Cultural Adaptation

Abstract

For much of the twentieth century the concepts of culture and adaptation have been almost equally neglected by British social anthropologists. In both cases the origins of this neglect can be traced to the rejection of the nineteenth century evolutionist paradigm and its replacement by the paradigm of structural functionalist anthropology, which in Britain was associated with the switch from a historically based subject to one that became primarily focused on the study of existing societies through fieldwork. American anthropology did not undergo the same extreme paradigm shift as British anthropology, for although Boasian anthropology was equally antipathetic towards nineteenth century evolutionism, the debates over evolution and culture change remained as part of the agenda of American anthropology. For heuristic purposes it may be useful to draw a distinction between adaptation in the weak sense and adaptation in the strong sense, to distinguish between the very different role given to the concept of adaptation in different theoretical frameworks.