The British and American Schools of Anthropology.

 The intrinsic relationship of anthropology with colonization is explicit in the further development of the discipline in its British version and the development of what came to be known as the American Cultural Tradition.  In the continent, the academic roots of British structural-functional school was drawn from the functionalism of Durkheim who belonged to the French school of sociology.

The structural-functional school critiqued the classical evolutionists for their speculative theories. Moving away from the deductive theories of evolution they moved to empiricism and developed the field study method that has today become the hallmark of anthropology. They believed that each society has a structure in the form of social relationships and there is a functional logic of each part of this structure that contributes to the whole.

The basic premises of structural-functionalism was based on the axiom of cultural relativism, that cultures were not higher and lower manifestation of stages of the same Culture, but cultures in plural were each functional wholes. Each society was bounded and could be compared to a living organism whose parts contribute to the functioning of the entire body.

Thus one could not study parts of cultures, like religion and kinship, by using the comparative method, as was done in classical evolutionary theory, but a society needed to be studied in its entirety and in depth, and the functional relationship between its parts established by close and intimate interaction with the people concerned.

In America, the situation was quite different. Here the Native Americans had not only been dispersed and their societies destroyed, many tribes and communities had been depleted to almost the last survivors, when the anthropologists began to study them. The father of American anthropology, Franz Boas, also drew his roots from German Diffusionism that emphasized history, migration and a more particularistic view of social transformation.

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