engleski

Culture and Evolution: Comparison British Social Anthropology, American Cultural Anthropology and Vienna's Kulturkreislehre

Cultural Anthropology underwent drastic changes at the turn of the 20th century. In an effort to overcome the predominant unilineal evolutionism of the preceding century, cultural anthropologists of North America and German-speaking countries adopted diffusionism, which most prominently split into historical particularism at Berkeley and the Kulturkreislehre at Vienna. British anthropology, on the other hand was far more sociologically minded and developed into a functionalist school. The socio-cultural environment as well as the philosophical traditions found at Berkeley, Vienna and in England around the time of this paradigmatic shift in anthropology differed a great deal and an understanding of them facilitates an understanding of why the three consequent schools of thought were so distinct. Human action is hard to grasp without seeing the developmental as well as immediate environmental context of the individual. The same applies to any scholar who develops a cultural theory and a consequential school of thought. The "meta-anthropologist" thus has to examine the various material and abstract influences working on the anthropological thinker in order to understand the anthropological thought. Anthropology is metaphorically seen as a "play", the socio-cultural environment around the institutes is the "set" and the scholars are the "actors". The actors -just like in a theater- don't usually improvise as much as they learn their "scripts" of earlier philosophy and social theory. The "sets" are turbulent times of cultural upheaval at the fin de siecle in Berkeley, Vienna and England. The "actors" are all milestones of modem cultural anthropology: Pater Wilhelm Schmidt, Pater Wilhelm Koppers, Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Clyde Kluckhohn, Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown. The "scripts" were composed of numerous thoughts and thinkers: Darwinism, unilineal evolutionism, German Idealism, medieval logic, Viennese positivism, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Adolf Bastian, Friedrich Ratzel, Fritz Graebner and Franz Boas to name but a few.

culture; anthropology; evolutionism; fin de siecle; Kulturkreislehre; diffusionism; functionalism; paradigm shift

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