BRONISLAW MALINOVSKI’S FUNCTIONAL VIEW

Abstract

In the early decades of the twentieth century, there emerged a kind of a systematic significance for social life, which is called functionalism. It contains essential elements of holistic and organizational theories, but it is recognized as new because it includes some new perceptions of the approach in the societies' studies, as well as their basic characteristics. It occurs first in anthropology, in the form of generalizations of life in small tribal societies, associated with field research carried out in small primitive societies on the remote islands of the Pacific Ocean, and then, during the Second World War (a little before and after it), and in sociology - as an endeavor to build theoretical models for societies as systems, which will then be put into service for the empirical research of modern earth-moving societies.

Functionalism, both within anthropology and within sociology, creates its own strategy for the study of society, in which it is understood as a system of social institutions and a system of cultural specimens. Institutions grow up as regulative examples of social action, grounded in the need of survival. Culture, meanwhile, is the total material, mental and spiritual apparatus that is instrumentally associated with institutions. Society is a system of parts -of institutional-cultural parts that function as mutually dependent, each of which contributes to the survival of the system as a whole.

Key words:

functionalism, anthropology, theory, social system, Malinovski