Malinowski's Functionalism is mutually exclusive to cultural change?

With a fitting tie in to last weeks blog entry, I turn now to Malinowski's approach to the study of society. More specifically to a fairly common critique of it which I happen to find rather unjust. Malinowski is praised, right so, with the important role he played in emphasizing cultural relativism of cultural traits and behaviours. He identified that far from being sporadically organized, like say a mismatching quilt blanket, they served the purpose of meeting particular needs. That is they performed required functions within the society. Some of these functions came from biological needs, whereas others came from cultural needs. This however is not a distinction I intend on exploring. Malinowski further articulated that they were organized within institutions, therefore it was of benefit to use this as one's scope. So as I briefly alluded to in my previous post this prompted the prospective anthropologist to be constantly checking that they were seeing how what they were observing could be understood relative to it's appropriate context. This now brings me to the critique.

It has been reasoned that such an approach falls victim to being too ahistorical. That is it treats society as a stable and cohesive unit with unchanging components. That if we are constantly checking to see what functions traits and behaviours perform, relating these back to institutions before analysing how the institutions interact with each other in addressing needs we are presented with an image of a society existing in a state of equilibrium. Putting aside the fact that this is clearly at odds Malinowski's acknowledgement that over time cultural needs will experience ongoing change this is an unfair mischaracterization. As, like Spencer and Durkheim, Malinowski used the analogy of comparing society to an animal I find it quite fitting that I shall demonstrate the fallacy in that approach by appealing to the biological sciences.

Let us presuppose we have someone who is particularly interested in a biological organism. Their interest lies in particular in understanding how the various organs and internal circuitry function in order to meet the needs of the sample. To this end they will look at individual organs and go into detail as to the functions they perform while relating it back to the rest of the body. Now one would not, I don't think, make the argument that such a person is guilty of neglecting neither biological evolution nor the changes which occur over the lifespan of the sample. Indeed to raise such questions would sound rather absurd. Yet when it comes to the study of society, it is seen fit to raise such questions of Malinowski. Simply because one is taking a functionalist approach does not exclude one from acknowledging societies and cultures live, largely, in a constant state of flux.