ABSTRACT
Function may be defined as the total set of relations that a single social activity or usage or belief has to the total social system. One of the most important things that people sometimes forget is that, as is perfectly obvious, one can never define all of the functions of an activity, usage, or belief, not if one wrote twenty volumes on the given society. For scientific purposes we do not need a complete description of the function, in this sense, of anything. If we take a particular custom, X, which occurs in one form in one society, and in a somewhat different form, X2, in another society, the problem of science is to discover what common function there is for this custom in the two or more societies in which its exists. The scientific question then will be, ‘What are the significant aspects of this functional relation?’ and to determine what is significant, we have to have some sort of hypothesis about human society in general.
