Prove it: Anthropological Theory (2): Example Post

This week's debate: Tylor vs. Brown

Debate Beginnings

“Culture, or civilization, taken in its broad, ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” ( ‘Primitive Culture’). Unlike Brown, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor considered culture to be key in determining the sophistication of given society. Brown argued culture to be entirely to abstract a concept to justify using it in developing theory. Nevertheless, Tylor’s take on culture was what he would later call the “Science of Culture”, as he focused on stages of development or evolution, investigating the past to understand the present. This is particularly evident in his study of religions, as he began to order societies according on a scale of religious sophistication. This unilineal evolutionist thought pervaded his understanding of societal development. As monotheistic societies, Europe and North America were granted a superior status to the rest of the inhabited world. Is this the use of culture as a determinant that Radcliffe Brown so adamantly rejected?

There's a reason his head's so big...

Radcliffe Brown was inspired by Durkheim to formulate a sophisticated structural functionalist theory, and to study primitive societies and determine generalizations about the social structure. Brown hated the theory of culture. He despised American anthropologists who used culture since it was such an abstract concept, something that you can’t observe, and because he believed culture could not be quantified or examined in any meaningful ways. Brown was big on social structure and the principles that organize persons in society. While Tylor subscribed to Unilineal Evolution, Radcliffe Brown was a Structural Functionalist and understood social structure in terms of the function of its constituent elements (norms, customs, institutions, etc…) in ordering society. However, while Brown and Tylor diverge on the subject of culture, are there other areas where they find common ground? Particularly in Tylor’s theory of “survivals” in conjunction with Brown’s emphasis on the observable components of culture. Can Brown's theories be reconciled with Tylor's belief that there was a functional basis for the development of society and religion, which he determined was universal?

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Example Post

I don’t know about you but the fact that Edward Tylor was an armchair scholar bothers me to no end!! He had little interest in undertaking field study of any kind. INSTEAD, he always kept a keen interest in the field studies of others, and drew his own conclusions from their research data!! Now at least Radcliffe Brown did SOME field work on the Andaman Islands!! Don’t get me wrong, I think Radcliffe Brown’s theories failed to consider the effect of historical changes in the societies he studied (in particular changes brought about by colonialism) and I agree with Evans-Pritchard that Brown’s analysis of society is a giant oversimplification. I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t agree with either of these guys or their theories. But if I had to choose, I would side with Edward Tylor (despite his ethnocentric views) because of his groundbreaking use of statistical data in his analysis of societies, and his pioneering work in establishing anthropology as a science.

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Sir Edward Burnett Tylor

Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (2 October 1832 – 2 January 1917), was an English anthropologist. Tylor is considered representative of cultural evolutionism. In his works Primitive culture and Anthropology, he defined the context of scientific study of anthropology. He believed that there was a functional basis for the development of society and religion, which he determined was universal. E. B. Tylor is considered by many a founding figure of the science of social anthropology, and his scholarly works are seen as important and lasting contributions to the discipline of Anthropology that was beginning to take shape in the 19th century.

Alfred Radciffe Brown

Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (17 January 1881 - 24 October 1955) was an English social anthropologist who developed the theory of Structural Functionalism, a framework that describes basic concepts relating to the social structure of “primitive” civilizations. Radcliffe-Brown vehemently denied being a functionalist, and carefully distinguished his concept of function from that of Malinowski, who openly advocated functionalism. While Malinowski's functionalism claimed that social practices could be directly explained by their ability to satisfy basic biological needs, Radcliffe-Brown rejected this as baseless. Radcliffe-Brown claimed that the fundamental units of anthropology were processes of human life and interaction. Functional analysis, then, was just the attempt to explain stability by discovering how practices fit together to sustain that stability; the 'function' of a practice was just its role in sustaining the overall social structure, insofar as there was a stable social structure (Radcliffe-Brown 1957).