Two oppositions: nature/culture and individual/society
The division between ‘society’ and ‘culture’ is further complicated by each term’s relationship with the central oppositions of the social sciences: *‘nature’/‘culture’ and ‘individual/society’. In both cases there is the same theoretical dilemma: whether the relationship between individual and society, or between nature and culture, is one of continuity or one of discontinuity. Is culture an outgrowth of human nature that can be exhaustively analysed in terms of the biology of the human species, or is it something of a quite different order which transcends any basis in the human organism? And is society merely the sum of the interactions and representations of the individuals that make it up, or is it too a specific level of reality, of a different order to its individual components?
The overlap between these two polarities is complex: often one is subsumed into another, as when society or culture is opposed to individual and nature. Moreover, both ‘individual’ and ‘nature’ are †polysemic notions with several meanings. ‘Individual’ has at least two: a universal empirical sense (the individual representatives of the species, the human component of any society) and a particular cultural sense (the individual as the ultimate value, origin and finality of social institutions). ‘Nature’, in turn, may signify: the material world as opposed to its conceptual representations, the sphere of ‘facts’ versus that of ‘values’, the ‘innate’ or ‘constant’ component of human behaviour as opposed to its ‘acquired’ or ‘variable’ component, the ‘spontaneous’ and ‘necessary’ versus the ‘artificial’ and the ‘conventional’, ‘animality’ in contrast with ‘humanity’, and so on.
The idea that the society and culture stand ‘above’ the individual and/or nature is found in all the most influential anthropological authors, but with important differences (Ingold 1986). Herbert Spencer saw society as the end-product of the interactive association of individuals, and as an instrument for the attainment of their goals; it was a supra-individual (but not a suprabiological) sphere of reality. Society was a natural phenomenon (which does not distinguish man from other animals), the †superorganic phase of a universal evolutionary process that encompasses the inorganic and organic spheres. Durkheim’s position was precisely the opposite: for him, society was an exclusively human phenomenon, a unique supra-individual and supra-biological reality of a moral and symbolic nature. It was a totality greater than the sum of its parts and endowed with a purpose of its own, a †collective consciousness higher than and external to individual consciousnesses, produced by the ‘fusion’ of the latter. Finally, Boas proposed a third solution: culture was an extra-somatic and ideational reality, but it did not make up a distinct ontological realm. Because it exists in human minds, it is individual and suprabiological, a nominal entity (similar to the Darwinian species) somehow reducible to the individuals who bear it.
Later anthropological theories present combinations of these three paradigms. Kroeber’s theory of culture, for instance, oscillates between Boasian and Durkheimian positions, whereas his concept of society is similar to Spencer’s. In general, *American anthropology has tended to concentrate on the nature/culture pair. Sometimes this has meant nature in the sense of ‘human nature’, which lead to analyses of the affective and cognitive moulding of individuals by culture, or alternatively to attempts to establish transcultural psychological constants. Sometimes it has meant non-human nature, as in the kind of †materialism that treats culture as an instrument of adaptation to the environment.
*British anthropology, on the other hand, has tended to focus on the ‘individual/society’ polarity and the associated concepts of ‘structure’ and ‘function’. For Malinowski, the idea of function referred to the role played by social institutions in the satisfaction of the basic needs of individual organisms. For Radcliffe-Brown, function meant the contribution of these institutions to the maintenance of the conditions of existence of the collective organism. Radcliffe-Brown’s definition provided an answer to the central problem of structural-functionalist theory: elucidating the foundations and modes of permanence of a given social form. Modishly rephrased as ‘reproduction’, the same issue was taken up again in the *Marxist anthropology of the 1970s.
Radcliffe-Brown proposed definitions of *‘social structure’ in terms of both natural interaction and moral regulation, hesitating between the image of a network of relationships between individuals and that of a structure of normative relations between groups. The prevailing image, however, was that of structure as a jural codex, or body of rules, in which individuals or collectives have social personalities and define their relative positions in terms of rights and duties. This idea, as developed by †Fortes, was dominant for a while. But the individualistic and utilitarian position, first championed in anthropology by Malinowski, made a comeback with †Edmund Leach’s reaction against structural-functionalism, and then flourished in various †transactionalist alternatives to the Durkheimian paradigm, all of them emphasizing the difference between what was normative and ‘ideal’ and what was empirical and ‘actual’, and favouring ‘strategies’ or ‘processes’ over ‘rules’ and ‘structures’, ‘action’ over ‘representation’, and ‘power’ over ‘order’. These opposed concepts express the classical dilemma of British anthropology, the disjunction between ‘norms’ and ‘practices’, which reflects the persistence of the society/individual antinomy in this tradition.
Lévi-Strauss, in turn, inherited from the Boasians the issue of the relation between psychological universals and cultural determinism, the interest in the unconscious dimension of social phenomena, and the ‘nature/culture’ dichotomy. But his treatment of nature and culture evokes classical attempts to derive an ideal genesis of ‘society’ from a ‘state of nature’; and Lévi-Strauss’s idea of ‘culture’ is in many ways analogous to the notion of †‘civil society’. Defining the *incest taboo and *marriage exchange as universal conditions of collective life, Lévi-Strauss described the transition from nature to culture in sociopolitical terms directly influenced by †Mauss’s theory of *exchange and reciprocity. Mauss’s theory has itself been interpreted as an alternative response to the Hobbesian problem of the emergence of the social order from the natural state of *war, with the gift and exchange as the primitive analogues of the state and the contract (Sahlins 1972). But Lévi-Strauss also drew from Boas and †Saussure to explore a new analogy for socio-cultural phenomena, *language. And, by countering Durkheim’s thesis on the social origins of symbolism with the theme of the symbolic foundations of the social, Lévi-Strauss derived both culture and society from the same substratum, the unconscious, the place where the oppositions between nature and culture, and between individual and society, are resolved.
The linguistic model underlies Lévi-Strauss’s concept of structure as a code; that is, as a system of signs with positional values. The problem of function is here replaced by the problem of meaning, a move which, among other things, explains structuralism’s relative indifference to the notion of social structure. After his book on kinship, in which ‘structure’ is still sometimes used in a way that remains close to the concept’s traditional morphological interpretation, Lévi-Strauss concentrated on *classification and *mythology—that is, on ‘cultural’ structures. His famous definition of ethnology as a kind of psychology finally abolished the distinction between society and culture, and in this way structuralism indirectly contributed to the predominance of culture over society in recent anthropology. This very emphasis on the taxonomic and cognitive aspects of social life has been frequently pointed out as a symptom of one of structuralism’s most serious limitations: its difficulty in accounting for the ‘passage’ from meaning to action, from the order of ideas to the order of experience, or from structure to history.
This is the complete article, containing 1,224 words
(approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page).
