To contrast anthropological traditions on the basis of these oppositions and dichotomies is no more than a simplification for didactic purposes. The tension between ‘Hobbesians’ and ‘Aristotelians’, or ‘Malinowskians’ and ‘Durkheimians’ (Kuper 1992), to use more recent totemic ancestors, reappears within the major theoretical strands. Evolutionism already showed a conceptual compromise; it projected the opposition between primitive collectivism (founded on group kinship and normative status relationships), and modern individualism (organized on the basis of local contiguity, the individual contract and freedom of association), onto the diachronic plane. It served as a critical foil for almost all later social anthropology, which attempted to show the simultaneous workings of both orientations within ‘primitive’ societies. A very common solution here was to divide the social sphere into two complementary aspects, one more ‘social’ and the other more ‘individual’.
This division is apparent in several famous analyses, from the contrast in Trobriand society between ‘mother-right’ and ‘father-love’ (Malinowski), through the role of the mother’s brother in †patrilineal societies (Radcliffe-Brown), to such contrasts as *descent versus *complementary filiation (Fortes), descent versus kinship (†Evans-Pritchard), *social structure versus social organization (†Firth), and structure versus communitas (†Victor Turner). Once one of these polarities was established, much analytical effort was dedicated to the task of transcending it—that is, determining the institutional mechanisms which mediate between intergroup links and interpersonal links, the political order of global society and the domestic order of kinship, the obligatory or normative component of social relationships and their optional or strategic component.
In short, one may say that the image of ‘primitive society’ in classical social anthropology ‘internalized’ the contrast previously established between global societies or global views of society. And though it owes much of its inspiration to the ‘Aristotelian’ tradition, there is one aspect of ‘Hobbesian’ modernity to which anthropology has not remained immune (Verdon 1989): it is the idea that society (even if it is a ‘natural’ state because it is equivalent to humanity) is a problematic condition—that is, something that must be explained. This, in turn, derives from the idea that society is made up of asocial individuals who require *socialization (that is, constraint by the inculcation of normative representations to behave in a given way), and who resist such constraint by means of a selfish manipulation of norms or by an imaginary regression to an original condition of freedom. This idea can be found in various forms in Durkheim as in †Freud, in Lévi-Strauss as in Fortes or Leach. Homo sapiens may well be a social animal, but to modern thought this phrase suggests a contradiction in terms, and the unease it inspires is what motivates anthropology’s unceasing search for solutions that transcend the oppositions and dichotomies implicit in it.
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