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. In the period spanning the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, virtually every human science generated a school that identified itself as functionalist, and in nearly every instance that school dominated its discipline for a time. Darwinian evolutionary theory provided the initial impetus to functionalist reasoning. But †Darwin’s multifarious argument admits of variable interpretation, so different constructions of his model yielded varieties of functionalism. The earliest schemes, those of psychology and economics, were promulgated at the turn of the century. These were not equally important, however; functionalist psychology was extremely influential, while functionalist economics was nearly inconsequential. But in both, the *individual was the basic unit of analysis, and individual action was conceptualized in terms of recursive processes of evolutionary adaptation. That is, both functionalist psychology and economics relied on an interpretation of the inherent nature of the human organism, and constituted fundamentally historical approaches to explanation.
In the late 1920s, a rather different type of functionalism became the dominant paradigm among British social anthropologists, thereafter diffusing to anthropologists elsewhere, as well as to sociologists—who judged that observation of non-Western societies had revealed the fundamental constituents of human sociability, unconfounded by the workings of ‘organized state machinery’ (Parsons 1934:230). (After World War II, this type was embraced by practitioners of other disciplines, perhaps most notably political scientists studying colonial societies then making the transition to independence, but these contributed little to its elaboration.) In its original formulation if not necessarily its subsequent permutations, this scheme was informed by Darwinian reasoning, but differed from its precursors in psychology and economics in its basic unit of analysis: functionalist anthropology and *sociology considered the group, not the individual, judging that it was in groups that humans withstood processes of natural selection. And the group had to be analysed as a social, not a biological, entity. Because all groups possessed roughly equivalent human resources—individuals differing in talent and temperament—variable natural endowments did not explain given groups’ survival. Human adaptation was effected through social organization. Thus, notwithstanding some functionalists’ professed concern with individual personality structure and volitional action, in analysis of this type individuals were judged derivative creatures of their social orders—practically epiphenomenal as individuals (see Radcliffe-Brown 1949; Wrong 1961).
For anthropologists and sociologists, the point of functionalist investigation was to identify the standardized habits that maintained the social organism in a condition of dynamic equilibrium—the ‘more or less stable social structures’ regulating individuals’ relations ‘to one another, and providing such external adaptation to the physical environment, and such internal adaptation between the component individuals or groups, as to make possible an ordered social life’ (Radcliffe-Brown 1932:152). The historical antecedents of any given social order were of no interest: they did not explain either the meaning of its practices for those who sustained them in the present or the roles these practices played in maintaining the social organization as a whole roles which exhibited the general properties of social life the functionalist sought. Moreover, scientific inquiry by definition entailed direct observation. Thus, the very designation †‘ethnology’, which denoted efforts to reconstruct the histories of peoples who left no written records, became a term of opprobrium for functionalists: ethnological findings were at best descriptions of probable pasts (and more likely conjectural ones), yielding accounts of idiosyncratic experiences rather than identification of scientific regularities (see Radcliffe-Brown 1932:144–8).
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