Define functional analysis.

Functional Analysis :

1. The functionalist approach, in sociology and social anthropology, appeared initially as a reaction against the methods and claims of the evolutionists.

2. It was a criticism of native and superficial uses of the comparative method and of the methods of conjectual history. In which, unverified and unsystematic data were employed on contemporary or primitive societies for reconstructing the early stages of human social life.

3. It was also a critcism of the intention and claim of the evolutionists to give a scientific account of the whole social hisroty of mankind.

4. Today the Human Realations Area File has been developed on the basis of Murdock’s idea and material, and is one of the principal ‘data’ banks which social scientiests possess.

5. Incidentally, in theVictorian age, Herbert Spencer had already started a significant systematic inventory of information about social institutions in a great number of countries.

6. Today, all forms of data banks are developed in different places, providing vital factual information readily and widely available.

7. In Britain its most forceful exponent was A.R. Radcliffe - Brown who dominated anthropology in the late thirties and forties, and used social anthropology as synonym for ‘comparative sociology’.

The systematic use of comparision and contrast as method of enquiry became widely accepted among sociologists and social anthropologists in the first half of the Twentieth Century.

A.R. Radcliffe - Brown sought to extend Emile Durkheim’s sociological theory of totemism by comparing and contrasting the relationship between social structrue.