The standard anthropological representation of ‘a society’ in the functionalist and culturalist traditions is that of an ethnically distinct people, living in accordance with specific institutions and having a particular culture. The ideal coincidence of the three components is seen as making up an individual totality, with its own internal organization and purpose. The functionalist emphasis is on the ‘total’ and systemic aspect; the culturalist emphasis is on the ‘individual’ and expressive aspect.
This image has been questioned for a long time. Theoretically, Lévi-Strauss (1987[1950], 1963 [1958]) insisted that structuralism was not a method for the analysis of ‘global societies’. He suggested that a society is a contradictory manifold in which structures of different orders co-exist, and that the ‘order of orders’ is a problem more for cultural self-consciousness than for analysis. Ethnographically, Leach (1965 [1954]) demonstrated the foolishness of epistemologically ‘well-behaved’ models that fail to take into account the historical and political contexts in which social structures are set.
More recently, it has been observed that the specific sense of a society as a self-contained whole relies on categories and institutions that are characteristic of the modern West. Thus it is argued, for instance, that the idea of mankind as divided into discrete, socially and culturally unique ethnic units derives from the ideology of the nation-state, imposed on non-Western peoples by *colonialism, the great inventor, both conceptually and practically, of †‘tribes’ and ‘societies’. This criticism has led to an emphasis on the interdependence of actual social systems (seen as the coalescence of heterogeneous, open-ended social *networks). The relations making up wider *regional configurations determine the internal processes of local units—a view which ultimately breaks up different societies into increasingly global systems, up to the level of the planet. And it has lead to a predilection for processual, action-centred approaches at the expense of structural, regulative approaches, resolving society into a web of atomic interactions and representations.
In its general sense, the notion of society has also been losing ground; contemporary anthropology tends to reject *essentialist or teleological views of society as an agency that transcends individuals. The notion of society as an instinctual or normative order, endowed with the objective status of a thing, is giving way to ideas such as †‘sociality’, which supposedly are better at conveying a sense of social life as an intersubjectively constituted process. In this way, social realism is being replaced by a view that extends to society the same constructivism that the sociology of knowledge applied successfully to nature.
If it makes sense to speak of a dominant tendency in contemporary anthropology, it is the rejection of structural views of society in favour of a †pragmatics of social agency that seeks ‘to promote a recovery of the subject without lapsing into subjectivism’ (Giddens 1979:44). Intentionality and conscience, hitherto explained away as mere epiphenomena of structures, or even denounced as epistemological obstacles to the determination of these explanatory principles, have become not only what must urgently be explained, but possibly the very essence (if not the true explanation) of sociality. This can be seen in different theoretical manifestations: the dissatisfaction with the alternative between interactive or naturalistic and regulative or culturalist views of society (Ingold 1986); the various theories of †‘practice’, of ‘communicative action’, and ‘structuration’ (Bourdieu 1977 [1972]; Habermas 1984 [1981]; Giddens 1984); or, the unanimous criticism of the ‘Saussurean’ paradigm of action as the passive actualization of a set of rules to be found in some collective counsciousness or in the mental apparatus of the species. In a nutshell: crisis of the structure, return of the subject. This return may be theoretically sophisticated, as in the proposals to overcome the antinomies of Western social thought, especially that between individual and society, which is what is at stake in this idea of a nonvoluntaristic view of social action. But it may also mean a straightforward revival of concepts that were rightly rejected by structuralists: philosophy of consciousness, celebration of the infinite creativity of human action, instrumentalist rationalism (or its reciprocal, romantic irrationalism), retranscendentalization of the individual, and so on. As every social theory at some point believed it held the key to the resolution of the classic dichotomies and oppositions, only to be later accused of favouring one of them in the most scandalous manner, one wonders whether these developments have indeed broken free of the perennial oscillation between societas and universitas.
Contemporary criticism has thus undermined the anthropological view of society from all sides: ‘primitive society’ as a real type; society as an empirically delimited object; society as an objective basis for collective representations, an entity endowed with structural coherence and functional purpose. This conceptual crisis is, firstly the consequence of a historical crisis. The end of political colonialism, and the accelerated †globalization of economic and cultural flows, have highlighted the ideological and artificial character of some of anthropology’s ideas: the isolated primitive was never primitive and was never isolated. But such a historical crisis also reflects a change in Western social apperception—in other words, a cultural crisis. The ideal object of anthropology, ‘primitive society’, was dissolved, not so much because of the objective globalization of local ‘primitive’ worlds, or as a result of the progress of anthropological enlightenment, but rather because of the demise of the notion of ‘modern society’ that was its obverse. There seems to be a growing conviction that the West has left behind its ‘modern’ period, predicated upon the absolute separation between the realm of facts and that of values, between nature and culture, the private and the public sphere, and finally between the ‘West’ and the ‘rest’. It remains to be seen whether we (and this ‘we’ includes every society on Earth) have indeed entered a *postmodern phase in which such contrasts are no longer operative or, contrary to the assumptions of the great divide cosmology that has made anthropology possible, ‘we have never been modern’ (Latour 1993 [1991]) except in the imagination. We do know, however—and this much we have been taught by anthropology itself—that imaginary conceptions may produce quite real effects. If this is indeed the case, then we must continue searching for concepts that can illuminate the differences between societies, there being no other way for anthropology effectively to view the social condition from a standpoint that is truly universal—that is, one that can generate and acknowledge difference.
EDUARDO VIVEIROS DE CASTRO (translated by Paulo Enriques Britto)
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——(1984) The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration, Cambridge: Polity Press
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