From Culture as a Whole to Structure: Nine Scientists Who Built the Study of Human Societies

Edward Burnett Tylor opened Primitive Culture in 1871 with a definition of culture as the complex whole of knowledge, belief, art, morals, law and custom acquired by a person as a member of society. His stages from savagery to civilization were later rejected by Boas as unsupported by fieldwork, which is where the path turns.

Franz Boas rebuilt American anthropology around fieldwork: living among the people studied, learning their language and recording culture in its own terms. His 1911 skull measurements of immigrants and their American born children challenged the claim that race fixed mental capacity.

Between 1915 and 1918 Bronislaw Malinowski lived in a tent among the Trobriand Islanders. Argonauts of the Western Pacific, published in 1922, set out participant observation as a systematic method and argued that institutions are understood by the function they serve for the people inside them.

A.R. Radcliffe-Brown studied the Andaman Islanders in 1906 to 1908 and went on to argue that customs are parts working together to maintain the social structure as a whole. His structural functionalism differs from Malinowski's by looking at structure rather than individual need.

Edward Sapir studied under Boas at Columbia and documented numerous Indigenous languages of North America. He argued that a language's grammar shapes how its speakers habitually organize experience, an idea his student Benjamin Lee Whorf developed into the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Margaret Mead, another of Boas's students, carried his claim that adolescence and gender are shaped by culture into her 1925 to 1926 fieldwork on Tau in American Samoa. Coming of Age in Samoa, published in 1928, became a bestseller and was later challenged by Derek Freeman.

Ferdinand de Saussure taught general linguistics at Geneva from 1907 and treated language as a structured system of signs, distinguishing langue, the shared system, from parole, an individual's use of it. His students published the Course in General Linguistics in 1916, the starting point of structural linguistics.

Claude Levi-Strauss applied methods from structural linguistics to kinship, myth and ritual. The Elementary Structures of Kinship, published in 1949, analyzed marriage rules as a system of exchange between groups, and Structural Anthropology in 1958 set out the method behind structuralism.

Derek Freeman's 1983 book Margaret Mead and Samoa argued from his own Samoan fieldwork that Mead's account of untroubled adolescence was wrong. The dispute over her fieldwork and over his use of evidence is still unsettled, which makes it a fitting close for a path about how fieldwork is judged.