You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
My interest in anthropology began long before I encountered psychoanalysis. In the course of working for an undergraduate degree in general psychology I realized that I was really only interested in social psychology and in a subsidiary course in anthropology. At graduate school in Chicago my interest became even more focused: it was only social anthropology that I wanted to study, not cultural anthropology, linguistics or archaeology, all of which formed essential parts of anthropology as a subject in Canada and the USA in the 1940s.
The central idea of social anthropology that I found, and still find, so intriguing is that society is conceived as a system of interlocking social roles that shape people's behaviour, beliefs and feelings without their being fully aware of it. I first encountered this idea in Emile Durkheim's Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Durkheim 1915). I went on to study the anthropological works of the two leading British anthropologists of the twentieth century, Bronislaw Malinowski and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, whose ideas had developed, at least in part, from the work of Durkheim.
Malinowski had been virtually marooned in the Trobriand Islands in the Pacific Ocean during the First World War and while there he learned the language and made detailed observations of Trobriand economic, social and religious customs and beliefs. This was in contrast to earlier ethnographers who interviewed people but did not really observe closely what they did or what they thought and felt. Malinowski thought of the totality of Trobriand culture as interrelated and mutually supporting customs whose ultimate function
was to satisfy human needs. Hence his sort of anthropology came to be called ‘functionalism’ (Malinowski 1929).
Malinowski's method of study was called ‘participant observation’ and it has become the standard research method of anthropology. I had some doubts about the ‘need-satisfying’ aspect of Malinowski's functionalism. Once one makes that assump