History of Anthropology

While the Boas-inspired American anthropologists and archaeologists explicitly rejected social evolutionism in favor of a historical approach, a functional and structural approach to anthropology was developing as well. Unlike the diachronically oriented Boasians, these theorists, for the around part, had a synchronic approach. They sought to look at societies as systems and to explain how those systems were held together. Despite this habitual sense of agreement, many differences emerged among the field.
Bronislaw Malinowski did his pioneering fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands, studying a living society and its social institutions. In his examination of the Trobrianders, he put forth the idea of a system as the way that all aspects of social invigoration intersect. For him, a system was a network of living passels relations and practices. He worked out this idea of a system with his study of the Kula, which he described as a form of exchange, of extensive, inter-tribal character, carried on by communities inhabiting a broad(a) ring of islands, which form a closed circuit (Malinowski 1922: 81).



Discussed in a chapter of his Argonauts of the Western Pacific, his study of the Kula exemplified his ideas about systems because he approached it as an institution: he wrote of the Kula being an extremely big and interlocking institution [that] welds together a considerable number of tribes, andembraces a vast complex of activities, interconnected, and playing into one another, so as to form one organic whole (Malinowski 1922: 83). He argued that it was the labour of the Ethnographer to integrate the individual actions that made up the Kula and show how they organise a coherent whole (Malinowski 1922: 84). The structure of that system is the general pattern of connections that make it up.
This idea about systems led to Malinowskis ideas about the importance of fieldwork. For him, because to understand societies they had to be looked at as systems, only an outside observer could...If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: Ordercustompaper.com



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