Functionalism: Sociology In The 1920's
Functionalism
Functionalism is an anthropology that was formed in Great Britain in the 1920’s. It is a broad term that includes both functionalism (which is narrowly described) and structural functionalism. Functionalism is often referred to as the ideas of Bronislav Malinowski and his followers, significantly Sir Raymond Firth. It is a sociological theory that focuses on how different parts of society function together as a whole.
Bronislav Kasper Malinowski
According to Barnard (2004) Malinowski was born in Cracow in 1884 and was the son of a professor of Slavic philology. He graduated from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow in 1908, in mathematics, physics, and philosophy, and with the highest honours in the Austrian Empire. He studied
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He discovered that the “superstitious savages” were actually more logical and more practical than white colonialists and missionaries acknowledged. To him, it didn’t matter that the rituals they performed had no scientific basis; what mattered was that islanders were empowered to do what needed to be done in situations which were beyond their material control. Malinowski defined anthropology as the “comparative science of cultures” but was against academic anthropology that was based on historical reconstruction, distribution studies and other impersonal investigations. He also sees culture from two different …show more content…
One image is the implicit theoretical assumptions of the fieldwork method and ethnographic style similar to Malinowski’s monographs on Trobriand Islanders. The other image is the more graphic theory of culture based on assumptions in A Scientific Theory of Culture (1944). Malinowski’s fieldwork style of functionalism wasn’t that much different from that of Radcliffe-Brown, but Malinowski was the better researcher. Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) is the most famous work of Malinowski where he basically describes the Trobriand and his time there. He also goes on to specifically describe the rules of the kula exchange and the canoe journeys. He ends of with an expressive chapter on the “meaning of the
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