In a general sense, ‘society’ is a universal condition of human life. This can be put in either biological or symbolic and moral terms. Society can be seen as a basic, but not exclusive, attribute of human nature: we are genetically predisposed to social life. Becoming fully human depends on interaction with our fellow creatures; the phylogenesis of our species runs parallel to the development of *language and labour, social abilities without which the organism’s needs cannot be met.
But society can also be seen as constituting one particular, exclusive dimension of human nature (Ingold 1994), our dependence on the rules of our particular society. The very idea of social †agency is revealed in behaviour which is not founded in instincts, selected by *evolution, but instead in rules which have their origins in history rather than in the requirements of the human organism. The notion of †‘rule’ may be taken in different senses: in †structural-functionalism it is moral and prescriptive; in *structuralism or in *symbolic anthropology it is cognitive and descriptive. Despite this important difference, in both cases an emphasis on rules expresses the institutional nature of the principles of social action and organization. The rules of different human societies vary in time and space, but there are rules of some sort everywhere (Lévi-Strauss 1969 [1949], Fortes 1983). The social condition is no longer seen as one of the attributes of Homo sapiens, but instead defines the very idea of ‘humanity’ as a unique entity, made up not of individuals but of ‘subjects’ who are both creators and creatures of the world of rules.
‘Society’ is also used to refer to more specific entities: different societies. In this specific sense, the idea of a ‘society’ is applicable to a human group having some of the following properties: territoriality; recruitment primarily by sexual reproduction of its members; an institutional organization that is relatively self-sufficient and capable of enduring beyond the life-span of an individual; and cultural distinctiveness.
In this sense, society may denote the group’s population, its institutions and relations, or its culture and *ideology. In the first case, society is used as a synonym for ‘(a) people’, or a particular type of humanity. In the second sense, in which society is equivalent to †‘social system’ or *‘social organization’, the socio-political framework of the group is important: its morphology (composition, distribution and relations between the subgroups of society), its body of †jural norms (ideas of authority and citizenship, conflict regulation, status and role systems), and its characteristic patterns of social relations (relations of *power and exploitation, forms of co-operation, modes of *exchange). In the third case, in which ‘society’ is interchangeable with *‘culture’, what is emphasized is the affective and cognitive content of group life: the set of dispositions and abilities inculcated in its members by various symbolic means, as well as the concepts and practices that confer order, meaning and value upon reality.
One of the ways to handle the relation between the two senses of ‘society’ has been to divide anthropology into ‘ethnographic’ description and interpretation, focusing on the analysis of the particular and emphasizing the differences between societies; and ‘theoretical’ comparison and explanation, which attempts to formulate synthetic propositions valid for all human societies. In spite of efforts to define the two activities as methodologically complementary ‘stages’, anthropology has tended to polarize between *‘ethnography’, which deals with specific societies, and ‘theory’, which deal with society in its abstract and general sense. The universalist perspective predominated in the early years of anthropology, with an emphasis on the *‘comparative method’ and on the definition of major types of society. The golden age of the ethnographic method was the period of †culturalism and *functionalism, in which ethnography was used polemically to demolish speculative typologies (by *Boas) or as the royal road to the universal (for *Malinowski). The structuralisms of *Radcliffe-Brown and *Lévi-Strauss, and American †neo-evolutionism (†White, †Steward), in turn shifted back to comparison and generalization.
Since the 1960s this polarization has intensified. On the one hand, the interest in meaning and interpretation has restored ethnography to a pre-eminent position, privileging the actor’s perspective and seeking a critique of the anthropologist’s concepts in the different *emic views of society. Society in the general sense came to be subordinated to society in the specific, plural sense. On the other hand, developments in *sociobiology, the psychological study of *cognition, and cultural ecology have led to ambitious hypotheses concerning ‘sociality’ as a genetic property of the human species, along with behavioural and cognitive universals (eventually attributing the ‘phenotypic’ diversity of the human ethogram to such extrinsic variables as the *environment). This polarization between ever more specific culturalist interpretation and ever more grandiose naturalist explanation has ultimately emptied the concept of society of any significance, reducing it either to particular representations or to universal behaviour.
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