Anthropology Diffusionism
Enviado por Antonio • 25 de Mayo de 2018 • 1.265 Palabras (6 Páginas) • 304 Visitas
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Period: 1940-1970
Postulates:
- Universal patterns in cultural systems are products of the invariant structure of the human mind.
- Language was a coherent social system regulated by the principles of syntax and semantics and that the structure of language consisted in the relations between its elements
- The awareness of complex social structure as determined by unconscious reason.
Main representatives and their most important texts:
- Levi Strauss
- Anthropologie structural deux
- Structural anthropology
- The Savage mind
Culture and personality
Description: Examines the interaction between psychological aspects of the individual and the overreaching culture. Theorists of culture and personality school argued that socialization creates personality patterns. It shapes a person’s emotions, thoughts, behaviors, cultural values and norms to fit into and function as productive members in the surrounding human society. The study of culture and personality wanted to examine how different socialization practices resulted in different personality types.
Historical background: Culture and personality was one of the reactions against the 19th social evolution and diffusionism just as the functionalism school of Radcliff-Brown and Malinowski. Anthropology in its fledgling years in the mid to late nineteenth century attempted to apply the theories of Charles Darwin to every aspect of human study. Therefore, in accordance to the colonial practices of that time, anthropologists viewed the differences between human cultures as a series of stages within an evolving schema. This led to a system that rather than described differences between cultures, enforced notions of civilized versus primitive.
Period: 1940-1970
Postulates:
- Seeks to understand the growth and development of personal or social identity as it relates to the surrounding social environment.
- Attempts to bridge the gap between anthropology and psychology by examining how cultures understand human identity.
- It held that culture and personality interact and balance one another.
Main representatives and their most important texts:
- Margaret Mead
- Continuities in cultural evolution
- The study of culture at a distance
- Culture and commitment: A study of a generation gap
- Ruth Benedict
- Patterns of culture
- Race and racism
- The man and culture
Neo-Evolutionism
Description: Explains how culture develops by giving general principles of its evolutionary process. tries to explain the evolution of societies by drawing on Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and discarding some dogmas of the previous social evolutionism. Neoevolutionism is concerned with long-term, directional, evolutionary social change and with the regular patterns of development that may be seen in unrelated, widely separated cultures. Neoevolutionists investigate the ways in which different cultures adapt to similar environments and examine the similarities and differences in the long-term historical trajectories of such groups.
Historical background: The theory of cultural evolution was originally established in the 19th century. However, this Nineteenth-century Evolutionism was dismissed by the Historical Particularists as unscientific in the early 20th century. Therefore, the topic of cultural evolution had been avoided by many anthropologists until Neoevolutionism emerged in the 1930s. This mean that it was the Neoevolutionary thinkers who brought back evolutionary thought and developed it to be acceptable to contemporary anthropology.
Period: 1940-1970
Postulates:
- Neoevolutionism depend on measurable information for analyzing the process of cultural evolution.
- Changes in modes of production have consequences for other arenas of culture.
- The Idea of looking for systematic cultural changes.
Main representatives and their most important texts:
- Leslie White
- The Science of Culture
- The Evolution of Culture
- The Concept of Culture
- Julian Steward
- The Economic and Social Basis of Primitive Bands.
- Ecological Aspects of Southwestern Society.
- Basin Plateau Aboriginal Sociopolitical Groups.
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