Transcription
In this episode, I'm going to cover the 10 most commonly encountered and, I think, relevant theories in the social sciences. Things that every student in anthropology and sociology should at least be aware of, and ideally, be able to discuss in some detail.
Now, this is my own personal list based on my experiences as a classroom educator and qualitative researcher. But if there are additional concepts that you'd like me to discuss, or you feel should have been included in the video, let us know in the comments below. And without any further ado, let's get into the video.
Number 10 is something that's been requested by subscribers recently, and that is functionalism. Now, historically speaking, we can trace functionalism back to the late 19th century, in particular to the French theorist Émile Durkheim. And the concept then emerged later in the early 20th century as a major theoretical lens that dominated some aspects of the social sciences all the way up to the 1960s.
The thing is, functionalism itself is not so much a theory as it is a macro-oriented method of analysis, a way of looking at a society in its entirety and theorizing the role that social institutions play in maintaining social order. In other words, the inherently conservative function that things like marriage, gift exchange, or religious beliefs play in contributing to the long-term survival and stability of a society.
To pick one common example, a functionalist reading of something like funerary practices, the ways that different societies dispose of their dead, wouldn't focus on cultural differences or unique religious rituals. Instead, it would look at funerals as a mechanism that prevents the breakdown of social order. For example, on some level, every society has to dispose of its dead in order to prevent the spread of disease. Or you could argue that funerals provide ritualized spaces in which people can collectively grieve, which in turn promotes healing and affirms the social importance of religious and civic institutions. Both of those readings look past cultural differences to theorize the function that funerals play in maintaining social order.
Now, the major problem with functionalism that really emerged in the, um, 1960s and '70s was that its emphasis on social stability made it very difficult to account for forms of conflict and radical change. Functionalist theorists also, quite problematically, tended to overlook ethnicity, gender, and class in their theorization of social institutions. And those critiques really pushed functionalism from being a totalizing mode of analysis to being just one among many different theoretical lenses that social scientists use in analyzing their data. And that's how I would recommend you understand functionalism today: as an interpretive tool that you can potentially apply to your work, as long as you have an understanding of some of the concept's inherent limitations.
Number nine is structuralism, which, similar to functionalism, is another meta-oriented mode of analysis and not so much a single unified theory. In a historical sense, we typically trace structuralism back to Émile Durkheim, but it really only emerged as a major movement in the social sciences in the 1950s and '60s. And I think that the more relevant foundational figure is the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who worked on the underlying structures shared by all human languages around the world. And that's a, a huge generalization. But in the late 1940s, theorists across the humanities began to adapt that body of work, which we now call structural linguistics. But rather than studying the underlying structure of language, this new wave of theorists wanted to uncover the underlying social structures that determine human action and social organization, and, um, by extension, to better understand the structure of the human mind.
And I'll give you an example of what that looks like. In Claude Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology, there's a very famous chapter on the structuralist study of myth. And what he does is survey a huge variety of mythological narratives from different cultures around the world, and he breaks those myths down to what he considers to be their most basic narrative elements. For instance, he takes the story of Cinderella and boils it down to five themes: attractive female protagonist, lives with non-biological family members, these family members dislike her, she's then given luxurious clothing by a supernatural figure, and with the help of that supernatural figure, marries into a higher social class. For, for Lévi-Strauss, that is the underlying structure of the narrative, which is revealed through a comparative structuralist analysis of every version of the myth.
So, having done similar things with different myths from around the world, he then claims that there is one basic narrative structure shared by all of mythology, expressed by this mathematical formula. Which I'm not going to go into because, frankly, it's, it's a little bit ridiculous. But this is one of the main goals of structuralist analysis in the social sciences: to see past different historical and cultural explanations for phenomena in order to uncover their underlying structural elements, and by cross-cultural comparison, to determine what aspects of that structure are universal to the human condition.
Now, the problem with this, and this is one of the major criticisms of structural anthropology that emerged in the 1960s, is that it relies on enormous generalizations and often lacks the linguistic and cultural understanding required for, you know, competent cross-cultural analysis. Despite those criticisms, though, structuralism was enormously influential and is still important today. But as a form of serious social scientific analysis, it was basically eclipsed in the 1970s and '80s by post-structuralism, which coincidentally is number eight on our list.
Okay, so post-structuralism in under two minutes. Okay. Um, post-structuralism is best understood as a response to and criticism of structuralism that began to emerge in France in the late 1960s and then exploded in the world of literary criticism and philosophy. And that explosion reverberated throughout the humanities, impacting different academic disciplines in different ways. And to almost irresponsibly simplify this enormous body of work, insofar as the social sciences are concerned, post-structuralists rejected the idea that cognitive, literary, linguistic, and social systems have an underlying structure that is internally coherent, unchanging, and universal. In that sense, the movement is a direct refutation of the theoretical project central to structuralism.
And one of the most fundamental tenets of post-structuralist literary criticism, which was widely adapted in the humanities, had to do with redefining how we understand the concept of a text. Early post-structuralist authors argued that to understand a text, it's not enough to study what it says and what the author might have intended by it. You also have to understand the systems of knowledge and power in which the text was produced, and crucially, these systems of knowledge and power in which it is perceived and understood today. In that sense, a post-structuralist textual analysis is an ongoing discursive process that, theoretically speaking, never arrives at a single definitive sense of meaning, because we as readers and critics, and the societies in which we live, are all constantly evolving.
Now, um, social theorists like Pierre Bourdieu, inspired by that idea, began to understand culture and the social scientific study of culture in similar terms. Bourdieu's concept of the habitus, for example, focused on the way that social hierarchies and power structures are internalized by human beings at a very early age. And he pioneered what we now call practice theory as an ethnographically informed discursive process that helps us understand the nature of power, symbolic capital, and the ways in which cultural meaning is constantly replicated and reaffirmed.
Now, because of the way that it emerged, post-structuralism doesn't so much have a single foundational figure so much as it has, like, a kind of pantheon that we now consider to be post-structuralist authors relative to the ways in which their respective disciplines reacted to the decline of structuralism. Authors like Derrida, Deleuze, Althusser, Barthes, Bourdieu, Lacan, and Foucault, to a certain extent. And even though they published on very different subjects, their core messages, these core messages, or something that they, they share: the rejection of meta-theories and universal structures, the interrogation of text or culture as text being a discursive process, and the importance of the reader in determining meaning, or in the social sciences, of the actor's subjective perspective in determining meaning. Those interests and attitudes come together, they, they congeal in one way or another to form this theoretical movement that we now call post-structuralism.
Number seven on our list is social action theory. Now, this refers to a kind of family of theories, all created by different sociologists attempting to theorize the relationship between a person's actions and the meaning that they ascribe to those actions within a social context. So, theorizing the relationship between what we do, why we say we do it, and how that affects the people around us. And we trace this family of theories back to the German sociologist Max Weber and his insistence on the concept of *Verstehen*, which is one of the foundational ideas in the, the social sciences. Basically, to understand a person's actions, it's not enough to just observe what they're doing. You also have to gain a meaningful understanding, or *Verstehen*, of why that person thinks they're doing what they're doing.
And this isn't going to blow anybody's mind, right? The idea that researchers should ask questions like, "Hey, what are you doing and why?" isn't going to blow anybody's mind. But back in the 19th century, Weber's most basic ideas catalyzed a systemic change in the way that we approach the study of human behavior. And what was unique about these social action theories when they began to emerge was that they treated people as inherently rational actors who made choices based on a combination of rational self-interest, cultural traditions, and emotions. That was revolutionary.
And beginning really in the 1930s, sociologists like Talcott Parsons began to use these complex models of social action to analyze people's choices in order to better understand the subjective motivations that, you know, compel people to act, as well as the impact of those actions on society. Now, there are some major criticisms of social action theory that began to emerge, I think, in the 1970s, that limit the ways in which we, we use these theories today. The first, and most relevant for me, is that social action theories tend to treat individuals as though they are free agents, completely unrestricted by economic and biological factors in their decision-making. And as a consequence, they often fail to consider things like class, gender, and ethnicity, and how those things can limit or predetermine a person's choices.
And that's a huge problem. I mean, if you want to create an all-encompassing theory of social action and you don't account for the fact that your class, gender, and ethnicity can restrict your range of choices, your access to education, sanitation, and physical well-being, then you're off to a really bad start. So, these theories, even though they provide a very complex and insightful structural analyses of people's actions, often fail to account for power distribution in society, which, from a post-structuralist perspective, means that they're severely limited. Still, the particular brand of action theory created by the sociologist Talcott Parsons attempted to account for some of those problems, and as a consequence, is probably the most relevant action theory that you'll encounter today. And you'll see that applied in economics, political science, and in sociology, but generally with an awareness of some of the theory's inherent limitations.
Number six on the list is cultural materialism, which is a theoretical movement that began to emerge in the 1960s and '70s. And there are actually two forms of cultural materialism: one in the history of literature, associated with the Welsh author Raymond Williams, and the other in anthropology, where it's more closely associated with the American anthropologist Marvin Harris. And in the broadest terms, and this is kind of the movement's theoretical tagline or epitaph, maybe: cultural materialism is a Marxist-inspired critique of liberal humanism. So, what does that mean? Well, liberal humanist literary critics argued that great texts, like the works of William Shakespeare, for example, contain a meaning that is both timeless and universally comprehensible. They reveal something uniquely and universally human that would be true for all people across all time. So, for liberal humanists, you don't need to understand the cultural, economic, and historical conditions in which a text was produced in order to understand its meaning.
Now, early cultural materialists, like Raymond Williams, were highly critical of that idea. They argued that all texts, whether they're films, books, plays, whatever, that all texts are products of complex cultural and material factors, rather than being the spontaneous revelation of a single author. So, if you wrote a play, for example, the meaning in that text would be informed by some combination of cultural and material factors: your social class, gender, and ethnicity, your religious background, and the political, economic, and environmental systems in which you live would all work together to influence your understanding of theater, and thus play a role in determining the structure and themes of your text. Also, films, novels, music, and art are really the work of a single person. If you wanted to publish your play and see it on stage, for example, the text would also have to go through an additional editorial and commercial process that might alter the text's composition and change its meaning beyond what you initially intended as the author. So, cultural materialism as a movement in literature focuses on the cultural and material conditions that influence the production of a text and influence the ways in which we attribute meaning to texts. That's literary criticism.
Now, in anthropology, cultural materialists do something similar, but rather than focusing on texts, they focus on culture. They argue that cultural and social institutions are best understood as products of the same kind of complex historical and material factors. As a consequence, cultural traditions across the world have developed differently in response to different material conditions: things like the availability of resources, forms of technological and economic production, and both the built and natural environments in which they emerged. So, at its most basic level, cultural materialism in anthropology provides a framework for studying cultural variation and for theorizing the ways in which power or hegemony is produced within different cultural contexts. And there's a complex, almost structural model that's used in cultural materialist anthropology that divides societies into infrastructure, structure, and superstructure, that they've adapted from what's called Marxist dialectical materialism. But I'm not gonna, I'm not really gonna go into that.
What I think I'll do, though, is make an episode of Off-the-Shelf covering forms of cultural materialism in more depth, because it is an important idea. But for now, if you're interested, I can recommend a really good video that Tom Nicholas made. A link in the description that only covers literary criticism, but it's still a solid introduction to cultural materialism in a general sense. Uh, now, I've talked for a while now, and I need another coffee. So, I think that I'll cut the video here for editing purposes. But, um, part two should be up in a couple of days, where I talk about my top five absolutely essential theories to know in the social sciences. So, keep an eye out for that. And until next time, never stop learning.
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