Functionalism — Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown

Organic analogy and synchronic focus

Functionalism explains customs by the jobs they do for individuals or for the social system, not by speculative origins alone.

• Organic analogy (Comte, Spencer, Durkheim): society is like an organism — individuals as cells, groups as tissues, institutions as organs that sustain the whole.
• Diachronic study follows change through time; synchronic study analyses a system at one period. Functionalists mainly worked synchronically.
• Basic claims: culture satisfies needs; every trait has a function; institutions interconnect; function is a contribution to the larger system.
• Two branches: bio-cultural (Malinowski — individual needs) and structural-functional (Radcliffe-Brown — maintenance of social structure).

Malinowski — needs, institutions and Trobriand fieldwork

• Pioneer of intensive participant observation among Trobriand Islanders (~20 months); major ethnography Argonauts of the Western Pacific.
• Culture is an instrumental apparatus for solving problems that arise from human needs.
• An institution combines charter (values and justifications), personnel, norms, material apparatus and activities.
• Primary (biological) needs and cultural responses: metabolism–food production; reproduction–kinship; comfort–shelter; safety–defence/law; movement–economic activity; growth–education; health–hygiene.
• Derived needs generate social control, economy, education and political organisation; integrative needs are met by magic, myth, religion, art and science.
• Magic reduces anxiety under uncertainty; religion gives courage, cohesion and sanctification; myth charters institutions and morals.

Kula, Wasi and Urigubu as functional examples

• Kula: ceremonial exchange of soulava (red shell necklaces, clockwise) and mwali (white armbands, anticlockwise) among island partners.
• Objects have little use-value; prestige, partnership and chiefly sponsorship matter; expeditions also enable ordinary trade and protection networks.
• In a matrilineal setting, Kula ties can reinforce uncle–nephew relations and inter-island integration.
• Wasi: coastal fish exchanged for inland yams — an insurance-like interdependence with sanctions for non-participation.
• Urigubu: a large share of a brother’s yam harvest goes to his sister’s household, displaying matrilineal obligation.
• Together these cases challenged the idea of a purely utilitarian Homo economicus: economy is embedded in social structure.

Criticisms of Malinowski

• Max Gluckman called the need theory crude — everything reduced to utility.
• Cannot explain why the same biological needs produce different institutions across cultures.
• Overemphasises harmony; weak on conflict and long-term change.
• Annette Weiner criticised underestimation of women’s economic and ceremonial roles (androcentric blind spot).
• Posthumous diary revealed racist and sexist private language and a gap between preached immersion and lived distance.

Radcliffe-Brown — social structure and the Andamanese

• Influenced by Durkheim’s social facts: ways of acting external to individuals and coercive over them.
• Fieldwork among Andaman Islanders and in Western Australia; synchronic analysis of structure rather than conjectural history.
• Social structure: organised arrangement of persons and groups; individuals change, structure persists.
• Function = contribution of a practice toward maintaining the existing structure (stability, continuity, order).
• Eunomia: harmonious functional unity; dysnomia: functional disorder or breakdown.
• Kinship behaviours (respect, joking, avoidance) were read as mechanisms that regulate relationships and reduce conflict.

Criticisms of structural-functionalism

• Teleological risk: explaining a custom only by the stability it supposedly serves.
• Underplays conflict, inequality, history and radical change.
• Can reify ‘structure’ as more real than people and meanings.
• Still influential for showing how institutions interconnect in a working present.