Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942)
Malinowski's contribution to functional theory was in proposing a theoretical guidance based on the assumption that all cultural traits constitute bound parts of the society in which they exist, that is, that every cultural pattern, every religious belief, or position represents a part of the society's culture and performs a function in that culture. Malinowski believes that the culture of any society arises and develops within the framework of satisfying the biological needs of individuals, limiting them to nutrition, procreation, physical comfort, safety, relaxation, movement, and growth. Malinowski sees culture as “that combination of tools, natures of social groups, human ideas, beliefs, and customs that together constitute the system in which man is in a position that forces him to adapt himself to this total system in order to achieve his necessary needs.” Malinowski asserts that every culture is a comprehensive, functional, integrated entity. He likens it to a living organism, such that we cannot understand any part of culture except in light of its relationship to the whole, and the function it performs with other elements of culture. That is, culture is studied as it actually exists, and it is not necessary to research the history of its origin and development.
Malinowski emphasizes the biological foundations on which anthropological theory is based, that human beings in every time and place must satisfy their necessary needs that enable them to survive. That is, human beings must satisfy their necessary needs for food and air, and they must reproduce, and provide themselves with comfort, health, security, and other necessary needs that preserve the human species’ survival and continuation. That is, humans are not like other animals and live only on physical motives, but on cultural motives. We see in every society types of cultural responses to all these necessary needs, because, according to Malinowski’s opinion, “job can only be defined by the satisfaction of needs through activity in which individuals cooperate, use machines, and consume what they produce.”
Malinowski believes that cultural responses to necessary biological needs have imposed on humans a number of necessities resulting from these necessary needs, which are:
First: As a result of the necessary need for food, cultural responses emerged in the form of obtaining food, which is known as economic organization, regardless of whether this organization is naive, uncomplicated, complex, or comprehensive of a number of rules regulating economic activity, represented in the manufacture of machines and tools necessary to produce food and use them for various other purposes, along with other accompanying phenomena such as ownership of land and its divisions, distribution of wealth among members of society, division of labor, and so on.
Second: The second necessity, which is a normative, i.e. cultural, necessity appears in response to the need to interpret culture itself with the aim of reaching the basic function of human culture represented in the processes of cooperation and common life, with the manifestations of joint work between members of society that this requires for the public interest, and by doing so certain social rules emerge.
Third: The political organization that determines the authorities in any society, and is associated in most societies with tyranny and oppression, and aims to regulate the relations between members of society among themselves, regulate their relations with other societies, and provide them with protection against attacks that may fall upon them from the outside.
Fourth: The necessity represented by the ways and means by which the social cultural heritage is transmitted from one generation to the next, that is, the education responsible for preparing members of society educationally and providing them with the necessary knowledge that qualifies them to carry out their specific roles in society, and it represents the laws regulating human behavior in all its aspects.
Malinowski's writings on the groups of the Trobriand Islands in Malaysia appeared between 1922-1935, and these studies constituted, as many scholars believe, the bulk of his scientific production during the period he spent as a teacher at the University of London. The information he collected from the Trobriand Islands formed the core of his lectures and lessons that he delivered in London, especially those related to his experience in collecting that information and the method he followed in field study.
It is noted that Malinowski sought to achieve some goals through what he published, and among those goals could be to emphasize his opinion that aspects of culture cannot be studied in themselves, that is, in isolation from the goals that they seek to achieve, meaning that the researcher must understand them within the limits of their uses: A boat, for example, among the Trobriand groups is not in itself considered more than a mere material piece, but it is made for several purposes. When making it, people face many difficulties that may not be overcome except within the limits of collective volunteer work. Each step of making a boat has its own rituals, and these rituals and beliefs do not lie merely in the steps of making the boat, but even when using it in sailing, in confronting dangers, in the success of trade, and so on. Due to his precise experience in the issues of the social anthropology method, Malinowski notes that the researcher must not rely too much on generalities, and he must not rely too much on the explanations of his informant accompanying him in the field study in order to reach an understanding of the social truth, because people always say one thing and do another thing. Malinowski gives advice to students of social anthropology that the primitive man who was portrayed to us as a savage human being is in fact a human being like us who has a mind and uses this mind like us. However, Malinowski had extracted these principles in his studies that he carried out in the Trobriand Islands, where he discovered the truth about the primitive man and his mentality. This issue of rationality is very important to Malinowski, as he wrote in the introduction to his book “Crime and Habit in a Savage Society” that the modern anthropological researcher has A mountain on the way to reach some general rules in some issues, such as the issue of whether the primitive mind differs from our minds or is like our minds, or whether the entire life of savage groups is permanently guided by the world of the unseen or by supernatural forces, or on the contrary, and other issues. However, these general rational problems, i.e. general forces, rules, etc., can be, from Malinowski’s point of view, the basis for a global theory of social man.
In his book “Heroes of the Western Pacific,” Malinowski presents an analysis that may be considered a model of modern anthropology, even though some of his interpretations are subject to objection today. Malinowski shows the intersection of elements of Trobriand culture by describing the economic system of matriarchal families, where the individual seeks his origin and kinship through the mother, and where the son is not related to his father, but to his maternal uncle, who is his clan. A Trobriand individual works hard in his orchard to support his sister and her children, not his wife and children, and more than 75% of his production is distributed to his maternal relatives. Here, the intersection of the economic system with the kinship system in Trobriand society becomes clear, as Malinowski analyzes it from the reality of their social life. This social system allows the chiefs to have multiple wives, and the chiefs prefer to marry women who have rich brothers in order to have a number of wealthy in-laws. Since the matriarchal system in Trobriand imposes duties on the brother towards his sister, the chief finds himself drowning in the wealth provided to his wives by their sisters. The leader does not store the wealth that he obtains, especially food commodities, but rather distributes it on a number of occasions and celebrations. Through the leader’s commitment to the continuous distribution of wealth in such celebrations, he is concerned with the tasks entrusted to him as a leader, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the continuation of this commitment depends on the continuation of the kinship system.
Malinowski's analysis of the powers exercised by the chief in the village of Omarkana, which dominates the district of Kiriwina, provides an indication that the village represents the basic political unit of Trobriand society, and even the most senior chiefs exercise their authority primarily over their village, and secondarily over their district. The village commune collectively cultivated its orchards, waged war, held religious ceremonies, and sent trade missions. Its political and economic autonomy remains very important. The village leader exercises some authority over the district, that is, over a group of villages that join his village in war and in major religious celebrations. All the men of rank are distributed in the form of a pyramid headed by the Omarkana leader. This leader is the master of the most powerful magical powers that control the rain and the sun. Ranking men wear distinctive jewelry, but they are distinguished above all from the common people by the presence of taboos, the number of which increases as one moves up the hierarchy. High-ranking people and chiefs have no judicial or executive power over lower-ranking individuals in villages not associated with their village. When a leader asks members of his village or district or foreigners to provide services, he is obligated to compensate for these services. As we have explained, the leader obtains the necessary resources through polygamy, which is the privilege of leaders, and through the gift that each brother-in-law owes to his sister’s husband. A high-ranking leader marries one of the sisters of each village leader in his district, and they owe him a portion of their crops and valuables. The ranking chief uses this wealth to hold large celebrations, and generally to integrate a number of villages into the "provincial economy." Thus, the leader is the instrument of a broader economy than the village economy.
The chief has no general power to settle disputes, which remain the domain of lineages. The leader has only one weapon, which is magic, and he has the best magicians at his disposal. Thus Trobriand society does not know a central government. Trobriand society exemplifies a hereditary hierarchy linking various lineages and local village commons without performing the function of an apparent political structure. The authority of the leaders is the foundation of economic and religious relations that go beyond the framework of private village commons without, however, integrating these commons into a single economic and ceremonial network that covers the entire island. Leaders have the most powerful magical powers, which they must put at the service of their commons. Therefore, their privileges are the other side of their duties and the reward for the exceptional services they render to their commons at all levels, whether imaginary or real.
Trobriand society represents the most famous example of the importance and form that exchanges may assume in fragmented primitive societies. In addition to exchanging necklaces and bracelets, large sea missions provide the possibility of supplying the necessary raw materials, such as stones for axes, bamboo, clay, and so on. The cola distribution network constituted a broad political nexus linking fragmented communities that had to ensure the regularity of a vital trade without the assistance of a central government to maintain and consolidate peace. When analyzing the cola distribution network system, Malinowski tried to clarify economic activities and mix them with the ritual system represented by magic and sorcery. Trobriand groups practice agriculture, boatbuilding, and fishing through a method of dividing labor among individuals according to types of economic activities, which leads them to exchange goods between the different Trobriand islands through the cola distribution network. Malinowski analyzes the Kula network as a complex system of religious rites, rituals, and ceremonies in which certain ritual materials are exchanged between members of groups that belong to a particular Kula network.
Despite the complex structure of the Kula network, it plays a commercial role, because when one of the individuals in a network wants to visit his partner on another island, he must carry with him the products and artifacts that he deems necessary to carry with him. Malinowski analyzes the rituals of reception and religious celebrations during which goods are exchanged, as well as the presentation of gifts, to the extent of the satisfaction of the person receiving the gift. This is how Malinowski explains the Trobriand groups' philosophy of distributing their goods through his analysis of the cola distribution network.
Radcliffe-Brown tried to develop social anthropology into a natural science based on the comparative scientific study of social patterns among primitive peoples. He made a constructive contribution to the study of social structure and kinship patterns. He and Malinowski are considered the founders of the modern British school of anthropology. He wrote a book: "The Andaman Islands" (1922). His scientific articles and lectures were collected in three books: “Structure and Function in Primitive Society” (1952), “A Natural Science of Society” (1957), and “Method in Social Anthropology” (1958).
One of the most important trends that influenced Brown and whose ideas dominated his issue was the issue of similarity between living organisms and social life, that is, on the basis of similarity between social life and biological organic life as was the case with Emile Dor Chaim. Brown believes that society, like a living organism, consists of parts or units that overlap functionally and depend on each other. For example, just as the members of a living organism cooperate to keep the organism alive, society’s systems and traditions, in turn, work to maintain and continue society. Brown defines function as the role that any partial activity plays in the overall activity of which it is a part. Thus, the function of any social system lies in the role it plays in the social structure consisting of individuals who are linked to each other in a single, cohesive whole of specific social relations, and the function of any social habit is the role that the specific habit plays in the overall social life on the basis that this life is the foundation of the overall social system. Brown gives importance to social life in any human society as long as the social system constitutes, in his opinion, a unity of entity and function, that is, it is not just a gathering or crowd, but rather an integrated whole like an organic being.
We saw how Malinowski was interested in the concept of culture and made it the focus and basis of his functional studies and analyses. As for Brown, he cares about society, returning it to its natural order. Brown then paid attention to Persons, considering them to be structural units, as these units constitute the whole and make it a structure. This importance that Brown gave to Persons made him differentiate between them and Individuals. Persons who are members of society can each be a citizen with a specific profession. That is, according to Brown, the person embodies a set of social relationships, while the individual is a biological being, meaning that he embodies a set of physiological and behavioral processes, and is studied by physiologists and psychologists. As for individuals, their study falls within the scope of the social structure, and it is not possible to study any social structure without them, considering them to be the main units of the structure. Therefore, the study of society according to Brown in its structural sense refers to the internal interconnection that links the social structure and the process of social life. Therefore, the use of concepts such as process, structure, and function are only axes on which Brown built his theory in explaining social patterns. The idea of function, in its structural meaning, according to Brown, is based on the fact that structure constitutes a set of relationships that link those structural units to varying degrees. According to Brown, the family is a structural unit and the family relationships that exist between its members are structural relationships that are impossible to see in their generality at any moment, but we can observe them. The most important thing that distinguishes Brown's interpretations and functional analyzes is its focus on the social structure. It is its focus on the social structure and its function, which led to the emergence of a new trend in anthropology that became known as the structural-functional trend.
Radcliffe-Brown, in his attempt to give anthropology a new purity and methodology, forced this science to dissolve in the general theory related to societies, that is, in sociology, and at the same time Brown gave anthropology an epistemological distinction. Since relatively uncomplicated (primitive/uncomplex) societies are the subject of anthropology's study, Brown saw the possibility of taking the basic concepts of sociology (structure, function, society, etc., as we mentioned). Thus it seemed to Brown that, based on minor parts of sociology, he could enrich his method. Likewise, it may be said that the idea of social structure appeared in anthropology with the analyzes presented by Brown and with his definition of the concept of structure.
Truth be told, the concept of structure is marred by some ambiguity because it appears in many forms in the works of many social scientists. Opinions were numerous and varied about this concept to the point that it was impossible to reach a single comprehensive and specific definition that scholars agreed upon. In his book “Social Structure” (1965), Murdock believes that the concept of social structure indicates the cohesion of social institutions, as these institutions are not a random grouping, but rather they have a structure. One of the purposes of this type of analysis is precisely to understand the cohesion of social institutions and to show their mutual dependency, and therefore it is noted that this idea is excluded in the form of structural-functional analysis. More generally, the concept of structure among functionalists and structuralists often receives an interpretation close to the concept of pattern. In cases where the concept of structure is used in opposition to other expressions or in relation to them, we find that Gurvich, in an article he published entitled “The Concept of Social Structure” (1955), distinguishes, for example, built groups from organized groups, and thus he believes that social classes can be “adopted” without being “organized.” The concept of structure is encountered in other circumstances with the concept of coincidence. Likewise, the concept of structure often refers to the fixed elements of a particular system versus its variable elements... Thus, the idea of the concept refers to a specific model, either to the constants of the model, or to the totality of the constants and functions that link the variables to each other, or also to the totality of the constants and functions. In other cases, too, the concept of structure is used with some frequency to distinguish the essential from the secondary, the essential from the non-essential, and the original from the derivative... Thus, Mannheim sees that social structure is “the fabric of social forces in their mutual activity, from which various models of observation and thought emerge”... In this case, the concept of social structure implicitly refers to the totality of the elements of a particular social system that the sociologist guesses controls over them and determines the others. For Mannheim, it is about the material elements (ambiguously referred to as “social forces”) that allow the interpretation of the intellectual elements, which reminds us of the distinction that Marx makes between infrastructure and superstructure. Some sociologists use the concept of social structure as synonymous with “gradient system,” and the variables of gradation in this case are considered primary and decisive.
Anthropologists such as Cropper, Evans-Pritchard, and Radcliffe-Brown refused to consider some categories of variables as decisive, so that the concept of social structure became for them a simple synonym for other concepts, such as the concepts of social organization or the organization of social relations. Thus, the concept of structure can appear interconnected with the concept of system if we consider that the system is the totality of “mutually dependent elements.” But it can also appear as if it is implicitly or explicitly defined by confronting or adhering to another set of concepts, in very diverse directions that perhaps only the general situation can determine.
However, the concept of structure, among those of the functionalist orientation, was associated with in-depth field studies, especially those carried out by Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands, as well as by Radcliffe-Brown in the Andaman Islands, where consequently definitions of social structure emerged that were far from being linked to function according to Brown and others, and the emergence of a new trend that combines structure and function, known as the structural-functional trend.
Brown believes that the concept of structure necessarily indicates the existence of a kind of arrangement between the parts that enter into the composition of the whole, because there are certain relationships and links between the parts that compose the whole and make it a cohesive and distinct structure. Hence, the partial units that enter into the formation of the social structure are the individual members of society, each of whom occupies a specific position in society and performs a known role in social life. As we mentioned previously, this constitutes the basic point in Radcliffe-Brown’s theory of the social structure, because the individual human being is not considered a component part of the structure that consists of people who are members of society, not in the sense that they are individuals.
The individual human being is a biological being consisting of a large group of organic and psychological units and processes, and thus a subject for research in biology and psychology. As for the person as a person, he is a group of social relationships united according to his social status as a citizen, husband, father, member of society, etc. From here, the human being, the “person” and not the “individual,” becomes the subject of social anthropology’s research, which continues with the continuity of the social system that organizes the roles of people and diagnoses and defines their relationships among each other... This is what explains, in Brown’s opinion, the continuation of the clan, the tribe, and the nation as an embodiment of certain organizations of people despite the change that afflicts the units composing it from time to time. By social structure, Brown means the following:
First: Social groups that have existed for a long and sufficient period, and they are the morphological forms of human society that represent the gathering of patterns into social units of different sizes.
Second: The existing disparity between individuals and groups in a society. This disparity determines the social roles that individuals and groups play in one society, such as the difference in social status between men and women, between the elderly and the young, between the youth and children, between the boss and the subordinate, and between the employer and the workers.
Third: All social relationships that exist between one person and another are part of the structure that consists of bilateral relationships, such as the relationships between a father and his son, a cousin and his sister’s son, etc. The kinship system in non-complex societies is the most important social system and determines the network of social relations of the society.
According to Brown, the social structure is characterized by several characteristics:
1- The real structure, which is a set of real relationships between at least two people, and may include a large number of people. What distinguishes these relationships is their variable nature, whether between individuals or groups, meaning that they are not fixed due to the entry of new members into society through birth or migration to society, migration from society, and deaths. The real social structure also includes all the partial and variable social relations between the members of any human society.
2- The structural picture that is characterized by relative stability for a period of time that lengthens or shortens according to certain variables. The structural picture is subject to change in cases suddenly or gradually... Revolution or external invasion may lead to sudden, sweeping change.
3- The social structure cannot be seen directly, but the researcher can observe the structure in the form of tangible social relationships between individuals and groups in a society... Then, studying social structure is one thing and studying social relations is another thing. Some anthropologists use the term social structure to refer to only fixed social groups such as nations, tribes, clans, etc., which maintain their continuity and entities despite the changes to which their membership is exposed, whether increasing or decreasing.
5- The anthropological researcher studies the social structure with the aim of reaching objective results using a comprehensive approach, that is, a study that includes all parts of the social structure and all its manifestations, because the elements and parts of the structure interact as a whole, and the researcher must reveal the direct and indirect relationships that connect those elements and parts. In other words, it must determine the process of mutual influences between the units of the social structure.
6- The continuity of the social structure and its survival for a long period of time, which is a feature that distinguishes the structure and qualifies it to carry out its basic social function of maintaining the cohesion and survival of society. The survival of the structure is a renewable survival, not a static one, meaning that it is variable and not static.
Structural functionalism has become a study not of a lifestyle, but of an actual mode of existence, transcending the ethnocentric tendency that characterized anthropology in the first half of the nineteenth century, which saw in other societies only types of life that had been surpassed by development.
Structural functionalism considers that every society, as a system of institutions and practices that have significance, is able to continue its movement and transformations and carry out its function despite the apparent changes internally and externally at the “personal” level, and is capable of non-important practices. Society is not just inorganic rubble, as anthropologists of the first half of the nineteenth century imagined, but rather a functional “system” of institutions that meet basic human needs. The humanitarian and social function of these institutions is what gives them their semi-legitimacy and permanence. The British anthropologist Lucy Mayer expressed this by saying: “Interpreting human culture as a mechanism of solidarity aimed at fulfilling social needs, in which each element is linked to the rest and remains conditioned by it, imposes the necessity of paying more serious attention to the uncomplicated institutions of uncivilized peoples than was done in the past, and as long as we affirm that the tribes are still living conditions of irregular barbarism, conditions whose cruelty even the tribes recognize, it becomes easier.” We must look forward to the triumph of civilization with its attendant benefits, and consider that all vital resistance will be temporary and will rise when the natives adopt a more rational concept.”