What Is Culture For?

Abstract

Abstract What is culture for? What functions does culture serve? This chapter traces a historical background to these functionalist questions and examine their contemporary relevance. Although functionalist perspectives arose from Darwin’s evolutionism in social science and psychology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their theoretical implications were thoroughly criticized and gave way to the emergence of a newer, neo-functionalist thinking in the late twentieth century. A neo-functionalist perspective is discernible in a variety of theoretical approaches in culture and psychology. Its basic tenet suggests that culture is often, though not always, helpful..