In Puli, the market town where I did my fieldwork, that would have meant trying to sort out the relationships of 35,000 people, plus as many more in the surrounding countryside. And most of these people lived behind brick walls or spent a good deal of time in buses and taxis traveling here and there. The practical result was that any references to “Chinese social structure” were to theoretical constructs developed by reading about the subject in mostly secondary sources, or asking local folks who mostly replied in terms of idealized notions instead of specific cases. It wasn’t the kind of immediate, solid grounding that Vic Turner’s understanding of Ndembu social life in the villages he studied brought to his analyses of particular ritual events.

So I find myself wondering, what does a Boasian/Weberian try to find out first. Then, where does he go from there? How do you translate that theoretical stance into a practical program if all you have is at most a year or two to learn enough to say something valuable?

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For instance, I think the idea that you “understand the local social structure and then interpret other phenomena in relation to that context” is pretty vague — it describes huge swaths of social science, from new institutional economics to Durkheim. To be classical ‘structure functional’ you’d have to add several additional features: the existence of externally bounded, homeostatic social systems as natural kinds, analyzing ritual etc. as epiphenomenal of social structure, a lack of attention to history, etc. etc.

The problem is specifying how you saturate a general approach of ‘see things in light of their general social context’ with a particular analytic, and explaining that in the case of a Boas/Weber hookup is the hard bit.

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I’m thinking about it. Let me get back to you.

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I’m curious about what you mean when you describe yourself as Boasian but in a Weberian kind of way.

For better or worse, structural-functionalism as described by Radcliffe-Brown had an explicit program: Step 1 was to analyze social structure, Step 2 to understand how something else, rituals, say, or conventional sentiments related to social structure. There was also the assumption that research conducted in this manner would contribute to a science, conceived in a classic positivist manner as a body of generalizations both empirically grounded and logically connected—generalizations that would transcend any particular case.

The example that always comes to my mind is “The Mother’s Brother in South Africa.” Here the generalization that in a patrilineal society with virilocal marriage the mother’s brother can be expected to have a special relationship to his sister’s children was derived from South African data but supposed to apply more widely, even outside of Africa. I remember this vividly because it led me to notice that in Taiwan, the mother’s brother both has a special role to play in his sister’s wedding and a distinctive ongoing relationship to his sister’s kids. Noticing this gave me an answer when a Maryknoll missionary who had asked me what anthropologists with only a year or two of fieldwork could possibly teach him, who had been in Taiwan for fifteen years and spoke Taiwanese fluently. A hah, I thought, there is some point to all that stuff I read in graduate school.

It may have been true that after a while, structural-functionalist anthropology came to suffer from what Evans-Pritchard labeled “the dead hand of competence.” The umpty-leventh description of lineage organization didn’t have the pizzazz of the first. But there was something solid there.

But, I have to confess, when I read “Boasian in a kind of Weberian way,” I don’t know what that is. I can only imagine that it has something to do with piling up lots of ethnography about particular peoples and trying, in each separate case to come up with some ideal types, conceived as mental models, to account for the observations. Is this anywhere close to what you have in mind?

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So there you go: to this day, I don’t adhere to any particular theoretical stream, although I do identify as somewhat PoMo (yeah, yeah, laugh it up) and feminist with some quite pronounced disposition toward ecclecticity (is that a word???). In terms of methods, though, I strongly identify with radical participation/experiential anthropology. Of course, there is a whole theoretical approach that is intrinsic to that but it’s not exclusive of others.

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The strcuk-fcuk tshirts MUST happen.

As for recycled structure-functionalism, I whole-heartedly agree. Witchcraft is a good case in point: it used to be it was caused by ‘social structure’ but “now we know it’s caused by ‘Modernity’ but don’t worry this isn’t a structure functional explanation because we use the word ‘dialectic’ a lot when describing it.”

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“what he was teaching us was that what you see depends on what you believe, What it’s reasonable for you to think, faced with a particular experience, depends on what ideas you already have”

Sounds a bit off to me. The way I learned it, E-P pointed out that the questions the oracle answered were different from those that a scientist would ask. The scientist and the Azande could agree on the how of an event (The termites chewed up the granary’s leg, which collapsed causing the granary to fall on X). The Azande, however, also wanted to know, “Why X? Why at this particular moment?” The answer was witchcraft. Given similar questions, a strict Calvinist might say Predestination, a Chinese Taoist healer, like the one I studied with in Taiwan might assert that, given astrological significance of X’s birthdate, his being in that time and place was offensive to the God of the Year.

One might argue that science is science precisely because it rules such questions out of bounds and radically simplifies the list of possible questions to include only those answerable by focusing on the how instead of the why, the area in which individuals with radically different cosmologies can still find common ground.

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Regarding your urgent question, go ahead and distinguish between Evans-Pritchards the structuralist and the structural-functionalists. Look at Evans-Pritchards’ students. Who is more of a student of Evans-Pritchard, Max Gluckman or Mary Douglas? I don’t think there’s any single right way of looking at it. I’m sure Monica Wilson knows what she’s talking about. There’s a lot to be said your viewpoint as well. I don’t think a terminus post quem will reconcile the two perspectives.

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The curmudgeon (who used to teach courses on Religion, Myth, and Ritual Symbolism) speaks:

A good argument can be made that the strong tendency in even social scientific descriptions of religion to privilege belief and to treat belief as the cause of religious behavior is an artifact of the Protestant reformation, which radically de-emphasized the communal and institutional context of ritual in favor of a one-on-one relationship between the Believer and his or her monotheistic God in which Faith is the key operator.

There are, however, alternatives. In the Analects, Confucius says, for example, that a gentleman participates in ritual “as if the spirits were there” but does not concern himself with whether or not they actually exist. He is, then, a progenitor of the functionalist school whose Western lineage runs from Robertson Smith (Religion of the Semites) through Durkheim (The Elementary Forms) to Radcliffe-Brown and Guy Swanson, in which ritual behavior is seen as primary and belief as
a (much distorted) reflection of what is done ritually instead of being its cause. (Radcliffe-Brown, by the way, explicitly mentions Confucius.)

More nuanced views see belief and behavior as systemically or dialectically related, with one feeding off the other and influence moving in both directions.

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The intellectualist approach understands ritual as a type of rational behaviour based on explanatory principles that formally, if not substantially, are indistinguishable from those of Western science. To put it crudely, the intellectualist approach does not distinguish the behaviour of ‘planting’ from that of ‘chanting’ if both are backed by explanatory theories arguing for their necessity in some practical endeavour, in this case agriculture. Both are seen as rational instrumental or technical actions in relation to a theoretical background. They are ‘rational’ as the behaviour can be explained and defended from the theory underlying it. Thus, magical practices in socalled primitive societies are not irrational and nonsensical, but are merely based on flawed theoretical premises.1
In contrast to the intellectualist position, the symbolist approach does not accept that ritual should be seen as instrumental actions based on theoretical presumptions about the world. There is no direct causal connection between underlying beliefs and ritual actions, and ‘chanting’ should not be understood as motivated by the same type beliefs about the world as is the case with ‘planting’. Rituals should instead be understood as expressive behaviour that communicates certain meanings, notably about social structure, coded in symbolic language. Thus, the job of the observer is to acquire the interpretational ‘key’ necessary in order to decipher the message inherent in this apparently irrational or wrong action.2

In his footnotes, Sorenson provides the following examples.

1 Representatives of the intellectualist approaches to ritual and religion are E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom
London: John Murray, 1871); J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 3rd edn, 13 vols (London: MacMillan Press Ltd., 1911–15), I: The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings (2 vols); I. C. Jarvie and J. Agassi, ‘The Problem of the Rationality of Magic’, in British Journal of Sociology, 19 (1967), 55–74; J. Agassi and I. C. Jarvie, ‘Magic and Rationality Again’, British
Journal of Sociology, 24 (1973), 236–45; R. Horton, ‘African traditional thought and Western science’, in Rationality, ed. by B. Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell Publications, 1970), pp. 131–71; J. Skorupski, Symbol and Theory: A Philosophical Study of Theories of Religion in Social Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
2 Representatives of the symbolist approach to ritual and religion are M. Mauss, A General Theory of Magic, trans. by Robert Brain (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972; 1st edn (French) 1902–3); E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. by Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Free Press, 1965; 1st edn (French) 1915); J. Beattie, Other Cultures (London: Cohen & West).

I was reminded, while scanning Sorenson’s article, of Evans-Pritchard’s own Theories of Primitive Religion in which E-P identifies three types of theories: intellectualist (attributed to Tylor and Frazer and said to be composed of “If I were a horse” stories), structural functionalist (attributed to Radcliffe-Brown, in which function is related to social structure) and psychological (attributed to Malinowski, in which function is related to psychological, primarily emotional, needs).

All this is, of course, a highly British perspective, which excludes from the category “theory” the writings of American anthropologists, which were, at the time that structural functionalism was flourishing, largely written off as examples of atheoretical “threads and patches” description.

That said, there is (speaking to Kerim) a substantial body of anthropology developing the structural-functional paradigm by incorporating into it the dynamics of social and psychological conflict theories rooted in Marx, Freud, and Simmel. I speak here of the Manchester school (Gluckman, V. Turner, etc.) and also of Mary Douglas’ work, especially Natural Symbols.

In the framework provided by this understanding, MWO is seen as a step away from structural functionalism to the kind of intellectualist theory later exemplified by, for example, Robin Horton.

Hope this is helpful.

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