Functionalism and Structuralism

In this entrance I am explaining what we understand for Functionalism and Structuralism the last theories about Culture and Society.

Funtionalism

Bronislaw Malinoswski was his ideologist, part of the assumption that the function of the elements of a culture is always to satisfy some basic need such as food, the production of goods, rest, reproduction, physical security, etc.

These needs are the origin of the derivatives that must also be met. Thus, the feeding generates cooperation for the crop, and the reproduction originates the norms of sexual approach. Society then creates the appropriate institutions and forms of organization to solve both types of needs, such as the economy or the family.

Cultural change occurs precisely when an institution fails to fulfill its purpose and becomes dysfunctional.

According to Malinowski, once we have thoroughly explained the social function of an institution, we will have known scientifically everything that is possible to know.

Structuralism

While the currents discussed above focused on the knowledge of social and cultural facts, structuralism investigates the ultimate foundation of both. It aims to know the deep and universal structures that explain the main features, complexes and cultural institutions.

Claude Levi-Strauss was initially a philosopher interested in human nature and the solutions that cultural anthropology could contribute to the clarification of the problem.

Structuralism will take linguistics as a reference. Ferdinand de Saussure distinguishes between language, as a system of signs suitable for communicative interaction within a society, and speech, which is the execution that speakers make of the language. According to Saussure, language is a stable system in which everything is held in opposition to the various individual manifestations of speech. In addition, the diversity of particular realizations of speech does not cause the language to change and cease to be a constant system.

The application of the method of structural linguistics to anthropology leads Levi-Strauss to affirm that current cultural anthropology deals above all with studying the particular manifestations of cultures and pointing out the similarities and observable differences between their constituent elements.

The structural anthropology of Levi-Strauss is based on the philosophical assumption that beyond the norms of culture or social organization that vary from one people to another, there are shared and identical structures that have their origin in the psychological, logical organization and epistemological of the human mind.

It is rather a philosophical and psychological explanation than properly sociological.