ABSTRACT
As a modernist movement the social anthropology of Bronislaw Malinowski and the two intellectual generations of anthropologists who succeeded him, set both itself and its theories firmly in the present. Itself, partly because modern simply means ‘of the now’, and partly, because functional anthropology made much of its displacement of evolutionist, diffusionist and outmoded intellectualist theories by its own vivid explanations of practices and institutions in terms of their very contemporaneity, their very ‘here-and-nowness’. The chief sociological principle is probably this: that no individual can have a position [eine Stelle] without identifying themself with something, and there is no identification without transformation. Merging the temporal nearness of the present with the spatial nearness of presence, functional explanations proposed that cause and effect merged in an actuality of social existence.
