Social Structures

Structural-Functionalism

Several theorists, in what came to be known as “structural-functionalist” anthropology, also known as “British social anthropology,” addressed the question of social structure as a part of their larger interest in the interconnectedness of individuals and societies. They include E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes, and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. Each regarded kinship as one of the chief entrées into social structure. Their approach was strongly comparative. They sought to identify the “rules” of descent that governed the composition of kin groups such as patrilineages, clans, and tribes, units they portrayed as integral to political organization. The structural-functionalists were later criticized by Harris for drawing universalistic conclusions from historically situated data, for example by not assigning enough weight to colonialism, the slave trade, and other encroachments on local political organization.

Radcliffe-Brown argued that social structures were “just as real as are living organisms” and that social structure was “the set of actually existing relations, at a given moment of time, which link together human beings”. He differentiated between his own approach, in which social structure encompassed “all social relations of person to person” and “the differentiation of individuals and of classes by their social role,” and that of Evans-Pritchard, whom he saw as using the term “to refer only to persistent social groups” in his 1940 ethnography of the Nuer.

Evans-Pritchard's ethnography was the best known example of “descent theory,” in which the structural-functionalists argued that segmentary lineages formed the basis for the societies, most of which were in Africa, that they presented as examples. Lineages were shown to unite and divide along blood lines. Their argument thus posited lineal underpinnings for kinship and political organization. What mattered to the individuals who comprised these systems, they argued, was related to the composition of the groups over time rather than laterally, in the present.

Comparative Anthropology

While the structural-functionalists were developing their theories of social structure in Britain, George Peter Murdock led the way in promoting a comparative approach in the United States. In 1949 he published Social Structure, in which he posited a model of human organization whereby human social structures were seen to conform to natural laws just as those recognized in the hard sciences. Murdock made his assertions based on (what came to be called) the Human Relations Area Files, a database he created in which features of numerous cultures were codified and described. This allowed him, and many others since, to compare structural features and to greatly advance the comparative method in anthropology. Murdock argued, for example, that postmarital residence carried more weight than lineage structure in influencing kinship terminologies.

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