Key points
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).
| Scholar | Type | Focus of function |
|---|---|---|
| Bronisław Malinowski | Bio-cultural | Satisfaction of individual biological and derived needs |
| A.R. Radcliffe-Brown | Structural-functional | Contribution to stability of social structure |
| Émile Durkheim | Early functional thought | Social integration and social facts |
Thinker
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.
Examples
- Open-sea fishing surrounded by ritual magic versus lagoon fishing with more technical control — magic clusters where risk is high.
Key points
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.
Thinker
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.
Thinker
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.
Examples
- Andaman ceremonial and mourning practices analysed as reinforcing solidarity after disruption, not as survivals of ancient stages.
Critique
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.
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