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Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3 |
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forms of social organisation corresponding to an antecedent condition in which the paternal family had not yet acquired economic and social importance is to be found, and examples of every combination of de facto paternal rights and authority with such features as partial or ritual matrilocal marriage, avuncular authority, or even matrilinear kinship are observed[1].
Adaptation of traditional social organisation, usage, custom, and sentiment to new functions arising from changed social conditions takes place, but that adaptation is remarkably gradual and slow, and the persistence of social tradition is overcome only where it is in direct opposition to urgent and powerful interests. The factor which determines that adaptation, and likewise the preservation of traditional survivals where they favour existing interests, is a very definite and concrete one. It is the economic interests at stake in the social situation.
The adaptation to altered social situations is often accompanied by important changes in sentiment, that is to say, in the emotional values which attach to social facts and relations. It is, as already indicated, a common illusion that the adaptation which takes place is the effect of those changed sentiments, of changes in "public opinion", or other psychological factors. In truth it is the change brought about in the interests at stake by altered economic situations which gives rise to changes in sentiment, in public, and often in scientific, opinion, and not vice versa.
Maternal sentiments towards offspring have, as noted, a truly instinctive basis, but the instinctive operation of those dispositions
Max Horkheimer (Hrsg.): Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 3. Jg 1933, Heft 3. Librairie Felix Alcan, Paris 1933, Seite 372. Digitale Volltext-Ausgabe bei Wikisource, URL: https://de.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Seite:Zeitschrift_f%C3%BCr_Sozialforschung_Jahrgang_2_Heft_3.pdf/54&oldid=- (Version vom 8.6.2022)
- ↑ It may here be noted that the tendency of some writers to belittle or deny the significance of "survivals" — a term which they print in quotation marks — cannot be justified. The school of social anthropologists who at the present day uphold the hypothesis of social origins from a paternal family have adopted what they designate as a "functional method". Social phenomena, according to this "method", are to be interpreted exclusively in accordance with the "function" which the writer supposes them to perform under the actual existing conditions, and without reference to the past or to parallel usages elsewhere. It would take more space than can here be used to enumerate the fallacies which are involved in such a conception. But it may be remarked that the whole of social development depends upon the continuity of transmitted tradition, and would not have been possible without it. Every complex of social phenomena presented by any social stage is thus inevitably made up for the greater part of traditional survivals. The constitution of our own societies may be said to consist of ninety-nine per cent of traditional survivals, and of one per cent of functional adaptations. The fact would seem too obvious to require elaboration. As Lord Raglan remarks, "that a custom can be explained by its functions is a complete fallacy. The functions of a custom, in so far as they exist objectively, and not merely in the mind of the observer, are the effects which the custom has on the members of the community in which it is observed, and the effect of a custom obviously cannot be its cause". (Jocasta's Crime, p. 27.) It would be truly difficult to recall from the annals of science any theory deliberately put forward as a scientific "method" so compact of glaring logical fallacies as that which is pretentiously styled "functional anthropology".
