Cultural Anthropology

For the anthropologist, everything in the end comes back to a single question: What is culture? And how are we ever to understand the culture of another people, how are we to grasp both the complex whole that defines the symbolic and behavioral and material world in which another people live as a whole and living creation and yet also be able at the same time to pull it apart into its component parts or categories so that we may understand each one of these separately as well. Just as the biologist must both understand the physical forces that hold together an atom and the more complex because more ambiguous forces that hold together a living creature, we must as anthropologists focus both on the individual cultural trait and the culture as a whole. Whether that trait be an object, a way of doing something, a belief, or an attitude, we must both be able to isolate it and be able to relate it to all other traits within the culture complex that it belongs to and beyond that to the wider entire culture.

This is such an immense task that it is nearly impossible not to feel overwhelmed by its magnitude. It would be all too easy to throw up one's hands at the demands of such a holistic approach - or perhaps to decide that maybe being a sociologist wouldn't be such a bad thing. But a more meaningful and productive approach would be to follow the path that is attempted in this paper and that has been the preferred strategy for many of the most eminent scholars within the

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nt functions, which are neither intended nor recognized. Functionalism gained prominence in the works of 19th-century sociologists, including the French sociologist Emile Durkheim whose metaphor of a society was that of a social organism that has needs in the same way that a biological ones does. Other functionalists have used other metaphors, suggesting that we should look at function within a society as a way of understanding the interrelationships of parts within a system, the adaptive aspect of a phenomenon, or its observable consequences. What is called functionalism in the social sciences today is closely related to structuralism, with the term structural-functional a common one, especially in anthropology. Function refers to the way in which behavior takes on significance, not as a discrete act but as the dynamic aspect of some structure. Biological analogies are common in theories of structure and function in the social sciences. Very common is the image of the biological organ, with its close interdependence to other organs (as the heart to the lung) and the interdependence of activities (as circulation to respiration). And yet, while the two schools are often seen as essentially similar to each other, there remain fundam

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