Socio-anthropological approach to the study of legal cultures: evolutionism and functionalism

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to substantiate the productivity of the socio-anthropological approach to the study of legal culture. In the study of legal cultures, the methodology of legal science involves going beyond both the special legal sciences and, in general, the social sciences. This actualizes the assessment of the productivity of the socio-anthropological approach to law and the justification of its evolutionist and functionalist directions for the conceptualization of legal phenomena. Their methodology in identifying the characteristics of legal culture is based on a) the recognition of its integral organism, whose elements are functionally connected and based on common principles; b) the principle of organicism, which involves the spread of methods, tools, and patterns of scientific knowledge, characteristic of the biological sciences, to social phenomena. This approach identifies the relationships between human thoughts and behavioral acts, biological and social processes, and various stages of the historical development of legal cultures. The result of the research is a structural scheme developed by the author, which demonstrates the productivity of the socio-anthropological approach to the study of legal culture, reflecting the main forms of manifestation of the reductionism of legal research from narrow methodological positions and ways to overcome it with the help of the socio-anthropological approach of evolutionist and functionalist orientation. The novelty of the work is due to the evolutionist and functionalist study of legal cultures applied by the author, which contributes to overcoming the limitations of criteria for the critical assessment of the laws of their development, contexts that allow characterizing legal phenomena from an interdisciplinary perspective, offer substantive and methodological alternatives to explain them and assess the importance of social communication processes in their dynamics.

Keywords

• law and socio-anthropology
• cross-cultural studies
• primitive societies
• cultural evolution
• legal culture