ABSTRACT

Recall that one of the assumptions of Durkheim had been an organismic analogy, by which he assumed that institutions contribute to the maintenance of society. It becomes possible to explain these institutions in terms of their functions and their relationship to each other. What Boas had proposed was quite different. His view of culture, as expressed by his student Robert Lowie, was not of a living organism, but of a patchwork quilt. Each patch had a different origin and was unrelated in any way to the patch sewn next to it. A given system of kinship bears no relationship to the type of subsistence practiced by the same culture, and these have no relationship to that culture’s religious concepts. Regardless of the famous differences between Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown (to be explored in the next chapter), this “fragmented” view of culture was rejected by British anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century. In this chapter, we examine a perspective in American anthropology that also rejected this idea of culture as a hodgepodge of unrelated traits. This is the perspective of Culture and Personality (later known as Psychological Anthropology), which dominated American anthropology between 1930 and the 1950s. This perspective was more or less contemporary with British functionalism.