BANC 108 Solved Guess Paper 2026 for Theories of Culture and Society (B.Sc. Honours Anthropology, BSCANH and BSCFAN)

Evolutionism: premises and criticisms

Question: What is evolutionism? Discuss the basic premises of the evolutionary school and examine its criticisms.

Meaning of Evolutionism

The term 'evolutionism' is derived from the Latin word evolutio, meaning 'unrolling'. The perspective emerged in the late nineteenth century and held that society and culture develop in a single line from simple to complex.

"Evolution as a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity, to a definite, coherent heterogeneity; through continuous differentiations and integrations"

Basic Premises of the Evolutionary School

1. Unilinear Evolutionism: Societies develop from simple to complex in a single, precise line of progression, moving from a lower to a higher stage.
2. Universal Evolutionism: Evolution happens across the globe and rests on the 'psychic unity of mankind'; all societies pass through the same process as the human brain develops.
3. Single Culture: There is only one Culture with a capital C; the differences seen across societies are not different cultures but different stages of the same Culture.
4. Sequential Progress: Once the sequence of progress is established, each society steps up from one stage to the next, though at its own pace.
5. Comparative Method: The white Europeans, the 'arm-chair anthropologists', placed their own society at the helm of civilization and compared all others against that scale.

Criticisms of Evolutionist Theory

1. Colonisation amplified: On moral grounds it justified colonisation, as the 'white men' placed at the top of civilization rationalised their plunder in the name of 'civilizing' others.
2. Cultural ethnocentrism: Presenting one's own culture as the benchmark devalued the comparative method, which only served to accentuate the scholar's society as superior.
3. Devoid of Cultural Relativism: By labelling some cultures simple and others complex, it ignored the value each custom held within its own cultural context.
4. Lack of empirical data: Most data was second-hand, gathered from travellers, sailors, missionaries and administrators, so the works lacked scientific rigour.
5. Missing links: Boas, Mead and others showed that universal evolution could not explain cultural variations, e.g. Polynesian chiefdoms had complex polities yet were technologically simple.

Conclusion: Classical evolutionism gave anthropology its first systematic framework, but its unilinear, ethnocentric and conjectural assumptions invited sharp criticism, paving the way for fieldwork-based and relativist approaches and, later, neo-evolutionism.

Diffusionism and its schools

Question: Discuss the concept of diffusionism. Examine the major schools of diffusion and the differences between them.

Meaning of Diffusionism

"The transmission of objects, customs, beliefs, ideas, and values from one culture to another or more cultures is referred to as diffusion"

Diffusionism assumes that human beings are largely conservative and uninventive and tend to borrow cultural traits that originated at one or more specific centres, from where they spread to other regions. It challenged the evolutionary idea that all societies independently pass through the same stages.

The Schools of Diffusion

1. British School: Founded by Grafton Elliot Smith with his disciple William James Perry, it insisted that all cultures originated in Egypt and spread from there, impressed by the pyramids and mummification (the heliocentric or Egypto-centric view).
2. German-Austrian School: Founded by Friedrich Ratzel, with Leo Frobenius, Fritz Graebner and Father Wilhelm Schmidt. They argued for many centres of culture and that culture complexes diffuse in totality. Ratzel's 'criterion of form' and Frobenius's 'criterion of quantity' led to the theory of kulturkreis ('culture circle').
3. American School: Laid by Franz Boas, who held that each culture has its own history. It proposed the concept of 'culture area', where Clark Wissler used subsistence to map areas and Alfred Kroeber spoke of 'culture climax'.

Conclusion: Though all three schools agreed that cultural traits spread from specific centres, they differed on the number of centres and whether traits travelled singly or as complexes. Diffusionism corrected evolutionism's neglect of cultural contact, but was criticised for overstating borrowing.

Malinowski's contribution to functionalism

Question: Discuss Malinowski's contribution to functionalism.

Meaning of Functionalism

Functionalism explains social institutions, rituals, morals and values in terms of the functions they perform. Malinowski's functionalism is distinctive because it grounds functionalism in the individual rather than in society.

"Functionalism is marked by its emphasis on the individual"

For Malinowski the individual is a compound of the biological and the cultural. The needs of the individual are mediated through culture, and the manner of satisfying them gives rise to further needs and ultimately to culture itself.

The Theory of Needs

1. Primary / Basic needs: Biological drives such as nourishment, satisfaction of sexual desire, protection from the environment, oxygen, rest and recreation. These are not met directly but are mediated through culture, e.g. each culture defines what is food and when to eat.
2. Instrumental / Derived needs: The manner of fulfilling basic needs gives rise to related needs; thus the sexual drive is regulated by marriage and family, and the need for food requires an economic system to produce it.
3. Integrative / Symbolic needs: As a sign of being human, individuals have symbolic needs represented by the capacity for abstract thinking and imagination, expressed through religion, morality and values.

Marriage as a Secondary Need

Marriage, for Malinowski, is a secondary need linked to the primary need of sexual satisfaction, but it goes far beyond this to fulfil needs of sustenance, economic cooperation and social status, while the family converts the human 'raw material' into a cultural being.

Conclusion: Malinowski's bio-cultural needs theory, unlike Radcliffe-Brown's society-centred approach, explains culture as the human apparatus for satisfying needs. By emphasising the psychological dimension, he firmly anchored functionalism in intensive fieldwork and the individual.

Ethnography and the types of new ethnography

Question: What is ethnography? Describe the major types of new ethnography.

Meaning of Ethnography

"Ethnography literally means 'to write about culture' (from ethnos, 'people', and grapho, 'I write'), a systematic study of a group of people and their cultures"

Classic ethnographies such as Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) and Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) were based on long fieldwork and a positivist aim of objectivity. New ethnography questioned this western, objectivist stance and brought in reflexive, collaborative variants.

Types of New Ethnography

1. Reflexivity: The process of reflecting on oneself as the object of thought; it arose from acknowledging anthropology's European-centric and androcentric roots and the revelations of Malinowski's field diaries, leading to the Writing Culture movement.
2. Autoethnography: Turning the ethnographic gaze inward on the self while keeping the outward gaze on the larger context. The term was first coined by Raymond Firth in 1966.
3. Team Ethnography: Fieldwork and writing done by a team, where, as Erickson and Stull note, players have defined roles. It works either as several researchers on a project or as collaboration where the researched become co-researchers, enabling multi-sited and global ethnography.
4. Dialogical Ethnography: It gives voice to the informants who were earlier 'muted' in writing; Paul Radin called for a directly dialogical approach in 1957, presenting the exchange between researcher and native as genuine dialogue.

Conclusion: New ethnography transformed fieldwork from a solitary, objectivist enterprise into a reflexive, collaborative and dialogical one, acknowledging the ethnographer's positionality and restoring the voices of the people studied.

Theory in anthropological research and a theory for displacement

Question: (a) Discuss why theory is an integral part of anthropological research and its relationship with fieldwork. (b) For a project on 'displacement', discuss a theory you would use and explain the reason thereof.

(a) Theory, Research and Fieldwork

Theory and fieldwork are inseparable in anthropology. A theoretical perspective shapes what the researcher looks for, how data is collected, and how it is interpreted.

1. Theory guides method: Franz Boas reacted against the classical evolutionists because they made premature generalisations from poor, second-hand information; his theoretical critique of the comparative method directly produced the demand for meticulous, first-hand fieldwork.
2. Empirical grounding: Boas insisted that anthropologists ground their arguments in empirical evidence, using a four-field approach so that data is collected in its proper context.
3. Interpretation: Theory enables the move from raw observation to understanding; the same data on kinship, ritual or economy is read differently by a functionalist, a structuralist or a conflict theorist, which is why theory is an integral part of research.

(b) Choosing a Theory for a Project on Displacement

For a field project on displacement, the involuntary uprooting of communities, a conflict-theory or Marxian framework would be most appropriate.

1. Why conflict theory: Displacement involves competing interests and unequal power between the displaced and powerful agencies, exactly the 'interests, ideals and power relationships' that conflict theories foreground.
2. Material base: A Marxian, historical-materialist lens links displacement to control over land and resources and to class; those who own the means of production gain while the labouring or marginal classes lose access to their resource base.

Conclusion: Theory is not separate from research but its very foundation, guiding fieldwork, observation and interpretation. For a contested process such as displacement, conflict and Marxian theories best capture the power, inequality and change at stake.