Schools of Anthropological Theory: Boas to Ortner

Modern academic anthropology took shape as a reaction against nineteenth-century unilinear evolutionism, the assumption, common to thinkers like Lewis Henry Morgan and E.B. Tylor, that all societies pass through fixed stages from 'savagery' through 'barbarism' to 'civilisation'. Franz Boas, a German-American anthropologist working principally among Northwest Coast peoples of North America, rejected this ranking in favour of historical particularism: each culture must be understood as the product of its own specific historical trajectory, and cultural traits should never be judged against an external, typically Euro-American, standard of progress. Boas's insistence on rigorous fieldwork, his training of a generation of American anthropologists including Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Zora Neale Hurston, and his public campaigns against scientific racism established cultural relativism as a foundational, and still contested, methodological and ethical commitment of the discipline.

In Britain, Bronisław Malinowski's fieldwork among the Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia (1915-1918) established the modern paradigm of intensive participant-observation fieldwork — living among a community for an extended period, learning the local language, and observing daily life directly rather than relying on colonial informants or armchair comparison of travellers' reports. Malinowski's functionalism explained cultural institutions, however strange they appeared to outsiders (his famous account of the Kula ring, an elaborate inter-island exchange circuit of shell valuables, being the classic case), as serving identifiable individual or social needs, a framework A.R. Radcliffe-Brown reworked into structural-functionalism, emphasising how institutions maintain the stability of the wider social system rather than individual psychological needs.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, working from French structural linguistics, proposed in the mid-twentieth century that the deep, often unconscious structures of human thought — expressed through binary oppositions such as raw/cooked, nature/culture, and the exchange logics underlying kinship and myth — could be analysed cross-culturally using methods analogous to phonemic analysis in linguistics; his Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) argued that the incest taboo functions universally to compel exogamous marriage exchange between groups, thereby generating alliance and, ultimately, society itself. Structuralism dominated much of mid-century anthropological theory before being challenged for its abstraction from historical change and lived experience.

Clifford Geertz's interpretive anthropology, articulated most influentially in his 1973 essay 'Thick Description', reoriented the discipline toward the analysis of culture as a system of publicly shared symbols and meanings that anthropologists must interpret much as a literary critic interprets a text, famously illustrated through his reading of the Balinese cockfight as a dramatised, richly meaningful commentary on status and masculine prestige rather than a mere gambling pastime; Geertz insisted anthropology could never achieve the predictive laws of natural science and should instead aim at deep, context-sensitive interpretation. Sherry Ortner's subsequent 'practice theory', synthesising Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus with a feminist and Marxist attention to power, shifted focus again toward how individual actors, operating within structural constraints, nonetheless exercise practical agency that can reproduce or transform those very structures over time.

These successive schools are not simply superseded stages but remain live methodological options that contemporary anthropologists combine: a single ethnography today might draw on Boasian relativism's ethical caution, Malinowskian participant-observation as method, structuralist attention to symbolic pattern, Geertzian thick description as a mode of writing, and Ortnerian practice theory to analyse how individuals navigate and sometimes subvert institutional power — a theoretical eclecticism that reflects anthropology's ongoing negotiation between universalist ambition and radical cultural particularity.