations from other disciplines, particularly psychology. The
idea was that social anthropology provided a type of explanation,
concerned particularly with social structure, that no other discipline
provided. Theoretical progress depended on the careful and cautious
exploration of the exact properties of the social structure, and the
relationships among its substructures
The significance of kinship and the family: it was assumed that in most preindustrial societies, one subsystem, in this case kinship, had more impact
than any other. Supposedly, these societies organized all other social
systems (economic, political, religious, etc.) at least partly in terms of kinship
Equilibrium: Society was thought to be highly patterned, but also in a state
of equilibrium, characterized by harmony, a central value system, and
internal consistency. When there were disruptions, mechanisms existed to
bring the equilibrium back
Static analysis: Following #7, if society was in equilibrium, then it also
exhibited long-term stability, so invited static instead of dynamic analysis
Anti-historical: Partly because of #7&8, and partly because of the
assumption that the past is unknowable in societies without written records,
structural functionalism didn’t encourage a historical perspective
Fieldwork orientation: Structural functionalists were totally devoted to firsthand, participant observational research. At first, more emphasis was
placed on high-quality data than theory, but there was an implicit
theoretical framework that went along with the guided model of structural
functionalism. They were also inductivists.
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Born in France and trained in philosophy
Joined the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bordeaux in 1887
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Ten years later he was appointed to the first professorship in the social science in
France
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He was totally committed to building a natural science of society; he
believed that social phenomena were as real as natural or physical
phenomena, in the sense that they simply can’t be gotten rid of.
He agreed with Boas that social life is driven by emotion and sentiment
instead of reason and utility, but he was vehemently opposed to
psychological explanations (which focused on the individual)
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By that point he had already publishes The Division of Labour, The Rules of Sociological
Method, and Suicide, among others
He believed that the individual’s beliefs, emotions, sentiments, and actions were a
product of the social structure – the collective conscience
He expressed his belief in the controlling role of society over the individual
with “Social Facts”, external to the individual, coercive over the individual,
and general throughout society. The most inclusive was the collective
conscience, which we now might call the central value system
He argued that group behavior was grater than the sum of its
parts (i.e. the members of a society) because the very fact of
interacting in a group transformed the emotions and sentiments
of each participant in a unified direction. The implication was
that there was no point in focusing on the individual
 The collective conscience had 2 subtypes: mechanical and
organic solidarity
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Mechanical solidarity: dominated pre-industrial societies; based on
homogeneity, a tendency towards group interaction, and the absence
of individual choice
› Organic solidarity: appeared as society began to industrialize and
became more complex; based on heterogeneity, an emphasis on
individualism, and choice – keep in mind that the last two were still
products of social structure
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Durkheim’s big example: suicide. He claimed it was actually a
societal phenomenon. Supposedly, there are two main types:
altruistic and egoistic (the third, anomic, was atypical and only
used when a society was breaking down.) Altruistic suicide
occurred when there was too much solidarity in a society (not
enough individualism – especially in mechanical societies).
Egoistic suicide occurred when there was too much
individualism, which was especially in organic societies
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He used statistics and the comparative method to prove this, and also
contended that the comparative method was the sociological method.
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While Durkheim did some fieldwork, he was really an armchair scholar,
but he had enormous influence on anthropology, particularly on
Radcliffe-Brown
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He identified three stages of scientific investigation: observation (data
collection), taxonomy (data classification), and generalization
(theorizing). He viewed the comparative method as the anthropologist’s
alternative to lab experiments and assumed that it was essential to the
discipline
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Born in England, he did fieldwork from 1906-1908 in the Andaman Islands, west of
Thailand, but he was particularly a theorist.
Like Durkheim, he was anti-reductionist, and committed to the natural science view
of society.
He made outstanding contributions to classic topics such as joking relations
(ritualistic verbal exchange between people in potentially hostile relations, like inlaws), and the significance of the mother’s brother, who takes on some of the
father’s role in matrilineal societies
But his view of the natural science approach to the discipline were more
impressive in classrooms and as lectures than out in societies. As
fieldwork became more popular, the natural science model was shown
to be unable to cope with the complexities of social life
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Born in Poland, taught at the London School of Economics for most of his
career
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Although both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown were structural
functionalists, Malinowski placed much more emphasis on function than
Brown, who placed a high emphasis on structure, and was less sensitive
to the potential flaws in the school
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Radcliffe-Brown’s rival for leadership of British social anthropology; known to be an
exceptional fieldworker – most anthropologists credit him with establishing modern
fieldwork, with the emphasis on participant observation in a small community and
the emic approach
He introduced a major ethnographic example: the kula ring, in which necklaces
were passed clockwise ceremonially around the Trobriand Islands, and armshells
were passed counter-clockwise, increasing the level of interaction and decreasing
the degree of hostility between the islands
He argued that the function of institutions was to satisfy biological needs, which
Brown greatly disagreed with; he defined the discipline as the study of culture, not
social structure, would occasionally focus on personality in his work, and agreed
with Boas about collecting native texts.
Radcliffe-Brown hated all this
However, the two men’s approaches did have similarities, and one of
their main points of contention – the culture vs. social structure label –
could be considered no more than semantics