The 5 most important anthropological schools: characteristics and proposals.

A review of the main currents or "schools" of anthropology.

Anthropology, like almost all scientific disciplines, does not have a single predominant school, but a set of several of them.

In order to get to know them better, we are going to a tour of the most representative schools of anthropology in order to discover to discover what approaches they make and to be able to compare them among them, so we will be able to distinguish the points in common that they raise as well as the differences that are characteristic of each one.

The 5 main anthropological schools

These have been the main currents of this science throughout its historical development.

1. The first of the anthropological schools: evolutionism.

Anthropology is the science in charge of studying the human being in all its dimensions, especially the cultural one. Within this task, different approaches have historically emerged, which represent the main anthropological schools, each of them offering a different way of studying human beings and their different cultures.

It must be taken into account that it is a relatively recent discipline, since it has been considered an independent science since the last few decades. It has been considered an independent science since the last decades of the 19th century, driven by Charles Darwin's ideas about the natural selection of species, as these principles were extrapolated to the human species.These principles were extrapolated to human societies through the so-called social Darwinism, which also affirms that only the fittest groups survive.

It was precisely in this way that one of the first anthropological schools, evolutionism, emerged. The highest representative of this school is Herbert Spencer, one of the first anthropologists in history. Spencer was one of the great English intellectuals of the 19th century. He embraced the theory of evolution to try to explain the functioning of human communities.

However, although he used Darwin's theories, he also intertwined them with those of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, that is, with Lamarckism, which defended postulates on evolution contrary to those of Charles Darwin. In any case, evolutionism is one of the anthropological schools characterized by rejecting creationism and trying to offer a scientific explanation to the origin and modification of human societies and cultures.

Another of the main exponents of this anthropological school was Edward Burnett Tylor, a British anthropologist who asserted that evolutionism is a scientific school of thought.a British anthropologist who laid the foundations of this discipline. Tylor developed cultural anthropology and comparative methods, being the first to carry out field studies, that is, on the field, in a quantitative manner in order to draw conclusions at the ethnological level.

Lewis Henry Morgan was another evolutionist author and therefore representative of the first of the anthropological schools. In this case, Morgan focused his efforts on analyzing kinship systems. He developed a scale to classify the degree of social evolution of human cultures, ranging from savages, with three different degrees, to barbarians, with another three levels, until finally reaching modern civilizations as we know them.

2. The American school of anthropology

Another of the main anthropological schools is the so-called American school, which emerged after the independence of the United States with the aim of analyzing the behavior of human groups in this continent. The greatest exponent of this school was Franz Boas, an American author and one of the greatest opponents of the time to the nascent ideas of scientific racism..

Within the anthropological schools, the American school is characterized by the in-depth study of culture and its comparison between different human groups in order to evaluate contact and transmission. For these authors, the key was to look for similarities as well as differences, since this was the only way to carry out a rigorous analysis of cultural areas as well as their expansion and confluence with others.

An important issue raised by the American school is the question of whether there are other species that, like humans, have culture. This branch is known as Biological anthropology. What they do is to establish a concrete definition of what culture is so that from there they can investigate whether other animals, such as perhaps the great apes (orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees) also develop behaviors that could be framed within the so-called culture.

The Americans also studied the use of language in depth through linguistic anthropology.. It is such an important part of culture that it becomes an element of its own. The form and use of language is of vital importance to anthropologists as a means of understanding the cultural history of a given people. They can even study the way they think thanks to the language structures they use.

Likewise, thanks to this anthropological school, greater importance began to be given to archaeological studies as one of the most important methods for anthropologists as a means of extracting information about the changes that a given culture has undergone over the years.

3. Diffusionist anthropological school

The third of the main anthropological schools is diffusionism, an anthropological current based on the principle of cultural diffusion.What does this mean? It means that all cultures transmit their traits to those close to them, so that a diffusion is constantly taking place between all of them. Thus, the use of a particular technique or object, even if it coincides among several cultures, must come from one of them or from an older one that no longer exists but was in contact.

In fact, there is an offshoot of diffusionism known as hyperdiffusionism, which takes this theory to its extreme. Its proponents maintained that there must have been a single primordial culture from which the others emerged, through small changes that cumulatively gave rise to the whole range of cultures so different that we can observe today in the world.

Friedrich Ratzel was one of the main proponents of diffusionism.. In fact, he is the father of anthropogeography or human geography, the study of the movements of human societies across different regions. Ratzel wanted, through diffusionism, to put an end to the evolutionary ideas of anthropology, since evolutionism defended the simultaneous development between cultures while diffusionism advocated the constant exchange between them.

The fact of the diffusion of a specific element from one culture to another is known in anthropology as cultural borrowing. It is a fact that has happened continuously in human cultures, although obviously some have been more open than others to this happening, facilitating contact with certain cultures to the detriment of others at different times in history.

4. The French sociological school

Within the anthropological schools, we also find the so-called French sociological school. This school is is mainly represented by Émile Durkheim, founder of sociology as an academic science.. The basis of this school is that a social phenomenon cannot be studied in isolation, but must be analyzed in perspective, taking into account all the elements related to it.

Therefore, what the French sociological school defends is the interconnection between cultural elements, which must be studied as a whole if we want to draw well-founded conclusions, otherwise we would lack sufficient information to be able to make a well-founded diagnosis.

Another of the most important authors of this anthropological school of thought is Marcel Mausswho is considered by many to be the father of French ethnology. Like Durkheim, Mauss affirms that, as in the rest of the sciences, anthropological concepts cannot be studied in isolation, since they need a context that helps the researcher to find the precise causes underlying each of them.

Therefore, these authors reject comparison as an anthropological method through which to analyze different human cultures. For them, each one must be studied using the rest of the elements as a context.

5. Functionalist anthropological school

Finally we find functionalism to close the list of the most important anthropological schools. The most important functionalist authors are Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown.

This movement defends the importance of each part of the culture for the function it plays in society.finally constructing a universality in which each element has an importance. It is a response to the postulates of diffusionism that we saw earlier.

Functionalism brings the concept of social structure as a key element, since every function must be preceded by a structure that supports it. Therefore it must be one of the elements that functionalism, one of the main anthropological schools, defends as a principle when carrying out the corresponding studies.

Bibliographical references:

• Harris, M., del Toro, R.V. (1999). The development of anthropological theory: history of theories of culture. Siglo Veintiuno de España Editores S.A.
• Restrepo, E. (2016). Classic schools of anthropological thought. Cuzco. Editor Vicente Torres.
• Stagnaro, A.A. (2003). Science and anthropological debate: different perspectives. Cuadernos de antropología social.