DIEGO C. POMARCA JR.

SHS Teacher – Pangpang Integrated NHS

www.diegopomarca.wix.com/undercover
 ANTHROPOLOGIST believe that culture is
a product of human evolution.
 Culture from different places develop
distinct culture.
 Culture is regarded as the means of human
adaptation to the world.

 EXPLICIT CULTURE – are those that people aware of and

consciously recognize e.g. shaking of hands when introduced.
 IMPLICIT CULTURE – it is not always recognize by people
but it influence behaviour and people simply take them for
granted and rarely think about it.
Theories – are perspectives that are essential in
shaping an analysis about a particular issue.
The following are the 7 theoretical orientations in
anthropology and the ideas on culture:
1. Cultural Evolutionism
2. Diffusionism
3. Historicism
4. Psychological Anthropology
5. Functionalism
6. Neo-evolutionism
7. Materialism
A. CULTURAL
EVOLUTIONISM
Perspective on Culture:
 All cultures undergo the same development stages in
the same order. The main classifications include
savagery, barbarism and civilization.
“Cultural evolution” is the idea that human culture
changes in socially transmitted beliefs, knowledge,
customs, skills, attitudes, languages, etc.
 Can be described as a Darwinian evolutionary process
that is similar in key respects (but not identical) to
biological/genetic evolution.
 (www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo.../obo-9780199766567-
0038.xml)
 CULTURAL
EVOLUTIONISM
Perspective on Culture:
 Explains the genesis and growth of cultural
phenomena.
 It tried to establish a universal pattern of human
cultural evolution.
 By studying and analysing cultural evolution,
anthropologists during the 19th century hoped to
develop a science of culture that could incorporate
universal laws of human nature.
 Evolutionism in the 19th century was initiated by the
works of Charles Darwin. A couple of years prior to
Darwin, Herbert Spencer a philosopher visualized
evolution to be a cosmic process.
http://www.sociologyguide.com/anthropology/main-approaches-to-the-study-of-society-and-
All cultures throughout the world
developed progressively over time.
Cultural progress took place from
simple to complex forms.
Cultural evolution led the growth of
civilization.
It was the belief in Social Darwinism
that led to the belief that some
societies were better equipped than
others to dominate and rule.
Natural selection operated to
eliminate those which did not have the
requisite capacities and capabilities
while encouraging the survival of the
fittest.
Edward Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan
and James George Frazer were the
classical evolutionists.
 the Father of Anthropology
 In his book entitled Primitive Culture published in
1871, he defined culture as a complex whole which
includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and
other capacities and habits acquired by man as a
member of society.
 He was convinced that all cultures were capable of
progress because he believed in psychic unity of
mankind.
 He also explained 'The Comparative Method' and
defined the concept of survival as processes, customs,
and opinions that has been carried on by force of habit
into a new state of society in which they had their
original home and they remain as proofs and examples
of an older condition of culture that a newer one has
 the Father of Kinship Studies
 He wrote extensively about evolution of specific
social institutions like Marriage, family and Kinship
but also constructed a general sequence of human
history.
 He was the first to typify the kinship terminologies
of the world into descriptive in which lineal kin are
differentiated from collateral kin.
 He published his works on kinship in the Systems of
Consanguinity and Affinity.
 Consanguine is based on group marriage within the same
generation.
 The Punaluan based on a form of group marriage in which
brothers were forbidden to marry sisters.
 The Syndyasmian or pairing family, a transitional form
between group marriage and monogamy in which husband or
wife could end the marriage at will as often as he or she
wished.
 The Patriarchical a supreme authority was vested in the male
head.
 The Monogamian based on monogamy and female equality and
progressively resembling the modern nuclear unit.
 famous for his work The Golden Bough published in
1914.He developed his theories based on other people's
ethnographic researches.
 According to him, all primitive people were mentally
irrational and hence superstition pervaded primitive
thought.
 Frazer came up with three stage evolutionary
development:
Magic------> Religion ------> Science
 According to Frazer in the first stage of human society magic played
very important role. But then man must have realized that there
could be some superior power above him that controls him and his
activities. He must have submitted himself to this superior power. It
is here when magic was replaced by religion. Later on science which
is based on factual correlations between cause and effect would have
Perspective on Culture:
 All societies change as a result of cultural
borrowing from one another.
 Diffusionism refers to the diffusion or transmission
of cultural characteristics or traits from the common
society to all other societies. They criticized the
Psychic unity of mankind of evolutionists.
 They believed that most inventions happened just
once and men being capable of imitation, these
inventions were then diffused to other places.
Perspective on Culture:
 All cultures originated at one point and then spread
throughout the world.
 Opposed the notion of progress from simple to
complex forms held by the evolutionists.
 Held that primitive or modern is also a relative
matter and hence comparative method is not
applicable.
 Looked specifically for variations that gradually
occurred while diffusion took place.
1. G.Elliot Smith;
2. William J Perry; and
3. W.H.R Rivers.
 Egypt was the culture center of the world
and the cradle of civilization. Hence human
culture originated in Egypt and then spread
throughout the world.
 They pointed to the Pyramid like large stone
structures and sun worship in several parts
of the world.
1. Friedrich Ratzel;
2. Leo Frobenius;
3. Fritz Graebner; and
4. William Schmidt.
Perspective on Culture:
 Each culture is unique and must be studied in its own context
 Regarded historical development as the most basic aspect of
human existence.
 Social and cultural phenomena are determined by history.
 Historicism is an approach to the study of anthropology and
culture that dates back to the mid-nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. It encompasses two distinct forms of
historicism: diffusionism and historical particularism.
 Historicism developed out of dissatisfaction with the theories
of unilineal socio-cultural evolution.
1. Grafton Elliot Smith (1871-1937)
is credited with founding and leading the British
school of diffusionism.
Through a comparative study of different peoples
from around the world that have practiced
mummification, Smith formulated a theory that all
of the people he studied originally derived their
mummification practices from Egypt. He concluded
that civilization was created only once in Egypt and
spread throughout the world, just as mummification
had, through colonization, migration, and diffusion.
2. R. Fritz Graebner (1877-1934) –
Graebner is remembered for being the founder of the
German School of diffusionism. Graebner borrowed the idea
of culture area and the psychic unity of mankind as
developed by Adolf Bastian and used it to develop his
theory of Kulturekreistehere (culture circles), which was
primarily concerned with the description of patterns of
culture distribution (Winthrop 1991:222).
His theory of culture circles posits that culture traits are
invented once and combine with other culture traits to
create culture patterns, both of which radiate outwards in
concentric circles.
The most complete exposition of his views is contained in
his major work, Die Methode der Ethnologie (Putzstuck
1991:247-8).
3. Franz Boas (1858-1942)
Boas was born in Minden, Westphalia (now part
of Germany) and grew up in Germany.
At the age of twenty he enrolled in college at
Heidelberg. He studied physics and geography
both in Heidelberg and in Bonn.
In 1899, he became the first Professor of
Anthropology at Colombia University, a position
that allowed him to instruct a number of
important anthropologists who collectively
influenced anthropological thought in many ways.
All societies are part of one single human culture evolving
towards a cultural pinnacle is flawed, especially when
proposing a western model of civilization as the cultural
pinnacle.
He argued that many cultures developed independently,
each based on its own particular set of circumstances such
as geography, climate, resources and particular cultural
borrowing.
The distribution of culture traits must be plotted. Once the
distribution of many sets of culture traits is plotted for a
general geographic area, patterns of cultural borrowing
may be determined.
 This allows the reconstruction of individual histories of specific
cultures by informing the investigator which of the cultural elements
were borrowed and which were developed individually
1. Alfred Louis Kroeber
2. Ruth Benedict
3. Robert H. Lowie
4. Edward Sapir
5. Paul Radin
6. Clark Wissler
7. Arjun Appadurai
Perspective on Culture:
 Personality is largely seen to be the result of learning culture.
 Psychological anthropology is the study of psychological topics
using anthropological concepts and methods. Among the areas
of interest are personal identity, selfhood, subjectivity, memory,
consciousness, emotion, motivation, cognition, madness, and
mental health.
 Psychological anthropology is the study of psychological topics
using anthropological concepts and methods. Among the areas
of interest are personal identity, selfhood, subjectivity, memory,
consciousness, emotion, motivation, cognition, madness, and
mental health.
Perspective on Culture:
 Investigates the psychological conditions that encourage
endurance and change in social systems, with the goal of
better understanding the relationship between culture and the
individual. It approaches anthropological investigations
through the use of psychological concepts and methods.
 It logically follows that without human behavior, the field of
anthropology would not exist.
 Leslie A. White viewed culture as a material system of objects
and symbols that determined human behavior so completely
that differences among individuals could be ignored.
 School Approach and Dates
Psychoanalytic Orthodox, 1910 -
Anthropology
Later Freudian, 1930 -
Culture and Configuralist, 1920-1940
Personality
Basic and Modal Personality, 1935-
1955
National Character, 1940 -
Cross-Cultural, 1950 -
Social Structure Materialist, 1848 -
and Personality
Positionalist, 1890 -
Interactionist, 1930 -
Cognitive Primitive Mentality, 1870 -
Anthropology
Developmental, 1920 -
Ethnosematic, 1960 -
Behavioral Human Ethology, 1970 -
Sociobiology, 1975 -
Self and Emotion, 1947 -
Leading Figures
Freud, Roheim, Flugel, Ferenczi
Fromm, Erikson, Bettleheim, LeBarre, Devereux
Benedict, Sapir, M. Mead, Barnouw, Hallowell
Kardiner, Linton, DuBois, Wallace, Gladwin
Kluckhohn, Bateson, Gorer, Hsu, Caudhill, Inkeles
Whiting, Spiro, LeVine, Spindler, Edgerton, Munroe,
D’Andrade
Marx, Engels, Bukharin, Godelier
Veblen, Weber, Merton
G. H. Mead, Goffman, Garfinkle
Tylor, Levy-Bruhl, Boas, Levi-Strauss
Piaget, Cole, Price-Williams, Witkin
Conklin. Frake, Kay, Berlin, Hunn
Erkman, McGrew
Wilson, Barash
Murphy, Shweder, LeVine, Lutz
Perspective on Culture:
 Society is thought to be like a biological organism with all of
the parts interconnected. Existing institutional structures of
any society are thought to perform indispensable functions,
without which the society could not continue.
 Functionalists seek to describe the different parts of a society
and their relationship through the organic analogy. The
organic analogy compared the different parts of a society to the
organs of a living organism.
 Bronislaw Malinowski and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown had the
greatest influence on the development of functionalism from
their posts in Great Britain.
Perspective on Culture:
 Functionalism was a reaction to the excesses of the
evolutionary and diffusionist theories of the nineteenth
century and the historicism of the early twentieth century.
 Malinowski suggested that individuals have physiological
needs (reproduction, food, shelter) and that social institutions
exist to meet these needs.
 There are also culturally derived needs and four basic
"instrumental needs" (economics, social control, education, and
political organization), that require institutional devices.
 Each institution has personnel, a charter, a set of norms or
rules, activities, material apparatus (technology), and a
function.
 He argued that satisfaction of these needs transformed the
cultural instrumental activity into an acquired drive through
psychological reinforcement.
Perspective on Culture:
 Radcliffe-Brown focused on social structure rather than
biological needs.
 He suggested that a society is a system of relationships
maintaining itself through cybernetic feedback, while
institutions are orderly sets of relationships whose
function is to maintain the society as a system.
 Radcliffe-Brown, inspired by Augustus Comte, stated
that the social constituted a separate "level" of reality
distinct from those of biological forms and inorganic
matter.
He argued that explanations of social phenomena had to
be constructed within the social level. Thus, individuals
were replaceable, transient occupants of social roles.
Unlike Malinowski's emphasis on individuals, Radcliffe-
Brown considered individuals irrelevant.
1. E.E. Evans-Pritchard
2. Sir Raymond Firth
3. Meyer Fortes
4. Sir Edmund Leach
5. Lucy Mair
6. Robert K. Merton
7. Talcott Parsons
8. Audrey Richards
Perspective on Culture:
 Culture is said to be shaped by environmental and
technological conditions. Cultures evolve when people are able
to increase the amount of energy under their control.
 Neo-evolutionism is a social theory that tries to explain
the evolution of societies by drawing on Charles Darwin's
theory of evolution and discarding some dogmas of the
previous social evolutionism.
 Leslie White, Julian Steward, Marshall Sahlins and Elman
Service as main propounders.
 the evolutionary stages are abstractions applicable to the
growth of human culture.
 culture grows out of culture with new combinations, syntheses
continually formed.
 technology is the basic determinant of cultural evolutionism.
He also refers to it as Cultural Materialism.
 the other factors remaining constant, culture evolves as energy
harnessed per capita, per year is increased, the system not
only increase in size but become more highly evolved , they
become more differentiated and more specialized functionally.
 Cultural Evolution may be defined as quest for regularities or
laws. There are three ways in which evolutionary data can be
analyzed.
 Multilinear evolution is a methodology based on the
assumption that regularities in culture change occur. This is
concerned with historical reconstruction with any set laws.

1. Unilineal evolution: the classical 19th century

formulation which dealt with particular cultures,
placing them in stages of universal sequence.
2. Universal evolution: This designates the modern
revamping of unilineal evolution which is concerned
with culture than with cultures.
3. Multilinear evolution: It is distinctive in searching
parallels of limited occurrence instead of universals.
1. Specific Evolution refers to the
particular sequence of change and
adaptation of a particular society in a
given environment.
2. General Evolution refers to general
progress of human society in which
higher forms arise and surpass lower
forms.
 G. MATERIALISM
(CULTURAL MATERIALISM)
Perspective on Culture:
 Culture is the product of the “material conditions” in which a
given community of people finds itself.
 Cultural Materialism is a scientific research strategy that
prioritizes material, behavioral and etic processes in the
explanation of the evolution of human socio-cultural systems.
It was first introduced by Marvin Harris in The Rise of
Anthropological Theory (1968).
 Cultural materialism embraces three anthropological schools
of thought, cultural materialism, cultural evolution and
cultural ecology.
Perspective on Culture:
 Cultural similarities and differences as well as models for
cultural change within a societal framework consisting of three
distinct levels: infrastructure, structure and superstructure.
 Infrastructure - consisting of “material realities” such as
technological, economic and reproductive (demographic)
factors mold and influence the other two aspects of culture
(structure and superstructure).
 The “structure” sector of culture consists of organizational
aspects of culture such as domestic and kinship systems and
political economy.
 The “superstructure” sector consists of ideological and
symbolic aspects of society such as religion.
Perspective on Culture:
 Cultural materialists believe that technological and economic
aspects play the primary role in shaping a society.
 Aims to understand the effects of technological, economic and
demographic factors on molding societal structure and
superstructure through strictly scientific methods.
 Cultural materialism views both productive (economic) and
reproductive (demographic) forces as the primary factors
which shape society.
 Systems such as government, religion, law, and kinship are
considered to be constructs that only exist for the sole purpose
of promoting production and reproduction.
1. Marvin Harris
2. Julian Steward
3. Leslie White
4. R. Brian Ferguson
5. Martin F. Murphy
6. Maxine L. Margolis
7. Allen Johnson
 anthropology.ua.edu/Faculty/murphy/histor.htm
 http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-
9780199766567/obo-9780199766567-0124.xml
 http://www.indiana.edu/~wanthro/theory_pages/Psychological.
htm
 http://www.sociologyguide.com/anthropology/main-approaches-
to-the-study-of-society-and-culture/neo-evolutionism.php