Society: An Introduction
I. Societies and Social Organization
Focuses on social roles, social groups, and social networks.
Pays attention not to the transitory groups that form and dissolve, but on more general
and permanent organizations of individuals.
Often, this organization extends beyond the lives of the individuals who make up the
group.
E.g. of this classroom and the university as an institution.
Social roles: instructors and students, each having certain norms and
expectations that exist beyond the lives of me and you.
Networks of social roles make up the social structure, e.g. the economic
structure, the kinship structure, the political structure. These structures together
make up a ‘society.’
II. Institutions
Patterns of behaviour and ideology that become relatively permanent, discrete and
autonomous.
Total institutions: prisons, the military, boarding schools, monasteries, communes, cults,
psychiatric hospitals, etc. Institutions that govern almost every facet of an individual’s
life.
III. Structure and Function
Each society has a structure consisting of roles, groups, institutions.
Each of these structures has a function, e.g. to provide social cohesion, to resolve
conflict, to ensure the reproduction of the group, to provide nutrition, to provide meaning,
etc.
All structures are interrelated.
Malinowski: British social anthropologist who stressed the universal and often basic
needs that diverse institutions met.
E.g. explained magic among Trobriand Islands’ fishermen as fulfilling the
psychological need of alleviating anxiety.
Radcliffe-Brown: stressed the function of all institutions in maintaining social cohesion,
e.g. joking relationships commonly found at points of tension in a specific society.
Cohesion versus Conflict: Marx argued that societies are shaped as much by conflict
between different groups than by cohesion.
IV. ‘Tradition’ and ‘Modernity’
Maine: status to contract.
Tonnies: gemeinschaft/gesellschaft
Durkheim: mechanical solidarity/organic solidarity.
Weber: bureaucratic rationality versus traditional authority systems.
Yet most anthropologists today find these dichotomies to be too simplistic and even
ethnocentric.
Doing fieldwork alerts us to the complexity of social life, difficult to categorize in terms
of traditionalism and modernization.
Especially obvious today in a globalized world.
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