Society, Social
Roles and
Institutions
How Behaviour Forms Patterns
The Layercake Model of Society and Culture
Culture: Values, Beliefs, Ideologies, Symbols, Embedded in
Language and Expressed Through Rituals, Religion,
Performances.
Society: Consists of Social Institutions and Social Organization
Networks and Roles
The Individual: Can be Variation and Differences
studying social organization
and societies
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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.
This organization extends beyond the lives of the individuals
who make up the group. If it does not, then it is not
considered to be a general pattern of social organization.
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.
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.
structure and function
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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.
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.
tradition, modernity
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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 sometimes even ethnocentric.
What is modernity? Can there be an asian modernity,
for example, or an african?
• Doing fieldwork alerts us to the complexity of social life,
difficult to categorize in terms of traditionalism and
modernization.
• Especially difficult to categorize societies today in a
globalized world.
Critiques of modernist
ethnography
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Starting in the 1970s, there were increasing criticisms both within and
without anthropology that it was not ‘objective’, since each
anthropologist is enculturated into her/his own society.
Led to the recognition that there could be no 100% objective or
complete description of a culture.
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Social life is too complex to capture it completely.
Since cultural values are often unconscious, it is impossible to eradicate
them completely.
Ethnography is a cultural ‘dialogue’ between ourselves and others and a
translation from one to the other. Always involves a comparative aspect.
new directions, ‘postmodernism’
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Recognition of the dialogic aspect through including individual subjects’ voices,
e.g. Nisa, The Story of a !Kung Woman.
Inclusion of conflicting voices and viewpoints to show that cultural values are not
uniform.
Inclusion of the biography of the anthropologist to show the reader the
background and goals of the study.
Direct conversations are included to show how the anthropologist arrived at
her/his information.
Reflections on western and ‘other’ viewpoints are often part of the text, e.g. In the
Realm of the Diamond Queen.
Ethnographies are no longer written in the passive, 3rd pronoun voice.
Encouragement of minorities to become anthropologists.
More anthropologists studying ‘at home’. Special challenges.
Recognition that ethnography is really a process of translation. Just as there is
never a 100% perfect translation, so there cannot be a 100% perfect
ethnographic description.
– However, I believe that participant-observation still provides the deepest way in which a
more accurate cultural translation can occur.