Following the relatively sterile interwar years, during which rural and urban sociology, symbolic interactionism, the "theory of action", and a couple of other broadly ahistorical perspectives (with the exception of critical theory which emerged in Germany during the 1920s) made their beginnings, the functionalist perspective gained a near-hegemonic metatheoretical status in sociology and anthropology, particularly in the US.

The second objective is not explicitly stated, but quite unmistakable: to infuse her own particular socio-political functionalist perspective into the fundamental discourse on "ritual.