J Scott Hill's List: culturetheory

• Diffusionism as an anthropological school of thought, was an attempt to understand the nature of culture in terms of the origin of culture traits and their spread from one society to another. Versions of diffusionist thought included the conviction that all cultures originated from one culture center (heliocentric diffusion); the more reasonable view that cultures originated from a limited number of culture centers (culture circles); and finally the notion that each society is influenced by others but that the process of diffusion is both contingent and arbitrary (Winthrop 1991:83-84).
• Malinowski suggested that individuals have physiological needs (reproduction, food, shelter) and that social institutions exist to meet these needs. There are also culturally derived needs and four basic "instrumental needs" (economics, social control, education, and political organization), that require institutional devices.
• Among the major questions about this issue was whether human culture had evolved in a manner similar to biological evolution or whether culture spread from innovation centers by diffusion (Hugill 1996:343).
• Radcliffe-Brown focused on social structure rather than biological needs. He suggested that a society is a system of relationships maintaining itself through cybernetic feedback, while institutions are orderly sets of relationships whose function is to maintain the society as a system. Radcliffe-Brown, inspired by Augustus Comte, stated that the social constituted a separate "level" of reality distinct from those of biological forms and inorganic matter. Radcliffe-Brown argued that explanations of social phenomena had to be constructed within the social level. Thus, individuals were replaceable, transient occupants of social roles. Unlike Malinowski's emphasis on individuals, Radcliffe-Brown considered individuals irrelevant (Goldschmidt 1996:510).
• There was a shift in focus from the speculatively historical or diachronic study of customs and cultural traits as "survivals" to the ahistorical, synchronic study of social "institutions" within bounded, functioning societies (Young 1991:445).
• The American, Lewis Henry Morgan, infuriated his British contemporaries, when his research demonstrated that social change involved both independent invention and diffusion. He agreed with British sociocultural anthropologists that human progress was due to independent innovation, but his work on kinship terminology showed that diffusion occurred among geographically dispersed people (Kuklick 1996:161).
• Acculturation, then, is the process of systematic cultural change of a particular society carried out by an alien, dominant society (Winthrop 1991:82-83)
• Despite its theoretical limitations, functionalism has made important methodological contributions. With its emphasis on intensive fieldwork, functionalism has provided in-depth studies of societies. Additionally, the investigation of functional interrelationships of customs and institutions provides a ready-made framework for the collection of information
• Culture Areas: In 1895 Otis T. Mason wrote an article entitled "Influence of Environment upon Human Industries or Arts," which was published in the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution. This article identified eighteen American Indian "culture areas." It was a simple concept, in that tribal entities were grouped on an ethnographic map and related to a geographical aspect of the environment.
• Acculturation: Kroeber (1948) described acculturation as changes produced in a culture because of the influence of another culture, with the two cultures becoming similar as the end result. These changes may be reciprocal, which results in the two cultures becoming similar, or one-way and may result in the extinction of one culture, when it is absorbed by the other (Kroeber 1948:425).
• Interactionist theorists criticized functionalism for failing to conceptualize adequately the complex nature of actors and the process of interaction. Marxist theory argued against functionalism's conservativism and the static nature of analysis that emphasized the contribution of social phenomena to the maintenance of the status-quo. Advocates of theory construction questioned the utility of excessively classificatory or typological theories that pigeonholed phenomena in terms of their functions (Turner and Maryanski 1991). Functional theory also has been criticized for its disregard of the historical process and for its presupposition that societies are in a state of equilibrium (Goldschmidt 1996:511).
• Assimilation: Milton Gordon (1964) formulated a series of stages through which an individual must pass in order to be completely assimilated (Thompson 1996:113). Although he listed acculturation as the first stage in the series, not all individuals go past this stage. It is not always possible to adopt the dominant culture's way of life completely, in order to assimilate (Titiev 1958:200).

10 more annotations...

• The term "sociocultural system" embraces three concepts: society, culture, and system. A society is a number of interdependent organisms of the same species. A culture is the learned behaviors that are shared by the members of a society, together with the material products of such behaviors. The words "society" and "culture" are fused together to form the word "sociocultural". A system is "a collection of parts which interact with each other to function as a whole".^[4] The term sociocultural system is most likely to be found in the writings of anthropologists who specialize in ecological anthropology.