Functionalism

Functionalism was the predominant underlying theory in both British Social and U.S./American cultural anthropology from the beginning of the 20th century up through the early post-World War II era. Deriving largely from French sociologist Emile Durkheim’s work, this school of thought saw societies largely through the lens of an organic metaphor, so that societies were

Functionalism regards society as an interdependent and self-regulating social system tending toward equilibrium. The goal of functional analysis is to establish to what extent the parts (subsystems) contribute to the functioning of the system as a whole. With functionalism, the theoretical emphasis moves from causes to consequences. No effort is made to derive a given