Structure, Function, Content, and Process

Abstract

THE structural approach in social anthropology developed by RadcliffeBrown and his students has become-along with evolutionary theory, functionalism, and psychoanalysis-one of the major influences on anthropological thought, but some adherents to this approach have confined their attention to social structure so narrowly as to exaggerate and misapprehend its place in human culture. In this paper I shall try to restore perspective to the study of human social organization by an examination of the use and abuse of the concept structure, by the explication of some equally significant concepts, and by suggesting a possible bridge between kinship studies per se and that new and nebulous American anthropological field entitled culture and personality. Some studies place so much emphasis on structure that, even where there probably is no structure in a given aspect of a society, their authors seem to insist upon its description. For example, Fortes on the Tallensi and EvansPritchard on the Nuer both speak at length of political structure when in fact only some kinship or lineage system prevails (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1940: 239-296). No doubt in both groups the kinship or lineage system or structure carries some, but not all, of the burden of law and order which in other societies is maintained through codes, courts, police, chieftainships, or government hierarchy. But kinship structures, no matter what they do, are not political structures, just as Chinese coolies, though they do some of the work of American trucks, cannot be designated as trucks. Of course, in a wider sense, Chinese coolies and American trucks are similar in function and use, in Linton's (1936:408) sense: namely, transportation. Both are carriers, but they are clearly different structures. To equate them is a procedure as scientifically unacceptable as to identify cabbage with cauliflower in a study of vegetables just because these two happen to have similar nutritive value and taste to the people who consume them. Their function and use are similar, not their structures. It is precisely for this reason that, if one society prescribes premarital intercourse as a matter of custom and law while the second one forbids it, though premarital intercourse does in fact take place according to certain unpronounced rules, an anthropologist who equates the two as comparable structures of courtship would be confusing the issue. Strangely enough, the obscuring of observed facts because of insistence on political structure in a society where no specialized political structure exists may be demonstrated by an example from Malinowski-who certainly would not have relished the thought of structuralism. In his study of crime and custom in the Trobriand Islands, Malinowski described how an incestuous union,