such a perspective in one of his own works (Psyche’s Task, published in
1927). What each of them took, however, from their ownfieldwork, was
an intrinsic understanding of the importance of observing what people do,
rather than simply speculating a priori about the logic or illogic of ideas
and beliefs; and a performance viewpoint emerges easily out of such a
focus on observed behavior.
There were large differences of overall perspective in other ways, of
course, between twentieth-century and nineteenth-century paradigms of
scientific knowledge. A taken for granted evolutionist perspective tended
to dominate in the nineteenth century (somewhat blunted by diffusionism
in the case of comparative ethnology). Functionalist theory in the twentieth
century brought more into focus the study of the actual working of social
systems regardless of their putative evolutionary standing. Moreover, the
critique of evolutionist schemes, built mostly on speculation about the so-
called group marriage as an explanation of classificatory kin terminologies,
was based on better explanations of particular cases founded on a function-
alist perspective (see, e.g., Hiatt 1996 :52–54 on how Radcliffe-Brown
refuted some of Morgan’s work by reference to hisfieldwork with indigen-
ous groups in Western Australia).
Malinowski also began his work with Australian Aboriginal materials,
using detailed evidence based on practices in their context to cast doubt
on the reality of any full-scale group marriage structures andfirmly re-
instating the idea of the domestic family as a unit of social structure. Both
men, therefore, used the weapon offieldwork and close attention to
customary practice as their means to undermine speculative evolutionist
explanations of features of custom. We can see here, too, that functional-
ism as a theory grows out of the observation of practice, and thus of
performance. Fieldwork thus became the means to establish new standards
of both description and analysis.
All such breakings of frames tend to be followed by further repercus-
sions and recursive loops of fashion. An interesting intervention on
theory in anthropology was later, but not much later, to emerge in a
challenging work by I. C. Jarvie, who was inspired by a philosophical
training at the London School of Economics, particularly through
acquaintance with the work of Karl Popper. Jarvie took as his starting
point a kind of omnibus effect of the works of Malinowski and Radcliffe-
Brown dubbed as‘structural-functionalism’. Such a categorization of
their work itself produces a part of the problem that the critiques of it
claim to solve by demolishing the approach.
1 FRAMING HISTORY 5