Thinking about Culture
This paradigm says all societies pass through stages from primitive state to complex civilization. Cultural differences are the result of different evolutionary stages.
Social Evolutionism
Franz Boas was the key player of this paradigm
Historicism/ Historical Particularism
Turning anthropology towards issues of culture and interpretation rather than the development of grand theories, reinforcement of the importance of studying culture from the perspective of the actors who are guided by that culture
Symbolic/Interpretive Anthropology
Cannot satisfactorily account for cultural variation, highly ethnocentric, not usually based on first-hand fieldwork.
Social Evolutionism
This paradigm states cultural practices, beliefs, and institutions fulfill psychological and social needs.
Functionalism.
Leslie White and Julian Steward are the key players of this paradigm
Ecological Anthropology/ Neo-Evolutionism
Taking anthropology away from grand theories of evolution and diffusion and refocusing its attention on the many different societies of the world and the great variety of cultural expression that characterizes them
Historicism/ Historical Particularism
Relies too heavily on the one-directional infrastructure-superstructure relationship to explain culture change
Cultural Materialism
This paradigm states the material world, especially economic conditions, shape people's customs and beliefs.
Cultural Materialism
EB Tylor, Herbert Spencer, and LH Morgan are the key scholars of this paradigm.
Gave value to social institutions by considering them not as mere custom (as proposed by early American ethnologists), but as active and integrated parts of a social system
Functionalism
Methods are imprecise and dependent upon the observer, primarily concerned with the structure of the human psyche, and it does not address historical change in culture
Structuralism
This paradigm says that culture is composed of hidden rules that govern the behavior of its practitioners and these rules can be discovered through identifying binary oppositions
Structuralism
Clifford Geertz and Victor Turner are the key players of this paradigm
Symbolic/Interpretive Anthropology
Anthropologists learned more about intimate interactions between humans and their environments
Ecological Anthropology/ Neo-evolutionism
Studies conducted were limited to egalitarian societies, it is a theory and methodology used to explain how things stay the same, as opposed to how things can change.
Ecological Anthropology/ Neo-evolutionism
This paradigm says that culture is a shared system of meaning and people make sense of their worlds through symbols and symbolic activities like myths and rituals
Symbolic/Interpretive Anthroplogy
A.R. Radcliffe Brown is the key player of this paradigm
Structural Functionalism
Contributed the following ideas to anthropology: cultural phenomena are to be studied in naturalistic fashion, cultural differences between groups are not due to differences in psychobiological equipment but to differences in sociocultural experience; and the use of the comparative method
Social Evolutionism
Over emphasis on extensive data collection, reluctance to synthesize extensive data into broader explanation
Historicism/ Historical Particularism