Page 59 - BANC-131 (E)

IGNOUPROJECT.COM 9958947060

cultures” (1944a, p. 175), that permitted the study of aspects of culture and the analysis
of culture in depth. Through the intermediate analysis of institutions, a functionalist
Shrichakradhar.com
approach revealed the multilevel relationships between man as a psychobiological
organism and man’s creation, culture.
Malinowski was also a functionalist but somewhat different from Radcliffe- Brown.
While Radcliffe-Brown emphasised social structure, Malinowski focused upon the
individual and his needs, which he classified into primary, secondary and tertiary needs.
Two versions of functionalism developed between 1910 and 1930:
Malinowski’s biocultural (or psychological) functionalism and structural functionalism,
the approach advanced by Radcliffe-Brown.

Q3. Elucidate the development of continent anthropology in America.
9958947060
Ans. American anthropology has culture as its central and unifying concept. This most
commonly refers to the universal human capacity to classify and encode human
experiences symbolically, and to communicate symbolically encoded experiences
socially. American continent anthropology was developing in some other direction.
Rather than focusing on society and structure, they began to focus on culture as
something that exists outside of the organic presence of people and living societies. The
reason was the nature of the American experience as compared to that of the European:
Europe had colonies like India that were flourishing societies with all institutions in
place whereas in the American continent the colonisation was genocidal with the Native
Americans dispersed and sometimes eliminated to the last person in a tribe.
German-American anthropologist Franz Boas was one of the most influential social
scientists of the early twentieth century, also known as the father of American
anthropology.He spent life in collecting material that he thought would fast disappear.
He collected folk and oral traditions, material culture artifacts and life histories as there
was very little in terms of stable social structures and functioning institutions. Boas
postulated that every culture is to be understood as a process of its own history and
since history cannot be understood outside of location and a people, American
anthropology was concerned about geographical settings or areas, about the minds of
the people who constituted a culture and aspects like folklore, material culture and
myths that survived the people who created them.
While defining culture, Kroeber has called it, “The mass of learned and transmitted
motor reactions, habits, techniques, ideas and values and the behaviour they induce.”
Kroeber says that culture is super individual and super organic. Kroeber has made it
clear that it does not mean that it excludes inorganic things. Boas, of German origin, was
also influenced by German Diffusionism and Gestalt psychology and not by
Durkheimian notions of function and society. Thus, the concept of Culture Circles (of
the German Diffusionist school) was borrowed into American anthropology as Culture
Area hypothesis.

Page
55