Functionalist (individual focus) - as exemplified by Bronislaw Malinowski (1884 - 1942)
(often grouped along with structural-functionalist)

Bronislaw Malinowski

Malinowski was noted for his field work among the Trobriand Islanders, the research of which appeared in such classic works as Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1961). Question asked: like Durkheim, concern for how things function and not temporally ordered or their origins, but turned question around - how does society support the individual? And specifically, what reduces an individual's anxiety of the uncertain? Key points:

• Identified three types of needs society satisfies for individuals:
  1. individual needs - nutrition, reproduction, safety - with society providing food collecting, marriage, defense
  2. instrumental needs - renewal of personnel and charters of behavior - with society providing education and social control systems
  3. integrative needs - means of intellectual, emotional and pragmatic control of one's destiny and chance - with society providing magic, religion and science.
• Thus religion and magic responses to psychological needs to control destiny and chance, where pragmatic knowledge, i.e., science, can't control.
• Wherever there are situations of danger or uncertainty, rift between ideals and realities, or human crisis and resulting in anxiety and fear, religion and magic steps in and attempts to resolve, mediate and/or lessen, and provides chart and procedural knowledge to give order and control. The example of Trobriand Islands fishing (lagoon vs. open sea) and sea-going canoe for Kula Ring, and gardening magic.
• Contrasts:
  • for Durkheim, rituals generate emotional state - for Malinowski, rituals reduce emotional state.
  • for Freud, religion reflects irrational triumph of psychological good over evil - for Durkheim, religion reflects social order - for Malinowski, religion is result of psychological anxieties.
  • for Tylor, magic is attempt of logically understand cause-effect, just wrong - for Durkheim, magic as mechanism for social control - for Malinowski, magic reduces anxiety and provides proper knowledge of procedures.
• Problem:
  1. Tautology.
• Contributes:
  1. Further strengthened role of field work.
  2. Added to the understanding of the social functions of religion.

return to schedule