Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Two genealogies: individualism and holism
Two contrasting images of society can be discerned in the history of Western thought, which combine and recombine at different moments, and in which the specific and the general senses of society meet. To use †Louis Dumont’s distinction, we may speak of ‘individualistic’ and ‘holistic’ views of the social; and we may call these images societas and universitas (Dumont 1986 [1965]). The individualist version is based on the idea of partnership between ontologically independent individual atoms: society is an artifice resulting from the consensual adhesion of individuals, rationally guided by interest, to a set of conventional norms; social life negates and transcends a pre-political ‘state of nature’. The key metaphor for this view is the constitutional and territorial state, and its central problem is the foundation of political order. The holistic version rests on the idea of society as an organic whole which preexists its members. Society is a corporate unit guided by a transcendent value, a ‘concrete universal’ in which human nature is actualized. The key metaphor in this view is *kinship, as a natural principle for the constitution of collective moral *persons, and its central problem is the cultural integration of a people as a ‘nation’. The most frequent modem images associated with these two views of society are the †contract (or its opposite, conflict) and the organism, both of which have persisted in twentieth-century anthropology in many forms, most recently as the contrast between †‘action’ and ‘structure’.
Universitas is associated with the premodern world dominated by Aristotelian thought, societas with early modern ‘Natural Law’ thinkers from †Hobbes to †Hegel.
The holistic organic model of universitas resurfaced in the Romantic reaction to the *Enlightenment, playing a key role in the development of the anthropological image of a society as an ethnically-based community sharing a universe of traditional meanings legitimated by *religion. On the other hand, much of Victorian anthropology and its progeny may be seen as a continuation of the Enlightenment version of societas.
The competition between ‘society’ and ‘culture’ as comprehensive labels for the object of anthropology can also be interpreted in terms of the opposition between societas and universitas, individualism and holism. The notion of society in British social anthropology is derived from the ‘civil society’ of Natural Law theorists, from French and Scottish rationalist thinkers of the eighteenth century and, more directly, from the sociologies of †Comte, †Herbert Spencer and †Durkheim. The notion of culture in American cultural anthropology comes from German Romanticism, the ‘historico-ethnological’ schools of the first half of the nineteenth century, and directly from the work of Boas.
This does not mean, however, that it is possible to derive social anthropology directly from the individualism of societas and cultural anthropology equally directly from the †holism of universitas. In certain respects, the situation is quite the opposite. For instance, Durkheim and †Maine assimilated the progressive schemes of the eighteenth-century rationalists, but at the same time reacted against their artificial and †utilitarian aspects in the name of *essentialist and organic conceptions of society like those that would later inspire the anthropology of Radcliffe-Brown and his followers. And Boas, though a descendant of German idealism and historicism, defended a view of culture in which the individual was the only real locus of cultural integration. But there are unmistakable marks of rationalist utilitarianism in several tendencies of social anthropology, particularly Malinowski’s functionalism and the Spencerian element in Radcliffe-Brown’s thought. And it is equally clear that the ‘configurational’ concerns of such American anthropologists as †Kroeber, †Benedict, or †C.Geertz derive from the Romantic paradigm of society as a spiritual organism.
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