Kluckhohn, Memoir of Malinowski

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Bronislaw Malinowski 1884-1942Author(s): Clyde KluckhohnSource: The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 56, No. 221 (Jul. - Sep., 1943), pp. 208-219Published by: American Folklore SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/535603Accessed: 25/08/2009 10:36

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BRONISLAW MALINOWSKI I884-I942

By CLYDE KLUCKHOHNThe record of the objective events of Professor Malinowski's life is easily

available in a number of memorial notices.' Rather than duplicating suchaccounts, a tentative and incomplete assessment of his contributions to an-thropology may be worth while. This is an exceedingly difficult task in theyear I943, for Malinowski was a passionate man, and he evoked strong pas-sions in others. To some of the most eager field workers and creative theoristsof the past two decades Malinowski was a major prophet, the guide who wasleading anthropology out of sterile antiquarianism or at least out of re-

searches which, while rigorous, were "aloof and preoccupied." His influenceas a teacher can be compared only with that of Professor Boas, even thoughone grant the profound consequences of the teaching of Sapir, Radcliffe-Brown, Kroeber, and Lowie. Not a few leaders in other scientific fields feltthat it was mainly Malinowski who had made possible recent cross-fertiliza-tion between anthropology and other fields. Certainly no anthropologist hasever had so wide a popular audience; thousands of laymen in many countriescame to entertain with fervor the attitude of an anthropology whose methods,purposes, and results had at last become intelligible. On the other hand, to

some anthropologists in Europe and to perhaps the majority of the olderprofessionals in the United States Malinowski appeared as little better thana pretentious Messiah of the credulous. At most it was conceded that he haddone field work worthy of respect, that he was able to communicate a senseof adventure in even his most technical writing, that he was "a gifted popu-larizer." During his lecture tours in the United States in the Twenties andlater Malinowski evoked deep resentments in professional circles. It was feltthat he was capitalizing on the obvious, that he was advertising, as new andstartling, tenets of field work and of theory which Boas and some of his stu-dents had long quietly practiced.2

An adequately documented critique of Malinowski's work would be abook-length assignment. Any short discussion must not pretend to be atother than an impressionistic level. Let me start, then, with some evaluationswhich are all too obviously subjective. During the last few months I have re-read most of what Malinowski published in English. My net reaction is therather uninteresting one that Malinowski has been both over-praised and

1 See, for example, that by Audrey Richards in Man 43: I, I9432 This is understandable enough. For example, I must confess that a year ago when I first

read Dr. A. H. Gayton's Yokuts-Mono Chiefs and Shamans (University of California Pub-lications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 24: 361-420, I930) I was astonished to dis-cover how this publication-issued in I930-exemplified most of the virtues Malinowskiclaimed for "functionalism" (and some others ). Without fanfare, Dr. Gayton shows-withconvincing workmanship-the interlocking of many cultural elements, complex reciprocities,the sanctions and social utilities involved in sorcery. Her discussion of the power of the chiefwas much more illuminating to me than any I have ever been able to find in the pages ofMalinowski.

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over-blamed. On the whole, I was surprised at how little, apart from ethno-graphic details, I learned from the re-reading. At times, especially in theArgonauts, which seems to me incomparably his best-written work, I founda lively pleasure in his literary skill. I enjoyed his dramatization of fieldwork. Occasionally I was annoyed by his diffuseness, more often by hisflamboyant flogging-of dead horses, by what Professor Lowie has called his"adolescent eagerness to shock the ethnological bourgeois." His substantivecontributions to the study of such topics as the family, religion (particularlythe luminous chapter in the Needham volume), economics, and law are im-pressive. His texts are most useful, but he appears to me as a not too distin-guished amateur in linguistics. In his appendix to The Meaning of Meaningand in the second volume of Coral Islands and Their Magic he does helpfully

apply a few of the leading principles of Ogden and Richards to the materialsof a non-literate language, but his vaunted "ethnographic theory of language"is really little more than that. For a really original and penetrating treatmentof the linguistic data from the Trobriands one must turn to Dorothy Lee'sbrilliant essay.3

In general, one does not get theoretical profundities from Malinowski. Hehas no flair for the intricate, sometimes tortuous, conceptual subtleties whichwe get from Bateson, for instance. As a theorist, Malinowski's forte was as anintegrator-often at a rather superficial level. There is no doubt that he askedmany of the right questions and that in the later years of his life he waspreoccupied with some of the most central dilemmas in the conceptualizationand presentation of cultural materials. But I was never conscious of thosesudden illuminations which I inevitably get upon re-reading Boas and Sapir.Possibly, the reader may object, this was because Malinowski wrote so welland so lucidly that one got the whole he had to communicate in the firstreading or two. It is true, of course, that Boas' genius was not for expression:that he must be studied rather than read. Sapir, however, was the consum-mate master of the literary instrument. No, I am convinced that my sense ofemptiness on re-reading Malinowski was because his message is essentiallysimple, almost devoid of deep insights and precious subtleties. I believe thatin the long run Malinowski's reputation will rest upon his capacity in expres-sion, upon his field data as such, and upon his crusade for theory in anthropol-ogy (rather than his own theoretical formulations).

Malinowski's capacity for expression had many facets and many conse-quences for anthropology. It was charged with that enthusiasm which wasone of his most attractive qualities. This enthusiasm revitalized much anthro-pological endeavor and, in the British world at least, drew students of a typewhich had not hitherto been much in evidence. These students had their eye

primarily uponthe

contemporaryworld in which

they lived,and a

largeproportion of Malinowski's energies in his later years was given to colonialadministration and other aspects of applied anthropology. Not merelythrough the work of his students but equally through his own more popularwritings and lectures Malinowski was able to reach scholars in other fields,

3 A Primitive System of Values (Philosophy of Science 7: 355-78, 1940).

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men of affairs who for the first time realized the potential contribution ofanthropological studies to our own problems.4 Among other things, this per-mitted the mobilization of much-needed material support. I think I am cor-rect in saying that Malinowski was the first anthropologist to receive hand-some assistance from the Rockefeller or any other major foundation. Finallyhis talents for communication implemented his facile eclecticism in theory.From Durkheim, Frazer, Ogden and Richards, American anthropologists,and from various psychologists he fused elements to produce a conceptualscheme which, if not profoundly original and not without internal contradic-tions and difficulties, was at least a usable, explicit, pro tempore theoreticalstructure.

In my opinion, this was by no means the least of Malinowski's services. He

provided a somewhat integrated, explicit conceptual scheme which told peoplewho were studying human behavior from the point of view of other disciplineswhat anthropology was trying to do-at an abstract and theoretical level. Hestated theories which could be criticized and tested in the same overt waythat factual data can be subjected to critical analysis and to testing in thefield. This is essential to the maturity of any discipline. What roused the in-dignation of many American anthropologists during what a friend of minecalls "anthropology's mauve decade" (I920-30) was that Malinowski was

making a fuss over what they were accustomed to taking for granted. Pre-cisely the great objection to the work of the followers of Boas is that theyhave taken too much for granted. Nothing dare be taken for granted in a sci-ence-in part because what one generation or one scientific clique takes forgranted will be opaque to or misunderstood by another generation or anotherclique. The work of the Boas group was too much in the family tradition-itwas not necessary to set down certain things of absolutely fundamental. im-portance (such as techniques of field work) because these were handled largelyon the basis of implicit agreement or on the basis of informal, oral discussion.Such a tradition may achieve quite good results in practice as long as workgoes on in the teacher-apprentice framework, but when the time comes for

the general conclusions to be communicated to a larger intellectual fellowship(especially that of other disciplines) it is most inadequate. Tell an acute psy-chologist, economist, sociologist to read Boas' article Anthropology in theEncyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, and-it is an induction from my experi-ence-he comes away disappointed and feels empty-handed. He says some-thing of this order, "Well, I know a little more about what I already vaguelyknew-that anthropologists don't take race very seriously as a determinantof culture et cetera, but I know very little about the basic presuppositions

4 Perhaps it is useful to point out one homely detail which partially explains the extent ofMalinowski's influence outside the

profession.His books were issued

bycommercial

publishers,rather than in technical series. He also contributed many chapters to books of wide popularappeal and wrote articles for journals of broad circulation. American anthropologists havecharacteristically done little writing of this sort. Boas, in his long life, issued only two booksthrough commercial publishers. Excellent monographs, like those of Gayton, tend to remain"buried" because they appeared in media which even the intellectual public tend to stereotypeas formidable. Hence the more general implications of their methods and results have only toa slight extent become part of the central stream of contemporary thought.

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(logical postulates) of the anthropologists, next to nothing about the opera-tions they follow in extracting their evidence. In short, my needs aren't met."5It is equally an induction from my experience that if one directs these samepeople to Malinowski's article Culture in the same Encyclopaedia, they docome away satisfied (not necessarily, of course, in the sense of agreeing com-pletely). This is simply a fact of my experience-and I, at least, have to reckonwith it. The inference is not, to be sure, that we must all therefore write abook about every commonplace of our subject. But we do need to make ourabstract procedures as explicit as our evidential critiques or anthropologytends to be little more than obscure antiquarianism.

The trouble is partly that that austerity which I myself value so highly inBoas is notably lacking in Malinowski. He is frequently wordy, often flip-

pant, occasionally trivial, pretentious, even cheap (according to my taste).If I were willing to lift, with tendentious discretion, isolated phrases and para-graphs I could document the worst which has been said against him. But thiswould not be seeing Malinowski steadily and seeing him whole. His own in-famous remark "the magnificent title of the Functional School of Anthropol-ogy has been bestowed by myself, in a way on myself, and to a large extentout of my own sense of irresponsibility,"6 gives the clue to what is perduringand valid in these cavils. Malinowski often speaks of his own "methodologicalpuritanism," but insofar as his claim is at all correct it must be based uponan inconsistent humility with regard to his field data and a certain timidity atventuring into the higher levels of abstraction. Actually, Malinowski wasfrequently "irresponsible" in his writings and often infuriatingly so at pro-fessional meetings. He could be defiant, petulant, wilfully brilliant, contradic-tory. He was sometimes too generous in praising the work of his students andfriends, too acrimonious in controversy, too adept at logical jugglery. Insum, his performance lacks unflagging emotional poise. I am persuaded thatMalinowski did indeed believe in anthropology, but one misses the sustainednote of high seriousness which is the hallmark of Boas.

The lack of austerity makes it impossible for most Boasians to forgive

Malinowski his terminological innovations and extravagances. As one ofthem complained to me "Why must he continually be draping the nakedtruth in long-haired words?" But here again I find more to applaud than tocensure. In my judgment, the Boasians, in their admirable determination toavoid the Scylla of pretentiousness, come dangerously close to an equallyperilous Charybdis. The student who describes and attempts to "explain"the doings and sayings of other human beings must never take commonplacesat their face value without scrutiny-that is the one unforgivable sin This isnot to say that ultimately the student cannot so accept them-but he mustalways question them first. Similarly, one can lean over backwards in theinsistence upon the use of the simple words of ordinary speech. The very fact

6 It is no accident that the only statement of the theoretical position of Boas and his fol-lowers which I have been able to find which would, I believe, strike a logician as systematicand coherent was written by a political economist-sociologist. See R. Maclver in IntroductionI, Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences i: 172-88, I930.

6 Special Foreword, The Sexual Life of Savages (3rd ed., London, I932) xxix.

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that these words are used in ordinary conversation makes them dangeroustools for the conveyance of delimited and precise meanings. It is often neces-sary to seek for unusual, even recondite words which have not been so soiled,so muddied by loose usage. I believe that what people who never permit them-selves a fifty-cent word actually achieve is often misunderstanding andequivocal interpretation. In some particulars, I would go so far as to arguethat Malinowski erred in the other direction. Take "institution"-one of hisfavorite terms. There are four, perhaps five, different senses in which thisword is employed in the professional literature of anthropology and sociology.Malinowski defined (differently in different places ) his own rather privatesense. But ten pages later most readers will unconsciously substitute their ownaccustomed referent. I submit that to use "institution" at all in technical

writing is to invite confusion.Considering the limited span of his productive life, Malinowski wrote a

great deal. There are eight books in English. I have discovered forty-twoarticles and chapters in books (excluding translations, re-publications, etc.)which range from a few pages to monograph length. I know of eight forewords(and there are undoubtedly more) to books by others; these never stop withconventional civilities, for he always makes theoretical points, often engagesin polemics. Indeed the Foreword to Hogbin's Law and Order in Polynesiais about fifty pages in length and must be considered as one of Malinowski'smore

importantutterances. This amount of

publicationwas doubtless neces-

sary to Malinowski's effectiveness as a publicist for anthropology and as aliaison officer with other disciplines. Had he written less and that more tightly,his stature as a scientist would be greater. Here again the contrast with Boasis patent. In Goethe's words, "In der Selbstbeschrankung erzeigt sich derMeister."

Lowie has well observed that "all his subsequent publications, descriptiveand theoretical, stand rooted" in the major experience of his Trobriand fieldwork. While I think that some critics have over-emphasized his "ethnographicprovincialism," his tendency to base pan-human generalizations upon his

Trobriand data, still there is undoubtedly something in these strictures.Malinowski alludes to field trips among the Pueblos, the Chaggas and variousother African tribes, but I see no evidence that he ever did much more thanget a few first-hand impressions of these other cultures. His serious field workwas limited to the Trobriands, except possibly for his study of Mexicanmarkets in the last years of his life. Moreover, I get the impression that, afterhe had studied Frazer and Seligman, his perusal of the ethnographic data pro-vided by others was mostly limited to a hasty scanning. His control of theethnography of other regions appears superficial for an anthropologist of hiseminence.

What of his accounts of the Trobriand Islanders, as he has finally left themfor us? By and large, the Trobrianders are surely about as adequately de-scribed as any people thus far. There are gaps, of course. The promised mono-graphs on kinship, on fishing, never appeared. On warfare we have only a fewpages. Some aspects of technology were never covered. Although he mentionsdescription of "the imponderabilia of native life" as a goal, he does not treat

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the covert culture, the distinctive apperceptive habits of the group, sys-tematically. These lacunae are perhaps more a commentary on the immensityof any attempt to describe a culture "completely" than a professional sin ofMalinowski's. More serious is the absence of a single volume where we seeTrobriand culture, not from the vantage point of the kula or of sex or of gar-den magic, but from a more embracive perspective which helps us to under-stand the interrelationships of these various "institutional systems." Lament-ably, the student who reads only Argonauts of the Western Pacific has quitedifferent notions of Trobriand culture from the equally competent studentwho reads Sex and Repression or Coral Islands and Their Magic.

The field work itself was undoubtedly good. While "dirt ethnology" andparticipant observation were not invented by Malinowski, he set a superla-

tive example along these lines and advertised their merits. He learned thenative language. He produced a great variety of posed and unposed photo-graphs. Although he apologizes for his photographs and although today Bate-son, Mead, and others have developed and refined the principles of ethno-graphic photography, still those he has published illustrate a tremendousrange of activities, of personal types, and of cultural artifacts.

The data Malinowski has provided are rich. But completeness would nothave been attained even had he published everything. Some topics appar-ently did not interest him: physical anthropology, to wit. His failure to do

anthropometryis justifiable, but why are there no organized observations on

health, figures on vital statistics and the like? Descriptions of motor habits arecasual. Another noteworthy omission is that of life histories or personal docu-ments of any intensity. There are scraps of such data, some vivid pictures ofscenes and personalities, and a few good case histories in Crime and Custom,but for all of Malinowski's talk about "the individual" it seems to me thatthere are amazingly few materials on persons as opposed to cultural patterns.For his neglect of dreams, children's drawings, and the like, it would be unfairto bring reproach. One ethnographer can't do everything, and the need forsuch classes of data was little apparent at the time of his field investigations.

Of many inadequacies in his materials Malinowski has shown an admirableawareness. Indeed the appendix, Some Detailed Statements about Errors ofOmission and Commission in Coral Islands and Their Magic, may serve as amodel of candor for most of us. He bewails that " ... like every ethnographerI was lured by the dramatic, exceptional, and sensational."7 He bemoans hislack of attention to the phenomena of culture change as they went on beforehis eyes as "perhaps ... the most serious shortcoming of my whole anthro-pological research in Melanesia."8 Assuredly, "functionalism" generally tendsto overemphasize the non-developmental aspects of society at the expense of

studyof

change-processes.He

recognizesthe lack of

quantitative materials,9the necessity for which he had argued in Argonauts. As a matter of fact,Malinowski gives the reader very little control over the validity of his gen-eralizations, for he seldom indicates the amount and kind of information upon

7 Coral Islands and Their Magic (2 vols. New York, I935) I: 462.8 Ibid. I: 481.9 Ibid. I: 459-60.

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which they are based. Apart from a few charts and tables, he publishes almostnone of his records as such. The excuse given for the absence of quantitativedata, I find highly unconvincing.10

It would be quite improper to call Malinowski's approach anecdotal.Would it, however, be very far from the truth if we described his method asthat of the well-documented anecdote set firmly in a ramified contest? Thereis surely a tinge of the anecdotal so long as an ethnographer gives us no checkupon his statement or implication that a behavior or a patterned set of re-sponses is or is not typical-in the sense where type is a measure of centraltendency in a range of material. At least until abundant induction assures usin how far we can disregard considerations of this sort we require documenta-tion in roughly this form: "Under such and such specified conditions I ob-

served (or was told by so and so many informants) that TrobriandersA, B, C, . . . X acted or spoke this, while Trobrianders I, 2, 3 ... 19 respondedto the relevant stimulus situation in this different fashion."

In the case of someone like Malinowski who has lived long in the societyand who speaks the language we are, in the greater number of cases, probablynot unwarranted in taking his word (or implicit suggestion) that a givenincident is typical or atypical. And yet-in terms of what we know and sus-pect as to the intrusion of the "personality" of the field worker into the selec-tion of his data and the crystallization of his dominant impressions-wouldwe not be

justifiedin

demandingeven from this sensitive observer some dis-

passionately factual controls of this sort? Malinowski himself remarks that"The competent and experienced ethnographer . . . will easily see from thedata presented throughout this book where the documentation is thin andwhere it is full."" But isn't this entirely too rough and ready a sort of test foreven a would-be science? Malinowski normally documents his "context ofsituation" in almost every particular, but I sometimes suspect that this sure-ness of documentation (together with a general effect of firm mastery of hisdata which he manages to convey to almost every reader) makes Malinowskia trifle more compelling than a really cold-blooded scrutiny of his work

would warrant.A distinguished anthropologist has been heard to remark, "When you read

the Argonauts you felt that the kula is everything in the Trobriands, whenyou read Sex and Repression or Sexual Life of Savages you decided it wasreally sex that counted. Now-with Coral Islands and Their Magic you haveto conclude that, after all, neither sex nor kula are really central-it is magic."No one would assert that these remarks constitute a fair and balanced verdict.It is highly enlightening to see various facts in a variety of different settings.One can easily comprehend why Malinowski was stimulated to follow a num-ber of alternative lines of

analysisand

presentation.Yet he never showed us

how these various foci which have formed the central motifs of his books areinterrelated one with another, how and where one "interest" prevails over oris subordinate to another. And so, in some of us from time to time, a nastysuspicion popped up that Malinowski's conceptual scheme was rather far

10 Ibid. I: 13.n Sexual Life of Savages, 3rd ed., xlviii.

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from a neutral, uniform set of operations consistently applied to various as-semblages of discrete data.

As Linton has observed, "The adequate presentation of cultural materialeven in simple descriptive terms offers a problem which is still unsolved."Malinowski faced the problem, made some progress, but did not solve it."The canoe has also its sociology," and other texts of his suggest the justlyfamous manner in which he pointed out far-flung interrelationships. CertainlyMalinowski does not destroy one's sense of the specific as much as did manyAmerican monographs, with their data forced into the stereotyped compart-ments of the standard table of contents. The theoretical papers of later yearsshow that Malinowski was developing an attack along the direction in whichI believe improvement lies. Instead of foisting the categories which arise nat-

urally out of Indo-European languages and which are traditional in WesternEuropean cultures upon data from divergent traditions, let us rather examinethose natural foci of activity and need satisfaction which are somewhat inevi-table for all human beings by reason of their similar biological equipment,their common problems vis-a-vis the physical environment, etc. Malinowski'sefforts thus oriented were halting. Late in life, he still clung to many of thereceived categories such as "law," "education," "economics."'2

Of his systematic theoretical statements, four appear to be outstanding:the article Anthropology in the thirteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia

Britannica,13the article Culture in the

Encyclopaediaof the Social

Sciences,The Group and the Individual in Functional Analysis in the American Jour-nal of Sociology'13 for 939, and The Scientific Approach to the Study of Man,published in Science and Man, in I942.14 The conceptual genealogy of Mali-nowski's theory is exceptionally hybrid. There are the French sociologists,various anthropologists, Shand's doctrine of the sentiment and bits of Pavlovand radical behaviorism, Ogden and Richards, and many other lines of in-fluence. He himself says that his article on Culture " ... consists in reducingDurkheimian theory to terms of behavioristic psychology."'6 This statementcan hardly be taken seriously at its face value,16 but is interesting as an indi-

cation of Malinowski's aims.It would be absurd to pretend that there is nothing new or useful on the

conceptual side. He saw most clearly how much of culture is "the reinterpre-tation of biological drives." "Symbolic charters," "integrative and instru-mental imperatives"-these and many other neat conceptual tools, encapsu-lated in fresh phrases, are by no means to be despised. At his best, he wasable to translate from one intellectual idiom into another with matchless lu-cidity:

12 Culture as a Determinant f Behavior, n Factors Determining Human Behavior

(Cambridge, Mass., I937) I39.13 Reprinted n the fourteenth dition as Social Anthropology.13a 44: 938-64, I939.14New York: d. by R. N. Anshen.16 Coral Islands, 2: 236.16There are too many uch n Malinowski. Anobject can be identified nd defined nly by

its use. .. ." "Every detail of social organization s active and effective. . ." (EncyclopaediaBritannica rticle). "All magic has an inaugurative unction" Coral slands).

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"Moral motivation" when viewed empirically consists in a disposition of the nerv-ous system and of the whole organism to follow within given circumstances a line ofbehavior dictated by inner constraint which is due neither to innate impulses nor yetto obvious gains and utilities. The inner constraint is the result of the gradual trainingof the organism within a definite set of cultural conditions.'7

As I see it, the great weaknesses in Malinowski's theory were the lack of re-gard for the time dimension, an unwarranted contempt for distributionalstudies, the lack of a workable psychology, the blindness to formal structuresas opposed to functions. The first of these points has already been sufficientlyelaborated in anthropological literature. Tylor's observation of more than twogenerations ago still holds: "Much learned nonsense is written in the attemptto explain by the light of reason what must be explained by the light ofhistory." Today it is generally agreed, to paraphrase Lesser, that "the proc-esses which control events are imbedded in time as well as in situation."Malinowski himself sometimes admitted,'8 but seldom applied, the utility ofthe historical approach. The same may be said for distributional investiga-tion. Perhaps because he hardly dealt with Trobriand culture in terms of itsown flux, he failed to deal other than incidentally in terms of surroundingcultures. Nor does he seem in his theory to give full recognition to thetheorem that movement or change within a culture cannot be wholly under-stood save by reference to that without. As for psychology, Malinowski re-

mained rooted in an outmoded behaviorism. His publications show no mas-tery of contemporary learning theory. Psychoanalytic theory he influencedimportantly, but he was never analyzed, and psychoanalysis failed to becomepart of his systematic thinking.

The final criticism of his theory can advantageously be considered togetherwith a general discussion of the topic with which it seems appropriate to con-clude an essay on Malinowski: functionalism. "Functionalism," as Malinow-ski recognized, had long been known in anthropology non verbo sed re.19 Hepointed to Bastian and Tylor, Boas and other Americanists, RobertsonSmith, and others as precursors. Sometimes, apparently, he regarded him-self and his pupils as the only true living exponents of this point of view; onother occasions he included Radcliffe-Brown and Thurnwald; once he listeda long and seemingly very heterogeneous group (including Havelock Ellis,Pitt-Rivers, G. A. Dorsey, Westermarck and Goldenweiser) as "spirituallyakin."20 In adopting "functionalism" as a shibboleth Malinowski was actingunder the influence of a cultural compulsive, for during this same period therewere vocally "functional" movements in law, philosophy, architecture, andother fields.2'

Probably it was healthful that, at this particular epoch in the history of

17"Culture," 623.18Encyclopaedia Britannica article: special foreword to Sexual Life of Savages, 3rd ed.19Encyclopaedia Britannica article.20 Article Parenthood in The New Generation, (New York, I930: ed. by Calverton and

Schmalhausen) 116, n.21 See the article Functionalism by Horace M. Kallen in Encyclopaedia of the Social

Sciences 3: 523-25, 1931.

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to all further work. But if there be abstractions common to social organiza-tion, mythology, and technology they must be discovered and pointed out. AsBateson urges, it is the task of the anthropologist "to see the highest commonfactor in a vast variety of human phenomena." The higher levels of abstrac-tion are admittedly perilous. But they are essential. No amount of externaldescription can-without second-order inference-enable us to comprehendthe covert culture.23

The "functionalists" have verged on assuming that the same interestswere dominant in all societies, that all cultures were organized in the sameway. They aren't. This is why a thoroughgoing analysis of cultural structuresas such can never be dispensed with. The "functionalists" have treated cul-tural patterns too casually. They have neglected the structure of culture, those

sectors of culture which are, as it were, pure form. They have forgotten theinertia of patterns, overlooked that inner coherence (as opposed to resultsachieved) of structures which tends to make them self-perpetuating.

What one always has is form; function changes-in time and in place. Inour educational system most people feel that by fulfilling forms they haveachieved what the assumed function is supposed to do. People commonlyjudge behavior by the purposed function of a form they pursue. The "naturalfunction" of a given form changes. The "functionalists" have wanted tooinsistently to explain "function" in direct and universal terms rather than insymbolic terms. This accords with their "anti-historical" bias, because, forthe most part, symbols become established not to fit universal principles butby historical accidents. It is of cardinal importance to realize this multiplicityof "natural function" for the same form and its transferability. Differentfunctions are served by the same trait and the different traits perform thesame function. The flux of "natural function" is a problem which must befaced.

Both "forms" and "functions" are significant. Neither approach alone issatisfactory. If you follow the "natural function" scheme for classifyingcultural behavior, you are likely to end up with empty commonplaces. If youattempt to classify formally, you run into the hazard of rationalization on thepart of the culture carriers. The "functionalists" have seen very clearlyhow the solidarity of a society was symbolized and reinforced by, especially,ritualistic behaviors. But they have not been clear as to how, from the stand-

point of the individual actor moving through cultural patterns, the fulfillmentof form becomes, in a sense, an end in itself. They have tended too much tolook for intrinsic and invariant connections between particular symbols andparticular activities, forgetting the "accidents" of history. The work of the"functional" anthropologists-so long as they think they can dispense withthe time dimension-is not calculated to answer the

question: whyis it that

exactly these and no other forms meet these and no other needs in a particularsociety at a particular period? As Linton notes: "Although its form may be

progressively modified during the process of incorporation, the initial formhas a strong influence on the initial ascriptions of use, meaning, and function,

23 Cf. Clyde Kluckhohn, Covert Culture and Administrative Process (American Anthro-pologist 45: 213-27, I943).

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Documents

Kluckhohn, Memoir of Malinowski