ANTH 208 Lecture 14: Anth. 208 (Classics in Ethnography) Week Fourteen Lecture Notes
Anth. 208 Week Fourteen Lecture Notes
● Rappaport if very clearly an exercise in functionalism, a fully realized functionalist
worked vs Morgan and Fraser which have parts that are functionalist but that is not the
whole of their works
● British school is associated with functional analysis but it is by no means restricted to
them
● Sacred vs. Profane aka Religious vs. Ordinary, written about by Durkheim while looking
at eskimo society, basically how within a society we easily alternate between the sacred
and the profane (the former is compact the latter dispersed) part of how many societies
function, part of how cultures adapt can see it also in things like rites of passage
● See the idea of ritual/supernatural not affecting the environment in functionalist thought,
but also that it does as Rappaport talks about it being a function of the society, affects
the internal parts of the society including social organization and the people in it
○ Leech 1954, definition of ritual
● Here ritual acts as a regulating mechanism, makes the society self-regulating, it
mediates and adjusts along with other parts of the environment the social
organization/society/relationships
