The main problem associated with the idea of different societies has been the establishment of historical and morphological types of society, and the ways in which one type relates to another.
The distinction between social types has a long intellectual history. The three-part Enlightenment division between †‘savagery’, †‘barbarism’ and †‘civilization’ was especially important. For †Montesquieu this scheme was more geographical than historical. The classification was temporalized by such thinkers as Turgot, †Adam Smith, †Ferguson and †Condorcet, and it also generated †Comte’s ‘law of the three states’, which was of great importance for Victorian theories of religion. This scheme acquired full anthropological citizenship with *Morgan’s division into *hunter-gatherer societies (savagery), †agricultural societies (barbarism) and *complex societies (civilization), which was subsequently incorporated into Marxist thought and developed by neo-evolutionary theories.
But the most productive scheme in Western thought has been the dichotomy, which is best suited to describe strong discontinuities. The conceptual polarity between universitas and societas, holism and individualism, has been treated as a real opposition, emphasizing various differences that are all ultimately reducible to the contrast between ‘us’ and ‘them’, thus providing the nucleus for those †‘great divide’ theories that make the modern West unique among human societies. All the most famous dichotomies contain some allusion to the pairs ‘primitive/civilized’ or ‘traditional/modern’. Among the best known are:
These dichotomies draw on the nature/culture opposition, the first term generally representing a more ‘natural’ state. They also draw on the individual/society opposition—here the first term denotes social forms in which the group prevails as the basic unit, whereas the second term points to a social form where the individual is preeminent. Finally, they echo the traditional division of theoretical labour, according to which anthropology is concerned with simple, kinship-based, stateless societies with a gift economy, while *sociology deals with modern, industrial, and (originally) Western societies.
These dichotomies may be interpreted either in terms of absolute and irreducible differences, or more heuristically as expressing the relative dominance of one pole over the other within each social type. Anthropologists have recently become sceptical of any formulation which suggests a ‘great divide’, especially if it reinforces the image of ‘primitive society’ established by Victorian thinkers and employed as a basic model for anthropology ever since. This, it has been argued, is no more than an inverted projection of the self-image of modern bourgeois society as it has been envisaged from the eighteenth century on (Kuper 1988). But it seems that anthropology cannot easily do without such dichotomies. Though they carry with them a cumbersome ideological burden, they do point to a substantive difference between most of the societies that have traditionally been the object of anthropology and modern *capitalist society. The theoretical productivity of this difference may be gauged by the recent revival of certain classical contrasts, like the gift-commodity distinction (Gregory 1982), and theoretical attempts to relativize and redefine the great divide (Latour 1993 [1991]).
There have been different ways of conceiving the relation between the terms in these dichotomies. Evolutionists interpreted it as an objective historical succession: ‘modern’ society is a societas which emerged from the universitas of ‘primitive’, ‘ancient’, or ‘traditional’ society. In this solution what prevails is the viewpoint of societas, seen as the final cause of a progressive movement in which all societies are caught up, and thus as the latent truth of the world of universitas.
Echoes of this model, shorn of its teleological connotations, can be found in those theories which privilege alleged formal action universals (such as maximization of value, for instance) and that see the sociological categories generated by and for modern society (such as ‘individual’, ‘power’, ‘interest’, ‘economy’, and ‘politics’) as applicable to any society, since the opposition between types of society is one of degree rather than one of kind.
The alternative position, which stresses the qualitative difference between the terms, tends to treat universitas as the normal form of society, while societas is conceived as a historical oddity or an ideological illusion. Here the opposition between the two types of society reflects above all the difference between two global socio-*cosmological views, one of which, the holistic, reveals the true nature of the social. This idea, the immediate roots of which are in Durkheim’s sociology of religion and in the Boasians’ ‘cultural determinism’, has led to quite different developments in the hands of such authors as Dumont, †Sahlins, or †Schneider. To the extent that many anthropologists conceive their task as above all that of undertaking a political and epistemological critique of Western sociological reason, this position occupies a central place in the discipline. Universitas is valued even by those who point to the deep connection between holistic and individualistic views, refusing both as ‘Western’ in favour of emic, reflexive views of the social condition entertained by other societies.
With primitive society as its traditional object, anthropology has virtually identified its concept of society with the theme of kinship. By taking kinship as the constitutive link of primitive social units, anthropology revived the Aristotelian concept of a natural continuity between the family and the polis that had been rejected by the Natural Law thinkers. Maine’s and Durkheim’s critiques of Bentham’s and Spencer’s utilitarianism, Morgan’s discovery of Amerindian classificatory terminologies and his attempt to fit them into a scheme that singled out the kinship group as the original political unit of human society, †McLenann’s and †Bachofen’s speculations on primeval †matriarchy—not to mention the impact of the earliest Australian ethnographies on the Victorian intellectual world—led the fledgling discipline of anthropology to explore a dimension of the social that had been neglected by the social contract tradition in favour of the immediate opposition between the individual and the state.
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