The Reactionary Nature of the Functionalist Social Anthropology Imported by Fei Hsiao-t'ung and Others

Abstract

Part of the reaction to the tentative steps taken by Fei Hsiao-t'ung and others toward the "restoration" of bourgeois sociology took the form of critiques of its major tenets. Chao Wei-pang's article takes as its focus Fei's involvement with Bronislaw Malinowski, the functionalist theories of the latter, and their introduction into China. Chao argues that the functionalist perspective led Fei to promote small-scale industrialization within rural cooperatives as a reformist palliative, and to avoid the root problem. At a more basic level, Chao charges that Fei's functionalist perspective led him to a kind of phenomenalist view in which "community types" were selected as the objects of analysis in preference to the socio-economic processes underlying them. In Chao's view this led Fei to reject evolutionary theories in general, and "Marxist-Leninist" theories of social development in particular, thus denying "any regularity to social development."