Anthropology in Credo Reference: Schools of Thought & Theorists

From Reader's Guide to the Social Sciences
Described by Edward Burnett Tyler as the belief that natural phenomena, such as climatic phenomena, or rocks and stones, could possess some kind of “spirit” or life force so that the apparently lifeless material world was actually animated by a host of unseen and supernatural forces.

From Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Fundamental to anthropological inquiry in the late nineteenth century was the task of explaining similarities observed in the habits and beliefs of so-called primitives all over the world.

From Dictionary of Race, Ethnicity & Culture
‘Evolutionist’ theories can be said to be those which presume the existence of a single model of civilization and a single and necessary evolutionary path for mankind comprising different stages, culminating in modern European society.

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.

From Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology.
The relationship between Marxism and anthropology has been both fruitful and often antagonistic.

In general, the postmodern view is cool, ironic, and accepting of the fragmentation of contemporary existence. It tends to concentrate on surfaces rather than depths, to blur the distinctions between high and low culture, and as a whole to challenge a wide variety of traditional cultural values.

From The Dictionary of Human Geography
A Euro-American discourse that represents the indigenous cultures of sub-Saharan Africa, South America and the Pacific islands as outside the perimeter of civilization.

From Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
"Cultural relativism," to most western anthropologists, is a combination of two notions: first, that behavioral differences between various populations of people are the result of cultural (sometimes societal) variation rather than anything else; and, second, that such differences are deserving of respect and understanding in their own terms.

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).

From Dictionary of Race, Ethnicity & Culture
The term derives from the Greek syn (together) and krete (Crete) and was first used by Plutarch to describe the fact that Cretans, who were often involved in internal conflicts, closed ranks when faced with invasion by outside forces.

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.

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.

From Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Blending the theoretical framework of A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (and E. Durkheim) with the detailed ethnographic empiricism of B. Malinowski, E.E. Evans-Pritchard was the most significant figure in the foundation of modern social anthropology.

From Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology
He produced an ethnographic record unsurpassed in its subtlety and precision of detail. He considered fieldwork to be an ‘empirical discipline’; a science in which it was essential to distinguish between the actor and the observer’s point of view.

From Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology
In the wake of The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), and its sister volume of collected papers, Local Knowledge (1983), Clifford Geertz became celebrated for initiating an interpretive revolution across disciplines, which shifted the focus of anthropological study from structure to meaning.

From Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Alfred Cort Haddon is best known for two contributions to early British anthropology: his leadership of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Strait in 1898–9 and his efforts to institutionalise anthropology as a discipline in the UK.

From Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Marvin Harris has been one of the most important scholars of cultural anthropology over the course of decades. He supported and developed theories of the so-called cultural materialism.

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.

From Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Malinowski treated culture as an instrumental reality and emphasised its derivation from human needs, from the basic universal needs of the individual organism to the highly elaborated and often specialised needs of a complex society.

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.

From Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Radcliffe-Brown, along with Bronislaw Malinowski, is credited as a co-founder of the functionalist school of anthropology—and in Radcliffe-Brown’s case the structural-functionalist branch of that school.