CEVAP:

The main interest of functional sociology has been culture as norms, values and a way of lifestyle rather than culture as high culture. Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), one of the founders of the functional approach, addressed some basic questions about how culture came into being in his work, Primitive Classification (1903), written with Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), his nephew and the most important student. According to them, culture only became possible when human communities began to separate and classify things in their environment. To understand the world around him, he has to develop a system that will classify what he sees. Durkheim and Mauss try to explain how societies classify phenomena separately, such as time, space, human types or animal species. According to them, the social structure makes it possible to classify because the social structure is based on the distinctions between social groups. They have emphasized the importance of moral and emotional nature of classifications. The emphasis they put on the culture-bound values is the most important attribute of the functionalist approach. Functional sociology in general, Durkheim in particular, suggests that forms of action, belief and emotion, that is culture, emerge from the organization of social structure or needs, rather than from the choice of the agent or his/her interpretation of the social world.