Essay from the year 2012 in the subject Pedagogy – Theory of Science, Anthropology, grade: 70, University of Cambridge, language: English, abstract: Was Evans-Pritchard a structural-functionalist?
Evans-Pritchard is widely known as a structural-functionalist (Kuper, 1988). What sense does this question make taken by its face-value? Let us understand it as a mathematical exercise. The question asks whether the works of Evans-Pritchard can be described as a subset of the anthropological tradition referred to as structural-functionalism. As I will argue, his works can not – at least in their entirety – both temporally and partially be seen as a subset of structural-functionalism. Especially in his later works, Evans-Pritchard stresses individual agency, the importance of history as well as personality in a way that is not congruent with structural functionalism in its traditional way. But before I am able to assess the congruency of Evans-Pritchard’s work with structural-functionalist imperatives in detail, the latter needs to be expressed in a clear set of statutes. The work of Radcliffe-Brown (Radcliffe-Brown, 1940) and Fortes (Fortes, 1953) can serve as a guideline for this.
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