Anthropological Theories and Theoretical Orientations

Braklelyn G. Reantillo
Student, MA.Ed. - Social Studies

Logo
 Historians of anthropology
often trace the birth of
Anthropology to the 16th –century
encounters between Europeans
and native peoples in Africa and
the Americas.
BraklelynG.Reantillo

 For Europeans, these
African/American natives and their
practices seemed
BIZARRE or IRRATIONAL,
yet it was important to live with them
to UNDERSTAND their CULTURES.

 CROSS-CULTURAL
UNDERSTANDING as
one of the roots of
Anthropology
 emerging focus on
EVOLUTION

 Other cultures could be changed, that they could and
should be “civilized”.
 The movement by Europeans to “civilize” others
between the 16th and 19th centuries destroyed some of
the world’s CULTURAL DIVERSITY, but the field of
Anthropology emerged.
 Despite colonialism’s impact on cultures, anthropologists
support the value of other ways of life and try to support
the needs of people formerly colonized/dominated by
powerful nation-states.

?
THEORY
(More specific
explanations that
can be tested
with empirical
evidence)
THEORETICAL
ORIENTATION
(General idea
about how
phenomena are
to be explained)

THE EVOLUTION OF EVOLUTION

Chain of Being (Macrobius)
“The attentive observer will discover a
connection of parts, from the Supreme God
down to the last dregs of things, mutually
linked together and without a break. And this
is Homer’s golden chain, which God, he says,
bade hand down from heaven to earth.”

Systema naturae (Carolus Linnaeus, 1707-1778)
 Classifying plants and animals by placing humans in
the same order (Primates)as apes and monkeys
 All species were created by God and fixed in their
form.
 Humans, apes, and monkeys had a common ancestor.
Hierarchical classification scheme (descending)
 kingdom – class – order – genus - species

Jean Baptiste Lamarck (744-1829)
 Species were not fixed in form.
 Acquired characteristics could be inherited and
therefore, species could evolve.
 Individuals who in their lifetime developed
characteristics helpful for survival would pass
those characteristics on to future generations,
thereby, changing the physical make-up of the
species.
 This hypothesis is now dismissed due to failure to
produce evidence to support it.

Natural Selection Theory (NST)
 Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
 Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913)
 He rejected the notion that each species was
created at one time in a fixed form.
 NST is the process through which the physical
and genetic forms of the common ancestor
diverged to become both monkey /primates and
human

EARLY ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY
A. Early Evolutionism
1. Darwinism
“Culture generally develops/ evolves in a
uniform and progressive manner. Most
societies pass through the same series of
stages, to arrive at a common end.”
 Culture change

2. Edward Tylor (1832-1917)
“ Culture evolved from the simple to
the complex and that all societies
passed through three basic stages of
development: savagery – barbarism –
civilization…”
*Diffusion: spread of cultural traits
*Acculturation: borrowing of culture
as a result of contact between two
cultures/societies

2. LEWIS HENRY MORGAN ( 1818-1881)
CULTURAL EVOLUTION
 19th C. European Idea
 All societies progress
through stages
 Europeans = most
advanced
 Justification of
European Colonial
Rule
Lower Savagery
Middle Savagery
Upper Savagery
Lower Barbarism
Middle Barbarism
Upper Barbarism
Civilization
Scheme of Social Evolution

B. “Race” Theory
This posited that the reason human
cultures differed in their behaviors was
because they represented separate
subspecies of humans, or “races”.
By the 19th century, few cultures were
being “civilized” in the way Europeans
expected.

“RACE” THEORY
*Systema naturae : Humans are classified into 4
distinct races (American, European, Asiatic,
African), each defined by physical characteristics
as well as emotional and behavioral ones.
* Johann Blumenbach (1752-1840)
He is the founder of the field of biological
anthropology. He divided humans into 5 “races” -
Caucasian, Mongolian, Malayan, Ethhiopian,
American – to help classify the variety of humans
that European colonists were encountering

“RACE” THEORY
*Samuel Morton (1799-1851)
 He was the first to explicitly link “race” with
behavior and intelligence.
 Crania Americana (1839): Not only were native
Americans a separate “race”, but their behavioral
differences from European Americans were
rooted in the physical structures of their brains.
 Crania Aegyptiaca (1844): “Race” differences
were ancient and unchanging. This justified the
exploitive relationships of colonialism and slavery
and fought Darwin’s idea of evolution.

“RACE” THEORY
*Louis Agassiz (1807-1873)
He argued that significant and stable
differences existed between people of African
versus European descent. He implied that these
differences illustrated God’s creation of human
“races”.
*Francis Galton (1822-1911)
Eugenics: A social and political movement aimed
at manipulating “races” by selectively breeding
humans with desirable characteristics and
preventing those with undesirable ones from having
offspring

“RACE” THEORY
*Richard Herrnstein & Charles Murray
There are “race” differences in IQ (and
success in life) and social policies should
discourage “races” deemed to have low IQs from
having many children.
 The scholarly use of race theory declined after
WWII.
 Nazi genocide/ Holocaust
 Biologists were able to show that purely genetic
races of humans are not clearly identifiable, and
therefore, not applicable to humans.

C. DIFFUSIONISM
British School of Diffusionism
German-Austrian School of Diffusionism
G. Elliott Smith
William J. Perry
W.H.R. Rivers
 Aspects of higher
civilization were
developed in Egypt and
filtered out to cultures
throughout the world
(diffusion).
Friedrich Ratzel
Fritz Graebner
Wilhelm Schmidt
 People borrow from
others because they are
basically uninventive
 There is existence of
several different cultural
complexes (kulturkreise,
German)

DIFFUSIONISM
AMERICAN SCHOOL OF DIFFUSIONISM
Clark Wissler and Alfred Kroeber
 Attributed characteristic features of a culture area
to a geographical center, where the traits were
first developed and from which they then diffused
outward.
 If a given trait diffuses outward from a single
culture center, it follows that the most widely
distributed traits found to exist around such a center
must be the oldest trait.

CONTEXT OF MODERN ANTHROPOLOGY
19TH – 21ST CENTURIES
 European & American Colonialism
 Scientific approaches to studying people, society and
culture
 Decline of colonialism, national liberation movements,
“native anthropologists”

EARLY MODERN
ANTHROPOLOGY
 Franz Boas
 Founder of American Anthropology
 HISTORICAL PARTICULARISM
 Bronislaw Malinowski
 Trobriand Islands (Pacific)
 FUNCTIONALISM
Bronislaw
Malinowski
1884-1942
Franz Boas
1858-1942

FUNCTIONALISM
 Specific cultural institutions function to support the
structure of society or serve the needs of
individuals in society.
 Early functionalists include Émile Durkheim,
Talcott Parsons, Meyer Fortes, A.R.
Radcliffe-Brown, and Edward Evan Evans-
Pritchard.

EARLY MODERN ANTHROPOLOGY
CULTURAL ECOLOGY & NEOEVOLUTIONISTS
“Culture is the way in which humans adapt to the
environment and make their lives secure.”
 Leslie White (1900-1975)
 Julian Steward (1902-1972)
 Marshall Sahlins (born in 1930)
 Elman Service (1915-1996)

STRUCTURALISM
(STRUCTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY)
“Universal original human culture can be
discovered through analysis and
comparison of the myths and customs of
many cultures.”
Claude Levi-Strauss
(1908-2009)
A theoretical approach
that holds that all
cultures reflect similar,
underlying patterns and
that anthropologists
should attempt to
decipher these patterns.

WHY STUDY CULTURAL
ANTHROPOLOGY?
 Just as the individual is not alone in the group,
nor any one society alone among the others, so
man is not alone in the universe.
 When the spectrum or rainbow of human cultures
has finally sunk into the void created by our
frenzy….in the contemplation of a mineral more
beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that
can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more
imbued with learning than all our books; or in the
brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and
mutual forgiveness, that, through some
involuntary understanding, one can
sometimes exchange with a cat.
-Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, pp. 414-415.

EARLY MODERN ANTHROPOLOGY
Psychological Approaches
*1920s: some American
anthropologists began to
study the relationship
between culture and
personality.
Early proponents:
Sigmund Freud
Edward Sapir
Ruth Benedict
Margaret Mead
1930s and 1940s
Abram Kardiner
 There is a basic
personality in every
culture produced by
primary institutions.
 Type of household,
subsistence, childrearing
practices
 Basic personality gives
rise to other institutions
(art, folklore, religion)

POLITICAL ECONOMY
“External forces explain the art, ritual, and
the patterns of daily life, as a surface
representation of the underlying structure
of the human mind.”
*Moiety systems reflect the human
mind’s predisposition to think and behave
in terms of binary oppositions (contrasts
between one thing and another).
This exists if a society is divided into
two large intermarrying kin groups. (You are
born into one of two groups and you marry
someone in the other).
Claude Levi-Strauss
Eric Wolf
Sidney Mintz
Eleanor Leacock
Andre Gunder Frank
Immanuel
Wallerstein
“This approach
reminds us that
the world, every
part of it, is
interconnected,
for better or
worse.”

ECOLOGICAL FUNCTIONALISM
 Theoretical approach that holds that the ways in which
cultural institutions work can best be understood by
examining their effects on the environment.

ETHNOSCIENCE AND COGNITIVE
ANTHROPOLOGY
 Attempt to derive rules from a logical analysis of
ethnographic data that are kept as free as possible
from contamination by the observer’s own cultural
biases
 Ethnoscientists seek to understand a people’s world
from their point of view (Emic Strategy)
 Ex.: Studying language and formulation of rules
underlying cultural domains, Kinship terms, plant and
animal taxonomies, disease classification
 “If we can discover the RULES that generate
cultural behavior, we can explain much of what
people do and why they do it.”

ETHNOSCIENCE
 A theoretical approach that focuses on the ways
in which members of a culture classify their world
and holds that anthropology should be the study
of cultural systems of classification.

ETHNOBOTANY
 Describes the ways in which different cultures
classify plants.

ETHNOMEDICINE
 An anthropological discipline devoted to describing
the medical systems of different cultures.

RECENT DEVELOPMENT IN
ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY
• Edward Wilson and Richard Alexander
• Evolutionary Ecology Approaches/ Sociobiology
“Natural selection can operate on the behavioral or
social characteristics of populations, not just on their
physical traits.” (individual selection)
Adaptive- the ability of individuals to get their genes
into future generations
• CULTURAL ECOLOGY - focuses on group selection
(how certain behavioral/social characteristics may be
adaptive for a group/society in a given environment)

FEMINIST APPROACH
-Role of women in culture
Political view: Anthropologist’s tasks is to
identify ways in which women are exploited in
order to come up with ways on how to
overcome these [exploitations].

INTERPRETATIVE APPROACH
Goal of Anthropology: To understand what it means to
be a person living in a particular culture, rather than
to explain why cultures vary.
He popularized the
idea that culture is like
a literary text that can
be analyzed for
meaning, as the
ethnographer
interprets it.
Clifford Geertz (1926-2006)

POSTMODERNIST APPROACH
 Ethnography is viewed as being “constructed’ almost as
a work of fiction.
 Anthropology is just another tool used by dominant
powers to control others.
Michael Foucault (1926-1984)
-Those in political power were able to shape the
way accepted truths were defined.
-In the modern age, truth is defined through
science, and science, in turn, is controlled by
Western political and intellectual elites.
-Science became a way to understand the world,
control the world, and dominate the world.

PRAGMATIC APPROACH
 The scientific study of human behavior depends
upon the belief that it is possible to find answers
to puzzling questions about humans
 It is not where ideas come from but where they will
lead you and what you can predict.
 It is POSSIBLE to study humans and their culture;
that is why up to these days, ANTHROPLOGY as a
discipline continues to thrive.

Table 4-1, p.87

ANTHROPOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDINGS OF CULTURE
(SUMMARY)
19th century
evolutionism
A universal human culture is
shared by all societies.
Turn of the
century
sociology
Groups share sets of symbols
and practices that bind them
into societies.
American
historical
particularism
Cultures are the result of the
specific histories of the people
who share them.
Functionalism
Social practices support
society's structure or fill the
needs of individuals.

Sociobiology
Culture is the visible expression
of underlying genetic coding.
Cultural ecology
and neo-
evolutionism
Culture is the way humans
adapt to the environment and
make their lives secure.
Ecological
materialism
Physical and economic causes
give rise to cultures and explain
changes in them.
Ethnoscience
and cognitive
anthropology
Culture is a mental template
that determines how members
of a society understand their
world.

Anthropology and
gender
Roles of women and ways
societies understand sexuality
are central to understanding
culture.
Symbolic and
interpretive
anthropology
Culture is the way members of
a society understand
themselves and what gives
their lives meaning.
Postmodernism
Cultural understanding reflects
the observer’s biases and can
never be completely or
accurately described.

THE FUTURE (OF ANTHROPOLOGY) …
…DOES NOT END HERE . . .

“It would hardly be fish
who discovered the
existence of water.”
-Kluckhohn (1949)

REFERENCE
CAROL EMBER AND MELVIN EMBER,
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, 13TH
ED.2011.

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Anthropological Theories and Theoretical Orientations

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