Anthropological thinking: anthropological theory and schools of thought practice questions.

Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown are both called functionalists, yet they explained an institution by reference to different things. In Radcliffe-Brown's version, a ceremony performed after a death is to be explained by

• the contribution that performing it makes to maintaining the structure of social relations
• the psychological and biological needs of the individuals who take part in it and who are steadied by performing it
• the position it occupies in a sequence of stages through which every society is held to pass
• the layers of meaning that the participants themselves can state when they are questioned about it

Answer: the contribution that performing it makes to maintaining the structure of social relations

Malinowski derived institutions from the needs of individuals; Radcliffe-Brown from what the social structure requires in order to continue, which is why his version carries the extra word 'structural'. Swapping the two is the commonest theory error in Paper 2 essays.

Levi-Strauss's structuralism is regularly confused with Radcliffe-Brown's structural functionalism because of the shared word. The 'structures' that Levi-Strauss set out to uncover in myth and kinship were

• the arrangements of groups and offices through which a society is held together across the generations
• the economic relations that decide what a society is able to believe about itself at a given moment
• the accounts that the tellers of a myth give when an ethnographer asks them what the story means
• operations of mind that work through paired contrasts such as raw and cooked, or the wild and the domesticated

Answer: operations of mind that work through paired contrasts such as raw and cooked, or the wild and the domesticated

For Levi-Strauss the object of analysis was the unconscious logic of thought, and the evidence for it is the pattern of contrasts running through the variants of a myth. Radcliffe-Brown's structures are made of people and offices; Levi-Strauss's are made of oppositions.

Practice theory was formulated from the late 1970s as a way out of an impasse that earlier approaches had produced. The impasse was that

• the schools then dominant disagreed about which societies should be compared with which, so no general statement could be reached at all
• structures appeared to reproduce themselves while the people who lived within them did nothing in particular
• fieldwork had become so long and so costly that few monographs were being completed by younger researchers in the discipline
• meaning had been left out of the analysis by every school working since the closing years of the nineteenth century

Answer: structures appeared to reproduce themselves while the people who lived within them did nothing in particular

Practice theory asks how structures are reproduced and altered by ordinary competent action, which is the work that habitus is meant to do. It is a response to a theoretical deadlock, not to a shortage of ethnographic material.

Steward proposed in the 1950s that anthropology should trace how particular technologies, resources and environments shape the arrangements of work and settlement in a society, and should look for parallel developments where conditions are comparable. His position is usually distinguished from the universal evolutionism of White by the claim that

• environment has no bearing on social arrangements, which are determined entirely by inherited tradition
• societies pass through one fixed sequence of stages that every population must eventually traverse
• development takes several lines, so similar conditions can produce similar forms without a single ladder
• the comparison of societies should be abandoned, since each configuration is the product of its own unrepeatable history

Answer: development takes several lines, so similar conditions can produce similar forms without a single ladder

Multilinear evolution keeps the ambition of explaining recurrence while dropping the single ranked sequence. What it explains is a core of arrangements tied to subsistence, which is also its limit: the further one moves from the food quest, the less the framework accounts for.

From the 1960s a number of anthropologists, among them Meillassoux and Godelier, took up the analytical vocabulary of Marx to describe societies without wage labour or industry. What their approach added to the functionalist accounts they were arguing with was

• attention to how control over labour, land and reproduction distributes what a society produces
• the first systematic use of long-term participant observation in this branch of the discipline
• the claim that kinship relations are of no importance in societies of this kind
• the argument that every such society was already governed by the same market forces that operate in industrial economies today

Answer: attention to how control over labour, land and reproduction distributes what a society produces

The move was to treat kinship itself as the framework through which labour and its products are controlled — elders over juniors, men over women — so that an institution earlier described by the needs it met could be analysed by who benefits. Note that this is an argument about relations of production, not a claim that markets are everywhere.

In the 1960s a group of American anthropologists set out to record the categories of a society exactly as its members use them, by systematic questioning about which things are called by which names and how the terms include one another — for instance in firewood, plant or kinship vocabulary. The aim of this programme was

• to demonstrate that folk categories are approximations to the scientific classifications of the same domain
• to specify what someone must know in order to behave acceptably as a member of that society
• to show that vocabularies of this kind are too variable between speakers to be described at all
• to establish which of the classifications used around the world is the most efficient for practical purposes

Answer: to specify what someone must know in order to behave acceptably as a member of that society

The programme defined culture as knowledge and tried to make it explicit by controlled elicitation, on the model of a grammar. Its strength was rigour about categories; its weakness, which later work pressed, was that knowing the terms is not the same as knowing what people do with them.