British Social Anthropology: Structure-Functionalism and Functionalism

Even though, the three anthropologists in Great Britain during the mid-nineteenth century, viz. Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, Sir James Frazer, and Sir Henry Maine, had already made substantive contributions to the field of anthropology by their monumental publications; however, if we talk about the ‘architects’ of British Social Anthropology, undeniably, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski would be so considered. By the turn of the twentieth century, the mid-nineteenth-century evolutionism had been almost buried. In its place, different schools of diffusionism had developed in Britain, Germany, and America, which outrightly denied the very basic tenets of evolutionary school, such as, the psychic unity of mankind, comparative method, inventiveness of man, and conjectural history of mankind from savagery through barbarism to civilisation. In Britain, two different schools of thought in anthropology were already in the offing, ‘which spurned both the evolutionists and the diffusionist’ (Harris 2001: 514) alike. These were the Structure Functionalism, led by Radcliffe-Brown and his followers, and Functionalism, led by Malinowski and his followers. ‘By the late 1930s this group had gained virtually unchallenged control of the anthropological establishment throughout the British empire’ (ibid.). These two schools of thought laid down the foundations of the British Social Anthropology.