Functionalism

FUNCTIONALISM:

V. RAZIONALISMO. FUNCTIONALISM

The founder of this ethnological school, originally English, is considered to be B. Malinowski, whose disciples include R. Firth, A. F. Richards, R. F. Fortune and M. Mead. For a certain time A. Radcliffe-Brown was considered one of its leaders, together with Malinowski. In Germany functionalism found a convinced follower in W. Mühlmann, who was also its best systematizer; ideally Fr. Krause is traced back to it with his "theory of structure." S. M. Shirokogoroff, S. R. Steinmetz, R. Thurnwald and D. Westermann have been linked by Mühlmann to functionalism, but in reality they do not belong to it; indeed Shirokogoroff attacked Malinowski and his disciples because, in his view, they debased ethnological science into practical questions that do not concern it; Mühlmann himself, moreover, acknowledges that they belong to it only to a certain extent.

Functionalism was born anti-historical, but later it also felt the need for the historical approach. Malinowski and his disciples remained at the first stage of functionalism; Radcliffe-Brown, on the other hand, went beyond it. Indeed, speaking of the concept of function in social life, he says that between the two approaches, historical and functional, "there need not be a conflict, but there is only a difference. There is not, and there cannot be, a conflict between functional theory and the view that every culture, every social system is the final result of a unique series of historical events... The two kinds of explanation do not fight each other, but complete one another. I see no reason why the two kinds of study, the historical and the functional, should not be conducted side by side in perfect harmony." Of this same opinion are Mühlmann and A. Lasser. The first stage of functionalism is easily understood when one reflects that it arose from the consideration of the phenomena that have been produced among Oriental and primitive peoples by the contact of their civilization with the Western European-American one, especially in the colonial lands of Africa and Oceania — phenomena of orientation toward new forms of civilization and of accommodation. Mühlmann then gave so much importance to these phenomena that he wants to judge by them all the innumerable contacts that have occurred thus far over the whole earth between different peoples and their various civilizations, seeing in them an experiment that allows one to grasp both the characteristics and the whole ensemble of civilization. And this is what constitutes "the search for the model," as will be seen, in Mühlmann's functionalist methodology, and by which his very definition of ethnology is inspired: the science of the forms and processes of accommodation of peoples and of their individual members, as they orient themselves toward a new form of civilization, to their geographical, social and cultural environment according to diffusion in space and depth in time.

The functionalist conception of civilization was developed especially by Malinowski, who considers civilization as a whole, in which the parts are in relation to the whole and determined by it. The manner that indicates the relations between the part and the whole, the qualities of the function or of the structure, are different in each civilization. This civilization and its individual systems or elements are known in their essence according to the method of the mutual illumination of the part by the whole. Mühlmann distinguishes a threefold environment with respect to man: the natural or geographical environment, the social one and the cultural one. Man and the environment are not, with respect to one another, two invariable quantities, but variable ones; they are in a specific functional dependence. Here "functional" is taken in a strict sense: a variation in one of the two quantities brings with it a variation in the other quantity (it is clear how false this principle is in the relation between the natural environment and man, except when it is a question of pastoralists with their herds of livestock). Since the term function has many meanings, Mühlmann proposes its abolition in ethnology; he often uses the term structure, or both together.

Mühlmann divides all ethnological facts into two groups: intentional and functional. Intentional facts are those that indicate historical life as consciousness; functional facts are those that understand it as activity — that is, according to the interpretation of Fr. Schmidt, intentional facts would be the conceptions that the natives have of their own civilization, functional facts the facts of that same civilization as they really exist in the external world. He presents two criteria for making this grouping: the criterion of historical value for intentional data and the criterion of return for functional ones.

For Mühlmann civilization is life itself; therefore he does not want people to speak of "cultural elements," nor of "cultural monuments," as Ratzel already expressed it, preserved in our museums. The monuments, the cultural material of our museums, are not symbols of something dead, but indices of processes, of regular forms of life, whose qualities carry much further than the objects themselves, introducing one into the whole civilization to which they belong. It is understandable that functionalism gives very great importance to psychology in all its branches, especially to the psychology of the person, and to sociology, so much so that Mühlmann comes to say that the study of society is distinguished logically, but not practically, from the study of culture.

F. recognizes, as has been said, the necessity of historical ethnology. It admits that there is a development in civilization, which takes place in time and therefore belongs to history. "Both aspects," writes Mühlmann, "that of development and that of history, the functional and the historical, are equally necessary, because the former shows us only the logical possibility, but not the realization; the latter shows the realization, but not the logical possibility." According to him, every cultural contact is an essentially historical experimental fact. It differs from the experimental fact of the natural sciences because in human social and cultural life there is not only determination but also indetermination, not only necessity but also the freedom of the human will participates in it. Mühlmann therefore places ethnology between history and biology. He notes that there is not only tradition or cultural borrowing between people and people, but also within the same people between man and man, between one social stratum and another, and from one generation to the next. Therefore, two orders of factors in the history of civilization must be distinguished, up to a certain point: internal and external ones. In this cultural tradition from one generation to another or from one people to another, a cultural selection takes place, whereby only what is suitable is accepted. In every cultural phenomenon a temporal course is given, which is transformation, change. This is normal; what instead poses a problem is the fact of the persistence, little or not at all varied, of a cultural phenomenon over a longer time, that is, it poses the question of the rhythm of time and of the manner in which the transformation takes place. The comparative study, in fact, of the individual cultural units of a civilization shows their difference in development; for example, technology, law, and social organization may have reached a different stage of development. This, moreover, is irreversible, according to Mühlmann himself. The value of the variations must be judged according to the criterion of social, cultural and historical importance, which presupposes the historical investigation of the individual phenomena; then the search for their historical course in order to arrive at the type. The rhythm of the transformation can be ascertained in three ways: 1) by means of written documents; 2) through the connection of archaeological material with ethnographic material in a determined place, where cultural contact and exchange have occurred; 3) through the traditions of the indigenous peoples themselves, insofar as they contain memories of the historical events of the people. This is generally the most important way, because it allows one to come closer to ascertaining the real process of cultural transformation. For the comparison of two or more civilizations, a comparison made in order to discover the concordant traits that indicate a common origin and cultural borrowing between the civilizations in question, Mühlmann gives six rules, which cannot be analyzed here. Although he affirms that the search for causality is a deep need of our spirit, which places the cause first and the effect afterward in the order of time, he nevertheless rejects, in the name of some modern scientist, for example,

Heisenberg, the ordinary concept of causality. He wants to replace historical-cultural certainty with that of statistical correlation, whose results lie between certainty and probability, which is obtained through the search for the model or type, as has been said above. This theory of Mühlmann was rightly judged by Fr. Schmidt to be a ridiculous conception.

In criticizing ethnological theories, Mühlmann makes very apt observations, which reveal his uncommon perspicacity. Particularly apt is his remark regarding history, namely that it will henceforth be greatly influenced by ethnology and anthropology, and especially by the functionalist method in the evaluation of historical facts; it will no longer be possible to write a world history without taking into consideration the so-called primitive peoples.

F. in its first form was rejected by Radcliffe-Brown at the solemn assembly of the Royal Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in 1940, deprecating having been considered a member and indeed a leader or one of the leaders of the functionalist school, which, according to him, does not really exist, except as a myth in the mind of Malinowski, whose activity has done nothing but cause so many useless discussions in ethnology.

Fr. Schmidt made a profound critique of F. according to the latest and extensive systematization made of it by Mühlmann, showing its insufficiency and its many inaccuracies, particularly the groundlessness and unreasonableness of his attacks, simplifications and misunderstandings regarding the historical-cultural method, while at the same time acknowledging his merit in having discovered some weak points of the other systems and theories, and in having brought valuable new points of view. In summary, Fr. Schmidt's judgment is the one given at the conclusion of his critique of Krause's theory of structure in the following two points: 1) the historical-cultural method does well to utilize the theory of structure or the functionalist theory both for preparatory ethnological work and for the ascertainment of certain relations in the coexistence of civilizations in space; 2) the theory of structure, however, must turn to the historical-cultural method for the solution of the principal question of ethnology, that is, to reach greater depths of time, going back to the origins, and therefore deeper causal successions.

Luigi Vannicelli