Anthropology from Credo Reference: Schools of Thought & Theorists

From Reader's Guide to the Social Sciences
The notion of animism is not now widely used in anthropology and tends to be referred to more as a historical curiosity for what it can tell us about anthropological thought in the 19th century than for what it can say about the beliefs of people in the modern world. MORE

From Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought
Diffusionism is the term used by anthropologists and sociologists to account for the spread, through time, of aspects of culture—artistic traditions, language, music, myths, religious beliefs, social organization, technological ideas—from one society or group to another. MORE

From Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought
Evolutionism is a movement in anthropology and sociology which was much in vogue in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It refers to theories of change in which development is seen to go through stages of increasing complexity and diversification. It is closely related to the idea of progress and technology, which is most prevalent in capitalist society. MORE

From Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Broadly speaking, ‘functionalism’ refers to a range of theories in the human sciences, all of which provide explanations of phenomena in terms of the function, or purpose, they purportedly serve. MORE

From Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought.
It developed out of two motives: the need to evaluate anthropology's historical relationship with colonialism, arising out of a discontent with earlier functionalist paradigms for the study of societies; and to conduct social enquiry with a greater sense of political and economic perspectives. MORE

From Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Anthropology in general has been viewed as a particularly sympathetic arena of the human sciences within which to pursue the postmodernist agenda, especially with regard to issues of ‘otherness’, critiques of the programmes of the Enlightenment and elaborations of the notion of culture. MORE

From Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought
Primitivism, in anthropology, refers to a body of thought that there exist remote and exotic ‘primitive’: peoples whose lifestyles and technologies are considered to show marked contrast to those of modern societies.
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From Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
The conventional cultural relativism that most anthropologists, British or American, take to work with them is a combination of two notions: first, that insofar as there are behavioural differences between various populations of people, these differences are the result of cultural (sometimes societal) variation rather than anything else; and, second, that such differences as do exist are deserving of respect and understanding in their own terms. MORE

From Reader's Guide to the Social Sciences
Structuralism is the approach which seeks to isolate, and decode, deep structures of meaning, organised through systems of signs inherent in human behaviour (language, ritual, dress and so on). MORE

From Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought
Syncretism is the process of mingling different philosophies, religions or traditions of belief and practice, resulting in hybrid forms.
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From Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
J.F. McLennan (1869) posited a worldwide reverence for the ‘mystical power’ of living things, arguing that ‘there is no race of men that has not come through this primitive stage of speculative belief. MORE

US anthropologist whose book Patterns of Culture (1934) had a major influence on the ‘culture and personality’ research tradition of the 1930s to 1950s. She claimed that cultures could be categorized on the same lines as personalities. MORE

Boas greatly influenced American anthropology, particularly in his development of the theoretical framework known as cultural relativism, which argued against the evolutionary scale leading from savagery to Culture, laid out by his 19th-century predecessors. MORE

From Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Blending the theoretical framework of A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (and E. Durkheim) with the detailed ethnographic empiricism of B. Malinowski, E.E. Evans-Pritchard was the most significant figure in the foundation of modern social anthropology. MORE

From Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology
He produced an ethnographic record unsurpassed in its subtlety and precision of detail. He considered fieldwork to be an ‘empirical discipline’; a science in which it was essential to distinguish between the actor and the observer’s point of view. MORE

From Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology
In the wake of The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), and its sister volume of collected papers, Local Knowledge (1983), Clifford Geertz became celebrated for initiating an interpretive revolution across disciplines, which shifted the focus of anthropological study from structure to meaning. MORE

From Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Alfred Cort Haddon is best known for two contributions to early British anthropology: his leadership of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Strait in 1898–9 and his efforts to institutionalise anthropology as a discipline in the UK. MORE

From Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Marvin Harris has been one of the most important scholars of cultural anthropology over the course of decades. He supported and developed theories of the so-called cultural materialism. MORE

He helped to formulate the principles of structuralism by stressing the interdependence of cultural systems and the way they relate to each other, maintaining that social and cultural life can be explained by a postulated unconscious reality concealed behind the reality by which people believe their lives to be ordered. MORE

From Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Malinowski treated culture as an instrumental reality and emphasised its derivation from human needs, from the basic universal needs of the individual organism to the highly elaborated and often specialised needs of a complex society. MORE

US anthropologist who established the practice of fieldwork in anthropology and – with her account of adolescence in Samoa – popularized the idea within her own country that there are alternatives to the American way of life. MORE

From Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Radcliffe-Brown, along with Bronislaw Malinowski, is credited as a co-founder of the functionalist school of anthropology—and in Radcliffe-Brown’s case the structural-functionalist branch of that school. MORE