LibGuides: Anthropology: Schools of Thought & Theorists

Schools of Thought

Animism
From Reader's Guide to the Social Sciences The notion of animism is not now widely used in anthropology and tends to be referred to more as a historical curiosity for what it can tell us about anthropological thought in the 19th century than for what it can say about the beliefs of people in the modern world.
Diffusionism
From Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought Diffusionism is the term used by anthropologists and sociologists to account for the spread, through time, of aspects of culture—artistic traditions, language, music, myths, religious beliefs, social organization, technological ideas—from one society or group to another.
Evolutionism
From Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought Evolutionism is a movement in anthropology and sociology which was much in vogue in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It refers to theories of change in which development is seen to go through stages of increasing complexity and diversification. It is closely related to the idea of progress and technology, which is most prevalent in capitalist society.
Functionalism
From Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology Broadly speaking, ‘functionalism’ refers to a range of theories in the human sciences, all of which provide explanations of phenomena in terms of the function, or purpose, they purportedly serve.
Marxist anthropology
From Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought. It developed out of two motives: the need to evaluate anthropology's historical relationship with colonialism, arising out of a discontent with earlier functionalist paradigms for the study of societies; and to conduct social enquiry with a greater sense of political and economic perspectives.
Postmodernism
From Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology Anthropology in general has been viewed as a particularly sympathetic arena of the human sciences within which to pursue the postmodernist agenda, especially with regard to issues of ‘otherness’, critiques of the programmes of the Enlightenment and elaborations of the notion of culture.
Primitivism
From Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought Primitivism, in anthropology, refers to a body of thought that there exist remote and exotic ‘primitive’: peoples whose lifestyles and technologies are considered to show marked contrast to those of modern societies.
Relativism
From Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology The conventional cultural relativism that most anthropologists, British or American, take to work with them is a combination of two notions: first, that insofar as there are behavioural differences between various populations of people, these differences are the result of cultural (sometimes societal) variation rather than anything else; and, second, that such differences as do exist are deserving of respect and understanding in their own terms.
Structuralism
From Reader's Guide to the Social Sciences Structuralism is the approach which seeks to isolate, and decode, deep structures of meaning, organised through systems of signs inherent in human behaviour (language, ritual, dress and so on).
Syncretism
From Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought Syncretism is the process of mingling different philosophies, religions or traditions of belief and practice, resulting in hybrid forms.
Totemism
From Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology J.F. McLennan (1869) posited a worldwide reverence for the ‘mystical power’ of living things, arguing that ‘there is no race of men that has not come through this primitive stage of speculative belief.'

Major Theorists

Ruth Fulton Benedict (1887-1948): Topic

Ruth Benedict originated the controversial concept of patterns of culture, which combined anthropology with sociology, psychology, and philosophy. In her 1934 book Patterns of Culture, Benedict proposed her holistic theory of culture to explain why certain personalities and types were valued in one society while discouraged in another. In an era of fascism, racism, and ethnic stereotyping for political purposes, Benedict's theory was controversial because it called for judging each culture only on its own merits and values, and argued that no culture should be forced to conform to the standards or values of another.

Franz Boas (1858-1942): Topic

Boas greatly influenced American anthropology, particularly in his development of the theoretical framework known as cultural relativism, which argued against the evolutionary scale leading from savagery to Culture, laid out by his 19th-century predecessors.

Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1902-1973)

From World of Sociology, Gale
Evans-Pritchard helped pioneer the argument that religious rites and thinking among so-called primitive peoples were connected in their larger view of the world and that ritual was a means by which they set social goals and resolved social conflict. With these theories, Evans-Pritchard helped invent social anthropology, a new sub-discipline developed by a small group of British anthropologists who focused on how primitive peoples organized themselves politically.

Meyer Fortes (1906-1983)

From Chambers Biographical Dictionary
Born in Britstown, Cape Province, South Africa, he was educated in Cape Town, and trained in psychology before studying anthropology at the London School of Economics under Charles Seligman, Bronisław Malinowski and Raymond Firth. His studies laid the foundations for the theory of descent, a cornerstone of the "structural-functionalism" dominating the social anthropology of the 1950s and 1960s.

Clifford Geertz (1926-2006)

From The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory
Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) was a groundbreaking cultural anthropologist whose techniques for the interpretation of cultural practices have been widely influential, not only in anthropology, but in fields such as literary criticism, where they exercised considerable influence on the development of the New Historicism.

Alfred Cort (or Court) Haddon (1855-1940)

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
British zoologist and anthropologist. Haddon led the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits in 1898 to study the physical characteristics, culture, and psychology of the native people.

Marvin Harris (1927-2001)

From World of Sociology, Gale
Marvin Harris was born August 18, 1927, in Brooklyn, New York. He was the primary force behind the development of the theoretical perspective cultural materialism. Harris was trained as an anthropologist, completing his Ph.D. at Columbia University during the early 1950s.

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009): Topic

He helped to formulate the principles of structuralism by stressing the interdependence of cultural systems and the way they relate to each other, maintaining that social and cultural life can be explained by a postulated unconscious reality concealed behind the reality by which people believe their lives to be ordered.

Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942): Topic

From Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia
A founding father of British social anthropology, Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski (1884-1942) pioneered modern fieldwork methods, re-created the genre of ethnographic writing, promoted applied anthropology in Africa, and contributed to many academic debates and popular causes. At the time of his death in the United States, he was a scientific celebrity, an international humanist committed to the battle against totalitarianism.

Margaret Mead (1901-1978): Topic

US anthropologist who established the practice of fieldwork in anthropology and – with her account of adolescence in Samoa – popularized the idea within her own country that there are alternatives to the American way of life.

A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955)

From Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Radcliffe-Brown trained in anthropology under A.C. Haddon and W.H.R. Rivers at Cambridge. Australia is the part of the world with which he is perhaps most closely associated. His work on kinship, cosmology and local organization, conceptualized in terms of structure and function and aiming at comparative generalization, remains of interest, notwithstanding criticism.