What schools of thought are available in cultural anthropology?

Question

In what ways does Cultural Materialism differ from the others?

Answer 1

Yes, a discipline that has no overarching theory must compensate with many incoherent " schools of thought!! "

Answer 2

Well give us a little more information, such as:

State/region/etc., preference

are you an undergrad, grad, masters

other

Answer 3

Schools of thought... Well that is a really loaded question (depending on who your asking). Check out http://www.as.ua.edu/ant/Faculty/murphy/... this should give you a low down on the theoretical history (schools of thought) of anthropology and the ability to contrast these theories with materialism.  I would like to write more on this for you but I am afraid you would be reading a novel.

Answer 4

There is a huge list and this is a short one.  Here is a short one.

Structuralism

Stuctural Functionalism

Materialism

Historical Materialism

Dialectical Materialism

Sociobiology (not really thought of as a school of thought yet, but is gaining influence)

Evolutionary Psychology (not really thought of as a school of thought yet, but is gaining influence)

Culture History

Historical Anthro

Cultural Relativism

Marxism

Symbolic Anthro

Semiotics

Postmodernism

Environmental Determinism

Selectionism

Cultural Ecology

Human Ecology

Cultural Determinism

Thick Description

Feminist Anthro

Cultural Evolutionism

Many of these are defunct or have evolved into one or another.  The most common, among academics, are probably structuralism, postmodernism, eclecticism and any of the various materialisms and evolutionary and ecological approaches.  

Cultural materialism is an amalgam of mostly Marxian ideas, methods and tools which are vaguely sewn together from Dialectical Materialism, Historical Materialism and Cultural Ecology, but with a sort of free-wheeling tendency to borrow from all the rest.  Most of its best products end up looking a great deal like eclecticism once you pick up on all the borrowed material.  Like most materialist paradigms, it borrows heavily from Marxian ideas about base,  superstructure and ideology. So, you could say that it differs from many other approaches not at all, or you could say that its eclecticism and emphasis on linking the empirical realities of economy, etc, to ideology or ideational culture makes it different.

It would be worthwile to just look up some of the words on thelist above and think about them before setting YOUR ideas to paper on this subject.

FOR JON - You are right about this, but I would say that these schools of thought were (perhaps unconsciously) devised in order to obfuscate any semblance of a coherent unified theory (which, by the way, could have been evolution itself had things been different historically)