Statues and Players

 I have been a Structural/Functionalist most of my professional career. I know that anthropology has advanced in its methodologies and theory since the mid-20th century. But Structural/Functionalism is at the very foundation of understanding of any event. It is the difference between Science and Religion.

Structure is the statue, the photograph, the paragraph. Structure is freezing time so that one can examine the situation, the context, the inter-relations of the parts, and the emotional response to an event. On the one hand, it is the player rooster, the theater program, the blueprint, etc. Put simply, structure is the picture of human activity without TIME. It is Culture as represented by a particular artifact.

Function is the players, the organization, the history, the novel. Function opens up the structure by adding Time to the analysis of the whole. It not only shows us the inter-relation of parts, but it illustrates how these parts operate in relation to the structure as a whole. Function describes the How? Where structure describes What? 

Together, these TWO perspectives tell us that life is not static. Culture is NOT static. They are cyclical and evolutionary. If there is one basic concept that describes both, it is TIME. They are cyclical when the process is repeated over and over again. And it is evolutionary when it responds to the context (environment) and adjusts to the longer cycle of an immediate context. Structure is based on duration of a process, where TIME is held constant. Function is based on the process cycle, where Time is to change. They may be studied independently, or in conjunction with one another.

Structure and Function, together, are the basis of scientific anthropology. 

Traditional, early, anthropology assumed a fixed Culture could be found in different societies. The traditional anthropologist went off to the field and spent a year or a few years studying the same group. The assumption that cultures were fixed in time comes from the context. 

The annual cycle of group was studied (funding permitting) and written up as a monograph describing the Culture of the people. Sometimes this was done by the anthropologist acting conservatively and describing the study of the  group, or the village. Other times it was done liberally with an extrapolation that the observations applied to the inhabitants of a physical area. The ethnography, or site report for archaeology, lead to a static description. It froze time. 

But this strategy can be forgiven because early anthropologist were attempting to salvage cultures that were threatened by the spread of Western Civilization. Archaeologist were also attempting to salvage stages of development before human prehistory was lost to modernization of the environment and natural decay of time on physical artifacts. In a way these are our baseline for the development of our discipline, much like the arbitrary laying of the datum line in an archaeological site. It provides  a statute --- a frame of reference -- as a reminder of where we started in our history of discovery of CULTURE.

Archaeology gave us a time perspective through the stratigraphic context of the salvage effort. It also provided a warning about the destructive nature of the science. Field archaeology evolved from art history to a science with the imposition of scientific methodologies for preservation of both the artifact, its context, and the site. This has lead to an evolution in the size and methods of archaeological anthropology. From a function to salvage art artifacts to the function of salvaging the context and "time".

Field ethnology attempts to salvage the material and behavioral aspects of people's actions in TIME by determining the context of time -- "the ethnological present." The original tradition recognized the difference between the aboriginal behavior and "contact" behavior and attempted to "salvage" the former from the older, surviving members of the earliest generation available. Further, because these older subjects generally represented a smaller sample of the target population and relied on memory, the field anthropologist was faced with an editorial decision as to who and what is the more authoritative evidence. Here "authority" is a issue since it reflects the "present" [the specific time of the research] "official" cultural values that the members hold "today."

As the ethnological record has expanded, in part due to the evolution of the profession and part to the size of the sample, the salvage issue has devolved into a broader range of detailed study of the specific cultural practices on one hand, and acculturation at the other end. In the former, the salvage concern becomes a more specific attempt to determine the differences between "cultural" and "social" practices. On the other, it is the focus on the processes of resistance and acceptance of  socio-cultural differences between social groups.

The Structural/Functional perspective unifies these two perspective by isolating TIME as a variable to the context of the analysis. Structure holds "TIME" as constant. Function focuses specifically on change in the structure over TIME.  Together the supply a complete picture, while individually they provide a contextual uniformity.