功能主义(functionalism)
一种社会科学理论，强调社会模式与机构的相互倚赖和它们在维持文化及社会统一方面的交互作用。在社会学中，功能主义来自涂尔干的着作，他把社会视为承载了必须实行之特定需要的一种「有机体」。类似的观点被芮德克利夫-布朗的人类学采用，他试图把社会结构解释为适应、融合、统整的持久体系，这种观点也被马林诺夫斯基采用，他把文化视为个人成就及集体成就的总体表现，在此，「每个习俗、物体、观念和信仰实践了某种重要功能。」美国社会学家帕森思从社会、心理学、文化成分方面分析了大规模社会，并把重点放在社会秩序、整合、均衡的问题。後来的作家论述：功能主义太死板，无法解释人类社会生活的广度、深度和不测事件，也忽略了历史在塑造社会时的角色。
English version：
functionalism
In the social sciences, a theory that stresses the interdependence of the patterns and institutions of a society and their interaction in maintaining cultural and social unity. In sociology, functionalism emerged from the work of é. Durkheim, who viewed society as a kind of “organism” that carried with it certain “needs” that must be fulfilled. Similar views were adopted in anthropology by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, who attempted to explain social structures as enduring systems of adaptation, fusion, and integration; and by Bronislaw Malinowski, who looked at culture as the expression of the totality of individual and collective achievement, where “every custom, material object, idea and belief fulfills some vital function.” The U.S. sociologist Talcott Parsons analyzed large-scale societies in terms of their social, psychological, and cultural components and focused on problems of social order, integration, and equilibrium. Later writers argued that functionalism was too rigid to account for the breadth, depth, and contingencies of human social life and that it ignored the role of history in shaping society.