Lucien Levy-Bruhl was a French anthropologist who had a study in the primary field explaining the types of minds and which involved primitive mentality. In the work, “How natives think” he hypothesized on what he mentioned as the two basic mindsets of a person, the “primitive” and “the Western.” He goes ahead to explain in his work that a “primitive” mind does not have the ability to distinguish between the supernatural and the reality. The primitive mind, however, uses a “Mystical participation” to so as to exploit the world. Besides, Levy-Bruhl explains that the Primitive mind does not address any kinds of contradictions. His work was original, and he explained that even though the minds of the primitive people work in the same way as the minds of the civilized, he also pointed out that the primitive people reason from mistaken premises which a different case with the civilized minds. (Lévy-Bruhl , pp154)He also explained that the difference in the thinking of both the primitive minds and the civilized minds lie in their collective representations from each category. He also explains that the ideas in his theory are the law of participation, where in the minds of primitive people, the same phenomenon might be represented in different forms of being.
According to Levy-Buhl, the civilized mind on the other hand by contrast to the primitive mind uses a both speculations and logics. He believed, just like other philosophers, in a historical teleology and evolution that transformed the primitive mind into the civilized one. As a result, his aim was never to diminish the primitive cultures but he emphasized on studying the primitive minds in their contexts, and they must only be studied in their terms. According to Levy-Bruhl therefore, the civilized mind sought the cause of a certain phenomenon. Therefore, as a result, we seek a condition that would bring out a series of the same phenomenon. As a result, for the civilized mind, as long as the conditions are fully determined, we do not ask so many questions. However, this is the contrary for the primitive mind. They will always try to seek the true cause of a phenomenon in the world of the unseen powers. The civilized man according to Levy occupied the highest position in the scientific stages.
Bronislaw Kaspar Malinowski is a Polish anthropologist whose work mainly revolved around transforming the 19th-century Anthropology into a modern science man. His primary scientific interest was based on the study of culture as a global phenomenon, which is paramount in the development of a framework that would permit the systematic study of certain particular cultures and to facilitate cross-cultural interaction and comparison. He was considered one of the most skilled anthropologists. This is because he had a highly methodical and a well organized theorized approach towards the study of the social systems. He established a way in which he established that to gain a good result with the experiments, the anthropologists ought to stay close to their subjects and express the detail of involving them in a detailed level of participation observation. As a result, the informants are their responsibility and hence they should stay close to them so that the anthropologists can understand a wide variety of cultural variances.
In his point of view, the entire goal of an anthropologist is supposed to be to acknowledge the native’s point of view and to view his relation to life in the realization of his vision for the future. Malinowski was the invert of the functionalist approach as a way to study the cultural orientation. Malinowski expressed claimed that culture served the needs of the individual people rather than the needs of the society as a whole. As a result, in his point of view, when the needs and requirements of the individuals who make up the society are met, then the needs of the society is considered to have been met. According to Malinowski, understanding the way in which the society function requires the anthropologists to monitor both the feelings and the motives of the people in the very society.
For Lévi-Strauss, the native classes are two; the primitive minded and the civilized individuals. According to him these two classes of personality are what make up the society and to study properly the society’s organization, the anthropologists ought to know the thinking capacity. According to Lévi-Strauss, his method had no difficulty and the inconsistencies of individual accounts. According to Malinowski, he speculated for instance that magic beliefs come to life when the people in the society come to control over the events whose outcomes were uncertain. This is true since he came to find proof to his claim in the rites that surrounded abortions and weaving of skirts. Despite this being the case, there was no magic attached to the making of pots despite the fact that it is the same business like any other like weaving. Therefore, the explanation to all these is not consistent.
Work Cited
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. How Natives Think. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1985. Print.
