Anthropological theories: evolutionism to structuralism

In short

Anthropological theory is the sequence of frameworks anthropologists have used to explain why human societies differ and what holds each one together — from nineteenth-century unilinear evolutionism, through diffusionism, historical particularism, functionalism and structural functionalism, to French structuralism and its neo-evolutionist and materialist rivals. It matters because every ethnographic description carries a theory inside it: what Morgan saw as a "survival", Malinowski read as a working institution and Lévi-Strauss as a sign in a system. It is the backbone paper of BA/B.Sc Anthropology under UGC CBCS (usually "History of Anthropological Thought" plus "Social and Cultural Anthropology"), and Paper I Section A of the UPSC Anthropology optional, where 15-20 marks regularly come from one theorist or one comparison. In employment terms it underlies the interpretive skills used in development consultancy, CSR and social-impact assessment, market and UX research, museum and heritage work, and the social-science research cells of bodies such as the AnSI, ICSSR institutes, NCERT and TRIs.

Explained

Classical evolutionism (c. 1860-1890): the comparative method

• Core claim: all societies pass through the same fixed stages in a single line (unilinear evolution); differences between societies are differences of *stage*, not of kind — a doctrine of psychic unity of mankind plus progress.
• L. H. Morgan (*Ancient Society*, 1877): seven ethnical periods grouped as Savagery (lower, middle, upper) → Barbarism (lower, middle, upper) → Civilization, each marked by a technological criterion (fire and fish diet; bow and arrow; pottery; animal domestication and irrigation; iron; phonetic alphabet and writing).
  • Morgan also built the first systematic kinship typology — classificatory vs descriptive terminologies — in *Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity* (1871), and reconstructed marriage from promiscuity → consanguine → punaluan → syndyasmian → patriarchal → monogamian.
• E. B. Tylor (*Primitive Culture*, 1871): gave anthropology its first working definition of culture ("that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom..."); proposed animism as the minimum definition of religion and the earliest stage, evolving animism → polytheism → monotheism.
  • Doctrine of survivals: practices that persist with their original function gone (saying "bless you" after a sneeze) are fossils that let the past be reconstructed. Tylor's adhesions were statistical correlations of traits — an early move toward cross-cultural statistics.
• J. G. Frazer (*The Golden Bough*, 1890): intellectual evolution as magic → religion → science; distinguished imitative/homoeopathic magic (law of similarity) from contagious magic (law of contact), both forms of "sympathetic magic".
• Other classical evolutionists: Herbert Spencer (society as an organism; militant vs industrial types; "survival of the fittest"), J. J. Bachofen (*Das Mutterrecht*, 1861, mother-right preceding father-right), J. F. McLennan (exogamy, endogamy, marriage by capture, totemism), Sir Henry Maine (status to contract; patriarchal theory), and Morgan's critic Edward Westermarck (*The History of Human Marriage*, against the primitive-promiscuity thesis).
• Method: the comparative method — arranging contemporary "primitives" as living specimens of Europe's own past (the doctrine of the contemporary ancestor), working from museum collections, missionary and traveller reports, not fieldwork.
• Limitations: armchair scholarship; ethnocentric ranking with Victorian Europe at the top; unilinearity contradicted by evidence; conjectural histories unverifiable; ignored diffusion and borrowing; "survivals" often had current functions.
• Why it still matters: founded culture as a scientific object, established comparison and cross-cultural generalisation, and framed problems (origin of religion, origin of the family, kinship terminology) still debated.

Diffusionism and historical particularism (c. 1890-1940): reaction against evolution

• Diffusionism explains similarity by borrowing and spread from one or more centres rather than independent invention.
  • British / Heliolithic ("Pan-Egyptian") school — W. J. Perry, G. Elliot Smith, W. H. R. Rivers: all higher civilisation radiated from Egypt (sun worship, megaliths, mummification). Extreme and now rejected.
  • German-Austrian Kulturkreis ("culture circle") school — F. Ratzel (anthropogeography), L. Frobenius, F. Graebner, Fr. W. Schmidt: a few culture complexes spread worldwide; Graebner's criteria of form (Formkriterium) and quantity (Quantitätskriterium) judged historical connection; Schmidt argued for *Urmonotheismus* (primitive monotheism) against Tylor.
  • American diffusionism (culture area school) — Clark Wissler's culture area, culture centre and age-area hypothesis (traits farthest from the centre are oldest); A. L. Kroeber's culture areas and culture climax.
• Historical particularism — Franz Boas (the founder of American cultural anthropology):
  • Each culture is a unique historical product of migration, diffusion, environment and internal invention; no universal stages.
  • Cultural relativism — a trait is intelligible only within its own culture; evaluation by an outsider's standard is invalid (methodological relativism, not a licence for anything).
  • Inductive, salvage ethnography — collect texts, language and detail *first*, generalise later; demolished race-language-culture equations (*The Mind of Primitive Man*, 1911) and showed head-form change among immigrants, undermining racial determinism.
  • Emic emphasis and the four-field approach (physical, cultural, linguistic, archaeological) still define American anthropology.
• Culture and personality / configurationalism (Boas's students): Ruth Benedict's patterns and configurations (*Patterns of Culture*, 1934 — Apollonian Zuni vs Dionysian Kwakiutl); Margaret Mead on adolescence and gender (*Coming of Age in Samoa*); Ralph Linton's status and role, universals-specialities-alternatives, and basic vs status personality; Abram Kardiner's basic personality structure and primary/secondary institutions; Cora DuBois's modal personality; national character studies.
• Limitations: diffusionism reduced culture to a bundle of travelling traits and could not explain *why* a trait was accepted; historical particularism was accused of abandoning generalisation and theory altogether.

Functionalism and structural functionalism (c. 1920-1960)

• Shared premise: explain a custom by what it *does now*, within a working whole, discovered by intensive fieldwork — not by conjectural origins.
• B. Malinowski — (bio-psychological) functionalism
  • Trobriand Islands fieldwork (1915-18), participant observation in the vernacular; *Argonauts of the Western Pacific* (1922) on the Kula ring; *Coral Gardens*, *Crime and Custom*, *Magic, Science and Religion*.
  • Seven basic (biological) needs — metabolism, reproduction, bodily comforts, safety, movement, growth, health — met by cultural responses (commissariat, kinship, shelter, protection, activities, training, hygiene); these create derived needs and integrative imperatives (knowledge, magic/religion, art).
  • Principle of universal functionalism: every element of a living culture has a function; nothing is a mere survival. Institution is his unit of analysis (charter, personnel, norms, material apparatus, activities, function).
  • Magic appears where knowledge and control fail — Trobrianders use magic for deep-sea, not lagoon, fishing (his theory of magic as anxiety-management).
• A. R. Radcliffe-Brown — structural functionalism
  • Society is a system of social relations; social structure = the actual arrangement of persons in institutionally controlled relationships; social form = the normal/typical pattern abstracted from it.
  • Function = the contribution an activity makes to the maintenance of structural continuity, not to individual needs; the goal is social morphology, social physiology and evolution/change — a "natural science of society".
  • Necessary conditions of existence, functional unity, coaptation; Durkheim's heir (solidarity, collective representations, social facts).
  • Key studies: *The Andaman Islanders* (1922), *The Social Organization of Australian Tribes*, joking relationship, avoidance, the mother's brother in South Africa, and the principle of the unity of the sibling group.
• Malinowski vs Radcliffe-Brown: needs of the individual vs requirements of the structure; culture vs society as the object; psychological-biological vs sociological explanation; rich single-case ethnography vs comparative typology.
• Later developments: E. E. Evans-Pritchard (*The Nuer*, 1940) with segmentary lineage, structural distance and oecological/structural time, later turning anthropology toward history and translation; Meyer Fortes (domestic domain vs politico-jural domain, developmental cycle); Max Gluckman and the Manchester school (conflict, rituals of rebellion, social field, Turner's social drama, liminality and communitas); Edmund Leach (*Political Systems of Highland Burma* — oscillating gumsa/gumlao, structure as a model, not a thing).
• Limitations: teleology and circular reasoning (function assumed then "found"); cannot explain change or conflict; ahistorical "ethnographic present"; neglect of the colonial context within which the fieldwork happened; functional alternatives make the argument unfalsifiable.

Structuralism (c. 1945-1980): culture as a system of relations

• Claude Lévi-Strauss transferred the method of structural linguistics (Saussure's langue vs parole, sign = signifier + signified, value as difference; Jakobson and Trubetzkoy's phonemic analysis by distinctive features) to social and cultural facts.
• Core propositions:
  1. The object of study is unconscious structure (*la pensée sauvage*, the universal operations of the human mind), not conscious models or observed behaviour.
  2. Meaning lies in relations, not elements — units have value only by their contrasts.
  3. The elementary relation is the binary opposition (raw/cooked, nature/culture, male/female, life/death, left/right), mediated by third terms.
  4. Transformation: myths and kinship systems of different societies are permutations of one another; an analysis is confirmed by finding the transformation rule.
  5. Prefers synchronic structure over diachronic history; distinguishes mechanical models (small societies, units at the scale of the phenomena) from statistical models.
• Kinship — *The Elementary Structures of Kinship* (1949): the incest taboo is the hinge from nature to culture because it forces exchange; marriage is the exchange of women as the supreme gift (after Mauss's *The Gift* and the principle of reciprocity). Atom of kinship = brother, sister, sister's husband, sister's son — the smallest unit, requiring the avunculate and an affinal relation. Restricted exchange (direct, symmetrical, bilateral cross-cousin, moieties) vs generalised exchange (indirect, asymmetrical, matrilateral cross-cousin, longer cycles, greater solidarity but greater risk). Elementary vs complex structures.
• Myth — "The Structural Study of Myth" (1955), *Mythologiques* (4 vols): the unit is the mytheme/gross constituent unit; myth is read both as narrative sequence and as bundles of relations (the "orchestral score"); myth's purpose is to mediate contradictions people cannot resolve in practice; the Oedipus and Asdiwal analyses; the culinary triangle as a model of nature/culture.
• Totemism and classification: *Totemism Today* and *The Savage Mind* dissolve totemism into a logic of classification — totems are a code for thinking social difference; bricolage = thinking with the signs at hand, as against the engineer's concepts; science of the concrete.
• Strengths: rigorous, comparative, anti-ethnocentric (savage and modern thought are equally logical, differently applied); opened the anthropology of symbolism, food, art and classification.
• Limitations: ignores the individual, power, history and material conditions; unfalsifiable and unreplicable analyses; "any myth can be made to fit"; silent on change — the criticisms that produced practice theory (Bourdieu's habitus), Giddens's structuration, poststructuralism (Foucault, Derrida), feminist and postcolonial critique, and Geertz's interpretive anthropology / thick description.
• British structuralism contrasted: Radcliffe-Brown's structure is concrete and observable (persons in relations); Lévi-Strauss's is abstract and mental (a model in the unconscious). Mary Douglas (*Purity and Danger* — dirt as "matter out of place", anomaly and taboo) and Victor Turner and Edmund Leach mediate the two traditions.

Neo-evolutionism, cultural materialism and the Indian reception

• Neo-evolutionism rehabilitates evolution as multilinear or general, and as measurable:
  • V. Gordon Childe — Neolithic and Urban revolutions.
  • Leslie White — culture evolves as energy captured per capita per year increases; *Energy and the Evolution of Culture*; culture as a thermodynamic system of technology, sociology and ideology (technology determining).
  • Julian Steward — multilinear evolution and cultural ecology: the culture core (subsistence and closely related arrays) adapts to environment, producing parallel levels of sociocultural integration (family, folk/community, state); cross-cultural regularities, not universal stages.
  • Sahlins and Service — general vs specific evolution; band, tribe, chiefdom, state; the law of cultural dominance; Sahlins's *Stone Age Economics* (domestic mode of production, reciprocity continuum).
• Cultural materialism — Marvin Harris: infrastructure (mode of production and reproduction) → structure (domestic and political economy) → superstructure, with the principle of infrastructural determinism; etic/behavioural over emic/mental explanation; the sacred cow of India explained as adaptive (traction, dung, milk, scavenging) — a reading Indian scholars criticise for ignoring meaning and history.
• Other post-structural currents worth naming: French Marxist anthropology (Godelier, Meillassoux), symbolic and cognitive anthropology (Geertz, Schneider, Sperber), feminist anthropology (Ortner's nature/culture critique, Leacock), postmodern/reflexive critique (*Writing Culture*, Clifford and Marcus), Said's *Orientalism*, Eric Wolf's and Sidney Mintz's political economy and world-system anthropology.
• The Indian trajectory: Sir Herbert Risley and the colonial ethnographic surveys and the Census of 1901 (anthropometry, caste ranking); the Anthropological Survey of India (founded 1945, after the Zoological Survey's anthropology section, 1916) and the People of India project (K. S. Singh); L. P. Vidyarthi's "three phases" of Indian anthropology — formative (1774-1919), constructive (1920-1949), analytical (1950 onward).
  • Evolutionism/diffusionism in India: S. C. Roy's monographs on the Oraon, Munda and Kharia; B. S. Guha's racial classification (1931 Census); G. S. Ghurye on caste, race and tribes ("imperfectly integrated classes of Hindu society").
  • Functionalism/structural functionalism in India: M. N. Srinivas (Coorgs, Sanskritisation, dominant caste, Westernisation — structural-functional, fieldview over bookview); S. C. Dube (*Indian Village*, *Shamirpet*); D. N. Majumdar (*Caste and Communication in an Indian Village*); N. K. Bose (Hindu method of tribal absorption, cultural regions); Verrier Elwin (the tribal "National Park" debate with Ghurye).
  • Structuralism and beyond in India: Louis Dumont (*Homo Hierarchicus*, pure/impure binary opposition, hierarchy as encompassing the contrary — structuralist application to caste); T. N. Madan (Kashmiri Pandits, non-renunciation); the Dumont-Bailey and Dumont-Srinivas (ideology vs behaviour) debates; Andre Beteille (*Caste, Class and Power*, Sripuram — a move to class and power); Dipankar Gupta and Gail Omvedt on hierarchy and difference.

Comparing the schools: what each asks and answers

• Unit of explanation: stage (evolutionism) → trait/complex (diffusionism) → unique culture history (particularism) → need (Malinowski) → structure (Radcliffe-Brown) → relation/opposition (structuralism) → energy and adaptation (neo-evolutionism) → infrastructure (cultural materialism).
• Time orientation: diachronic-conjectural → diachronic-historical → synchronic → synchronic-universal → diachronic-measurable.
• Data source: travellers' reports and museums → trait distributions and maps → salvage texts → long participant observation → myth corpora and kinship terminologies → archaeology, ecology and statistics.
• Core method term to quote in an exam: comparative method; criteria of form and quantity; age-area hypothesis; cultural relativism; participant observation; functional unity; binary opposition and transformation; multilinear evolution.

Key points

• Unilinear evolution - all societies climb one fixed ladder of stages; Morgan, Tylor, Frazer, Spencer.
• Morgan's stages - Savagery, Barbarism, Civilization (three sub-stages each except Civilization), each set by a technology.
• Tylor - defined culture, proposed animism as religion's origin, and the doctrine of survivals.
• Frazer - magic → religion → science; imitative (similarity) and contagious (contact) magic.
• Comparative method - using living "primitives" as evidence of the European past; the doctrine of the contemporary ancestor.
• Diffusionism - similarity from borrowing: British heliolithic (Egypt), German Kulturkreis (Graebner's form and quantity criteria), American culture areas (Wissler's age-area, Kroeber's climax).
• Historical particularism - Boas: every culture is a unique history; induction before generalisation; cultural relativism; race, language and culture are independent.
• Culture and personality - Benedict's configurations, Mead on gender, Linton's status/role, Kardiner's basic personality structure, DuBois's modal personality.
• Malinowski's functionalism - seven biological needs met by cultural responses; universal functionalism; institution as unit; Trobriand Kula; magic fills the gap left by knowledge.
• Radcliffe-Brown's structural functionalism - society as a system of social relations; function = maintaining structural continuity; social structure vs social form; joking and avoidance relationships.
• Participant observation - the methodological break of the 1920s that ended armchair theorising.
• Evans-Pritchard - Nuer segmentary lineage, structural distance, and the later turn from "natural science" to history and translation.
• Lévi-Strauss's structuralism - unconscious mental structure, meaning in relations, binary oppositions, transformation, synchrony; borrowed from structural linguistics.
• Elementary Structures - incest taboo forces exchange; marriage as exchange of women; atom of kinship; restricted vs generalised exchange.
• Myth analysis - mythemes read as bundles of relations; myth mediates unresolvable contradictions; *bricolage* and the science of the concrete.
• Neo-evolutionism - White's energy law, Steward's multilinear evolution and cultural ecology, Sahlins-Service's general/specific evolution and band-tribe-chiefdom-state.
• Cultural materialism - Harris's infrastructural determinism, etic over emic.
• Indian reception - Risley and the 1901 Census, Vidyarthi's three phases, Srinivas's Sanskritisation and dominant caste, Dumont's *Homo Hierarchicus*, Beteille's caste-class-power.

Examples

Theory is not a numerical subject, so the standard exam task is to *apply* a framework to a case. Each case below is worked through to a stated conclusion, as answers are expected to be.

Case 1 — One custom, five theories: the Hindu sacred cow

1. *Classical evolutionism (Tylor/Frazer):* a survival of an earlier animistic or totemic stage, retained after its original belief has lapsed. Weakness: it is fully alive, not a fossil.
2. *Diffusionism:* cattle veneration spread with pastoral Indo-Aryan movement from a Central Asian centre; evidence would be trait distribution and chronology (Graebner's form and quantity criteria).
3. *Functionalism (Malinowski):* satisfies derived needs — draught power for ploughing, dung for fuel and manure, milk — plus the integrative need for a sacred charter.
4. *Structuralism (Lévi-Strauss/Dumont):* the cow is a term in a classification — pure/impure, vegetarian/non-vegetarian, Brahmin/untouchable — and its sanctity is positional, not intrinsic.
5. *Cultural materialism (Harris):* infrastructure determines; the taboo is an adaptive rule protecting traction animals in a monsoon-dependent smallholder economy.

Conclusion: the "best" answer depends on the question asked — origin (1,2), present working (3,5), or meaning (4). An exam answer that names this difference scores above one that simply picks a side.

Case 2 — Deriving a structuralist reading of a myth (method, step by step)

1. Collect all known versions; do not privilege the "authentic" one — a myth is the set of its variants.
2. Break the narrative into mythemes (shortest sentences: "X kills the snake", "Y marries out of the village").
3. Arrange mythemes in columns, each column a bundle sharing one relation (e.g. overrating vs underrating kinship).
4. Read the oppositions: in the Oedipus corpus, overrating kinship / underrating kinship and denial of autochthonous origin / persistence of it.
5. State the contradiction mediated — here, whether humans are born from the earth or from other humans.
6. Test by transformation: does a neighbouring group's myth invert the same terms? If yes, the structure is confirmed.

Conclusion: the output is a relation, not a moral; this is why structuralism is criticised as unfalsifiable at step 6.

Case 3 — Restricted vs generalised exchange, counted

• Restricted exchange: two sections A and B; A's men marry B's women and B's men marry A's women. Closed cycles of 2, debts settled in one generation, so with 4 sections there are 2 marriage pairs — maximal security, minimal social reach.
• Generalised exchange: sections A → B → C → D → A (a man marries his mother's brother's daughter). With 4 sections the cycle length is 4 and no unit is reciprocated directly; solidarity spans the whole set, but if one link defaults the whole chain breaks.

Conclusion: Lévi-Strauss's trade-off — generalised exchange buys greater integration at greater risk; this is why it correlates with hierarchy and with wife-givers/wife-takers ranking, as in parts of North-East India and in North Indian hypergamy.

Case 4 — Testing Morgan's unilinear sequence against Indian data

• Morgan put the matrilineal stage before the patrilineal. In India, matriliny among the Khasi, Garo and Nayar coexists in the same period, region and technological level with patriliny among neighbouring groups.
• Both occur in the twentieth century with iron tools and writing — Morgan's "Civilization" criteria.

Conclusion: the two systems are *contemporaneous alternatives*, not successive stages, so the data falsify unilinearity and support Steward's multilinear position and Boas's particularism.

Case 5 — Which theory does Srinivas's "Sanskritisation" belong to?

1. It is derived from fieldwork in Rampura and among the Coorgs — Malinowskian method (Srinivas trained under Radcliffe-Brown at Oxford).
2. It explains mobility by reference to the working of the structure — a lower caste adopting the ritual, diet and ideology of a higher one, backed usually by the dominant caste's economic and numerical power.
3. It is therefore structural-functional with a diachronic correction: it supplies the change that functionalism was accused of being unable to handle, without becoming either evolutionist or materialist.

Conclusion: classify it as structural functionalism extended to social change; contrast it with Dumont, who would read the same facts as movement within a fixed pure/impure opposition.

Where it is used

• Development and social-impact work: cultural relativism and functional analysis underpin Social Impact Assessment under the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, and the Free, Prior and Informed Consent/gram sabha consent process under the Forest Rights Act, 2006 and PESA, 1996 — anthropologists are empanelled as SIA experts by state governments.
• Government research and tribal administration: the Anthropological Survey of India (Ministry of Culture), state Tribal Research Institutes, and the Ministry of Tribal Affairs' PVTG and Eklavya school programmes use ethnographic and culture-area frameworks; UPSC Anthropology optional and state PSC papers examine these theories directly.
• Museums, heritage and archives: IGRMS Bhopal, National Museum, INTACH and state museums classify and interpret collections using culture-area and symbolic-classification ideas; UNESCO intangible heritage dossiers require a functional and symbolic account of a practice.
• Market, UX and design research: ethnographic and "thick description" methods in design studios and consumer-insight teams (Unilever/HUL, Godrej, Tata, Nielsen, Kantar, and in-house UX research at Indian product firms) are direct descendants of participant observation; structuralist opposition analysis survives in semiotic brand audits.
• CSR, public health and behaviour change: programmes such as Swachh Bharat sanitation behaviour change, immunisation and nutrition campaigns use functional analysis of local belief and Douglas-style purity/pollution reasoning to understand resistance.
• Journalism, policy and teaching: social-science faculty posts (UGC-NET Anthropology/Sociology), ICSSR and NCERT research, and policy work on caste, tribe and reservation, where Ghurye-Elwin, Srinivas and Dumont remain the reference points.

Interview questions

• Q: What is the single biggest difference between classical evolutionism and functionalism? A: Evolutionism asks where a custom came from and answers by conjecture from second-hand reports; functionalism asks what the custom does now and answers from first-hand fieldwork in one society.
• Q: Why is Tylor's doctrine of survivals criticised? A: Because most so-called survivals turn out to have current functions or meanings, so labelling them fossils both misreads the present and builds an unverifiable history.
• Q: Distinguish social structure from social organisation. A: For Radcliffe-Brown, social structure is the arrangement of persons in institutionally defined relationships; social organisation is the arrangement of activities — the working of that structure in time.
• Q: How does Lévi-Strauss's "structure" differ from Radcliffe-Brown's? A: Radcliffe-Brown's structure is empirically observable — real people in real relations; Lévi-Strauss's is an unconscious mental model that the observer constructs and which need not be visible to the actors.
• Q: Why is the incest taboo central to Lévi-Strauss? A: It is the first rule, the point where nature becomes culture, because by prohibiting marriage inside the group it compels exchange between groups and so creates society.
• Q: What is the atom of kinship and why four terms? A: Brother, sister, sister's husband and sister's son — because a kinship system minimally requires a relation of descent, a relation of consanguinity and a relation of affinity, which three positions cannot supply.
• Q: Give one Indian example that falsifies unilinear evolution. A: Khasi and Garo matriliny and neighbouring patriliny exist in the same region, period and technological level, so the two are alternatives rather than successive stages.
• Q: Is cultural relativism the same as moral relativism? A: No — as Boas used it, it is a methodological rule that a practice must first be understood in its own cultural terms; it does not require suspending ethical judgement, which is why human-rights critiques of it often miss their target.
• Q: What is the main charge against functionalism, and what answers it? A: That it is teleological and cannot explain conflict or change; the Manchester school (Gluckman, Turner), Leach's oscillating models and Srinivas's Sanskritisation supply the dynamic element.
• Q: How did Malinowski explain magic? A: As an anxiety-managing response filling the gap where technical knowledge cannot guarantee an outcome — hence Trobriand magic for dangerous deep-sea fishing but not for safe lagoon fishing.
• Q: Where does Dumont fit in the theoretical sequence? A: *Homo Hierarchicus* is a structuralist reading of caste built on the single binary opposition of pure and impure, with hierarchy encompassing its contrary; it was contested by Srinivas, Bailey and Beteille for privileging ideology over observed power and economy.
• Q: Which theory would you use to study a modern Indian workplace, and why? A: A practice- or interpretive-oriented approach — Geertzian thick description with Bourdieu's habitus — because the relevant questions concern meaning, agency and power, which structural functionalism and structuralism both set aside.

Common mistakes

• Treating Lévi-Strauss as the same kind of structuralist as Radcliffe-Brown — the first studies mental models, the second observable relations; marks are lost for conflating them.
• Writing Morgan's stages wrongly: there are three sub-stages each of savagery and barbarism, and Civilization has none; and Morgan's criteria are technological, not moral.
• Attributing animism to Frazer and magic-religion-science to Tylor — the first is Tylor's, the second Frazer's.
• Calling Boas an evolutionist or a diffusionist; he used diffusion as one mechanism within historical particularism and rejected both unilinear stages and pan-Egyptian diffusion.
• Saying functionalism "has no theory of change" without naming the correctives (Gluckman, Leach, Srinivas) — examiners expect the counter-argument.
• Confusing restricted with generalised exchange, or describing matrilateral cross-cousin marriage as "direct" exchange.
• Giving only Western names in an Indian paper: Roy, Guha, Ghurye, Bose, Majumdar, Srinivas, Dube, Vidyarthi, Dumont and Beteille are expected, and leaving them out costs marks in UGC and UPSC answers.

Related topics

Kinship, marriage and family · Economic and political anthropology · Religion and society · Caste, class and family in India · Fieldwork methods and ethnography · Contemporary theory: practice, interpretive and postmodern anthropology