The term ‘society’ refers both to a general aspect of the human condition—we are all necessarily social creatures, and therefore depend on society in order to live as humans—and to specific groups of people living together in particular ways, different societies. Society has been the central theoretical object of much European anthropology, especially *British social anthropology, so that any history of the theoretical use of the term swiftly becomes a history of anthropological theory.
In that history, various tensions and oppositions appear and reappear: society and the *state, society and the *individual, society and *culture, society and nature, primitive society and modern society. In recent years, as the particular use of the term to denote a specific group of people and their way of life has grown ever more problematic, while some of these tensions have approached breaking-point, anthropologists have started to suggest abandoning the very idea of society as a theoretical construct.
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