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Durkheim

Peter Worseley 1956

-Began the move to Marxist anthropology

-Reinterpreted Fortes' analysis of Tallensi society

-They are subsistence farmers in Northern Ghana, Fortes analysed it in a functional style, believing that religion held the lineage together. Worseley saw it more practically, land was held on to in response to its value

-Demonstrated Marx's axiom that control of the means of production conferred power, elucidated the economic basis of lineage organization in small-scale socieites

General Marx

Marx says that modern society is created by oppressed/ oppressive. Durkheim sees these struggles and unhappiness as temporary effects of wider change that will be quickly corrected

Original human condition: primitive communalism

familial kinship, no land ownership

Marx considered the self-sufficient peasant family as a past historical phase and a recurrent one

Marvin Harris 1979

Rejected the theory that people's ideas can transform the material conditions of their existence. He believed material conditions determined consciousness

-CULTURAL MATERIALISM, purist marxism, that technology and demography determined the conditions of social life

-The isolated (etic) observer is able to objectively define relationships of the emic.

IDEAS CANNOT DETERMINE MATERIAL CONDITIONS

White 1943

Simple economies:

-Direct exchange between producers, goods are exchanged for goods and are valued by their usefulness

Mercantile economies:

-A capitalist is a person who uses money in an exchange to generate more money by: lending and charging interest or by trading in commodities

-If a merchant owns the goods and tools he can pay the worker a subsistence wage and generate profit, then invest in more workers and materials = positive feedback

-This is generally more efficient but then merchants will continue to cut down until the workers will eventually seize the means of production

-Replaced Marx's emphasis on the control of human labour and accesss to resources with the idea that the decisive force driving social evolution was the control of energy

-Because the original social system relied on their body alone they were trapped to live in a simple form

-Technology drives change in the social system and social life changes ideology

-He only considered energy as a determining factor and therefore saw development on a linear scale

phenomenology

Core:

-Social relationships are generated by exchange

-money confers the power to buy labour

-True value is determined by the cost of production

-social systems NOT STABLE

-he believed that we were all developing in one direction but via different paths

Marx was divorced from the materials he described

Developed in response to dissatisfaction in Anth:

- can you really treat small scale societies as isolated suspended in time & space

-can functionalists really treat all elements in a social system with equal force?

-Can structuralists really argue that social life is drivne by the structure of people's thoughts?

Marxist anthropology sought a compromise position that the material conditions of existence could not completely determine social organisation. They moved from functionalism to processual modes, during transition, multiple modes of production can exist at once.

Marxism in Anthropology

Goods should be exchanged because of their labour value, if they are exchanged because of their production cost they are fetishised

SYNTAGMATIC CHAIN- Subject + object linked by a verb, the women threw the ball

PARADMATIC CHAIN- Alternatives that could be substituted in, the child threw the ball

Language gradually changes, it can be studied:

Synchronically: in terms of its position in the structure of language at any time

Diachronically: as its meaning is transformed by changes in structure

-Language did not originate from imitating sounds, words derive meaning through arbitrary association of sound and meaning

-Language has all the qualities Durkheim attributed to collective consciousness, it is a force beyond individuals which they have to accept

-Sound= signfier + idea= signified = linguistic sign

-The meaning of each linguistic sign is determined by its position in the total language

1818-1883

structuralism: what appears to consciousness is not true reality, opposite of phenomenology

Marxism

Sassure 1957-1913

Structure of Kinship systems:

-There are strikingly similar marriage systems across the world, Asia, Australia & America states marriage should be cross-cousin

-In Africa there were descent systems- individuals marry out of a group outside their direct lineage

-Alliance systems- smaller groups that exchange partners.

Marxism believes that ideas a formed by the material conditions of our existence whereas structuralism believes it's cognitive

In functionalism everything interlocks, society is a great machine. Marxism sees society as something riddled with tensions and conflicts of interest- this characterises social life.

Structural Linguistics

Located structure in human thought, conceived of social interaction as the outward manifestation of cognitive structures

Belief is determined by the material conditions of our existence

Functionalism

Levi-Strauss

Structuralism

Social interaction is the outward manifestation of pre-determined cognitive structures

Behaviour is the product of the organisaiton of social structures

How can we explain social organisation and behaviour?

Durkheim & Mauss

Primitive Classification 1963

Durkheim believed that a cultures belief system has an internal logic which gave meaning to ritual actions

The origin of logical though is in the collective consciousness of the earliest societies.

-They found the earliest society (aborigine) and make a unilinear progression for how they increased in complexity

Elementary Forms of the religious Life 1915

Structural-Functionalism

-All people begun solitary walking in the outback, when they came together they experienced collective social currents which they interpreted as religion (religion originated in the deification of collective consciousness

-Individual consciousnesses are closed off to eachother so they need signs to communicate

-Sacred objects arise when there is a concrete realization of the sense of collective force felt during a ritual or interaction

Radcliffe-Brown

Understood cognitive structures and the product of social structures

Malinowski & Radcliffe-Brown

Social life= transactions in meaning rather than substance

-Religion will reflect the structure of their social system & function to maintain that social system in its present state

-Variations in myths are caused by variations in social systems

-More centralized governments= monotheistic, more egalitarian= polytheistic

Hertz

Derrida 1976

The meaning of a custom must be deduced from its place in a cognitive structure

e.g. right hands are often associated with strength, part of primitives seeing in dual oppositions

Poststructuralism

& Postmodernism

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