Anthropology Research Starter: 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 World of Sociology, Gale
Evans-Pritchard helped pioneer the argument that religious rites and thinking among so-called primitive peoples were connected in their larger view of the world and that ritual was a means by which they set social goals and resolved social conflict. With these theories, Evans-Pritchard helped invent social anthropology, a new sub-discipline developed by a small group of British anthropologists who focused on how primitive peoples organized themselves politically.

From Chambers Biographical Dictionary
Born in Britstown, Cape Province, South Africa, he was educated in Cape Town, and trained in psychology before studying anthropology at the London School of Economics under Charles Seligman, Bronisław Malinowski and Raymond Firth. His studies laid the foundations for the theory of descent, a cornerstone of the "structural-functionalism" dominating the social anthropology of the 1950s and 1960s.

From The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory
Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) was a groundbreaking cultural anthropologist whose techniques for the interpretation of cultural practices have been widely influential, not only in anthropology, but in fields such as literary criticism, where they exercised considerable influence on the development of the New Historicism.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
British zoologist and anthropologist. Haddon led the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits in 1898 to study the physical characteristics, culture, and psychology of the native people.

From World of Sociology, Gale
Marvin Harris was born August 18, 1927, in Brooklyn, New York. He was the primary force behind the development of the theoretical perspective cultural materialism. Harris was trained as an anthropologist, completing his Ph.D. at Columbia University during the early 1950s.

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 Theory in Social and Cultural Anthropology: An Encyclopedia
A founding father of British social anthropology, Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski (1884-1942) pioneered modern fieldwork methods, re-created the genre of ethnographic writing, promoted applied anthropology in Africa, and contributed to many academic debates and popular causes. At the time of his death in the United States, he was a scientific celebrity, an international humanist committed to the battle against totalitarianism.

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 Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Radcliffe-Brown trained in anthropology under A.C. Haddon and W.H.R. Rivers at Cambridge. Australia is the part of the world with which he is perhaps most closely associated. His work on kinship, cosmology and local organization, conceptualized in terms of structure and function and aiming at comparative generalization, remains of interest, notwithstanding criticism.