P4C x ELT = P4ELT: Its Theoretical Background (Kanazawa, 2024 March).pdf
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
1. The Routledge
Encyclopedia of Social and
Cultural Anthropology
Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer
Class, Community, Complex Society,
Power, Society, Sociology
1836410 Ceren Köktürk
2. Class
- Social class understood as a relationship
- Study of class differences, class analysis
- Different approachs to concept of class;
- Emergence of class society is linked to the rise of private property and
the state
- variety of approaches influenced by the rejuvenation of political
economy.
- Marxists argued that polarized classes can be shown as a early capitalism
could also be found in precapitalist societies.
- Conflict and class struggle; male elders appropriated the surplus labor of
their juniors and of women, they were to be seen as an exploiting class
(class in itself - class for itself)
3. Class
- anthropologists working in ‘tribal’ and ‘peasant’ societies, problems occured
by the growth of the middle classes in capitalist industrial societies
- ‘vertical’ links across apparent class boundaries prevent the formation of
horizontal linkages between those sharing the same ‘objective’ economic
situation. Links of kinship, religion ethnicity and nation are stronger than
links of class
- pre-socialist concepts of hierarchy can plausibly be glossed in terms of class.
- the concept of class remains the appropriate analytic term
- the experience of class is structured by race, gender and kinship.
- class emerges as a relation to the means of production that is collective
rather than individual, a relation of communities to the capitalist state more
than of employees to employers’ (Sacks 1989: 547)
- culturally sensitive interpretations of stratification and social inequality and
in aspiring to a unified theory of class, race and gender
4. Community
- All dealt with people (Hillery, 1955)
- Four key qualities in community:
- a smallness of social scale;
- a homogeneity of activities and states of mind of members;
- a consciousness of distinctiveness;
- a self-sufficiency across a broad range of needs and through time.
Traditional anthropological approaches
- ‘Community’ is to be characterized in terms of
- common interests between people;
- common ecology and locality
- common social system or structure
- Frankenberg (1966) suggests that it is common interests in achievable things
(economic, religious, or whatever) that give members of a community a
common interest in one another.
5. Community
- Social coherence of communities emerged from the people having with
common interests in mind and sharing manystranded or multiplex relations
with one another, also they share a sentiment towards the locality and the
group itself.
- Geographical territory is the key of community.
- throw up common problems and give rise to common perspectives,
which lead to the development of organizations for joint action and
activities, which in turn produce common attachments, feelings of
interdependence, common commitment, loyalty and identity within a
social group.
- Anthropologists have conventionally emphasized an essential commonality
as the logic underlying a community’s origination and continuation.
Communities have been regarded as empirical things-in-themselves (social
organisms), as functioning wholes, and as things apart from other like
things. Consciousness of this distinction gives community members a sense
of belonging.
6. Community
- the community study is a tradition in anthropology of basing research on
what could in some sense be treated as a bounded group of people,
culturally homogeneous and resident in one locality, because this
‘community’ would provide a laboratory for the close observation
- Anthropologists conventionally studied communities (villages, tribes,
islands) because these were regarded as the key structural units of social
life: what the elementary structures of kinship gave onto; what the complex
structures of society were composed of
- Symbolic approaches
- Functionalism and structuralism approaches which emphasize the extent to
which cultural reality is negotiated and contested, its definition a matter of
context and interpretation, as anthropologists have come to regard social
life as turning on the use of symbolic not structural logics –notions of
‘community’.
7. Community
- how ‘community’ is as a feature of social life, on how membership of
community is marked and attributed, how notions of community are given
cultural meaning, and how such meaning relates to others.
- social groups achieve an identity by defining themselves as different from
other such groups and by erecting boundaries between them
- Anthony Cohen argues community must be seen as a symbolic construct
and a contrastive one; it derives from the situational perception of a
boundary which marks off one social group from another: awareness of
community depends on consciousness of boundary. Hence, communities
and their boundaries exist essentially not as social-structural systems and
institutions but as worlds of meaning in the minds of their members.
- Community is an aggregating device which both sustains diversity and
expresses commonality. Thus it is that community comes to represent the
social milieu to which people say they most belong; community, its
members often believe
8. Community
- understanding of ‘community’ must be relativistic, that the concept is a
matter of contingent symbolic definition, is also to talk about ‘community’
in relation to other types or levels of sociation.
- members of a community are related by their perception of commonalities
and equally, differentiated from other communities and their members by
these relations and the sociation they amount to.
- ‘community’ describes the arena in which one learns and largely continues
to practise being social. It serves as a symbolic resource, repository and
referent for a variety of identities, is to continue to encompass these by a
common symbolic boundary.
- Evolutionary approaches
- Community is a stage in social evolution, what is seen as ‘community’ now is
a residue and a throwback to a mode of relating and interacting which was
once the norm but has now all but been eclipsed by more modern notions
of contractual relations in complex society
9. Community
- Community’ in current usage
- ‘communities’ have continued to flourish; as an idea, community has
continued to possess both practical and ideological significance for people.
Indeed, recent decades
- community is defined in terms of locality, ethnicity, religion, occupation,
recreation, special interest, even humanity, people maintain the idea that it
is this milieu which is most essentially ‘theirs’, and that they are prepared to
assert their ownership and membership, vocally and aggressively, in the
face of opposing ideas and groups
10. Complex Society
- The term ‘complex society’ came into increasing use in anthropology in the
post-World War II period. It is used somewhat imprecisely to refer mostly to
societies with a developed division of labor and with sizeable populations.
State organization, urbanism, organized social inequality and literacy tend
also to be aspects of the complexity involved.
- tradition of local ethnographic field study, anthropological research has
often focused on smaller-scale units of analysis within complex societies
- ‘national character’ to generalize from culture and personality analyses of
interpersonal relations to national cultures
- Community studies have often succeeded in offering well-rounded
portrayals of places and ways oflife, and some even have a certain literary
merit.
- generation of studies in the British Isles in his comparative exploration of
tendencies of social change
11. Complex Society
- From the 1950s to the 1970s, research on various types of informal
organization was investigated in the anthropological study of complex
societies
- complex societies has been groups whose forms of life for one reason or
other diverge from whatever is thought of as the ‘mainstream’
- Studies of ethnically distinct and disadvantaged groups may well attract
anthropologists because they entail both an involvement with a culturally
different ‘other’ and an opportunity to contribute
- The anthropological study of the state was earlier preoccupied with phases
of state formation, complex society but more recently there has been an
increasing concern with contemporary states and state apparatuses, and
with the nation-state and nationalism as cultural constructs
- Globalization itself is also emerging as one focus of ethnography and
conceptual work, in varying degrees tied to ‘world systems’ formulations
elsewhere in the social sciences
12. Complex Society
- anthropology of complex societies has been devoted to the shape of social
relationships there has naturally also been an ethnographic concern with
culture
- To understand the culture of complex societies in a more macro-
anthropological manner, an ‘organization of diversity’: there are interrelated
subcultures, a more or less overarching cultural apparatus and a division of
knowledge in large part matching the division of labour
- research area of ideology, hegemony and cultural resistance.
- youth culture, popular culture and the media in complex societies has had
- some part in the development of the new quasidiscipline of cultural studies,
a discipline also sometimes inclined toward ethnography.
13. Power
- ranging from physical domination to symbolic empowerment
- either between an individual and a group, as in the power legitimized
through acknowledged, often redistributive, leadership; or one group and
another group, as in colonial domination; or between humans and their
environmental energy sources, as in the power of a collectivity to organize
and maintain itself.
- Social and political anthropologists have theorized about forms of social
organization in non-state and state societies which legitimize the power of
specific lineages, classes, or individuals to make decisions pertaining to
others’ lives and the organization of social and material resources.
- A study of power implies not only a study of social distinctions but also of
the inequalities implied in those distinctions
- Power has been thought of by anthropologists as human influence and
agency anthropological analyses of power have investigated social
stratification and hierarchy, some have looked at forms of social
organization which assure that power is not individually concentrated, as in
the industrial collectives or collectives not organized within state societies
14. Power
- anthropologists have studied historically, and prehistorically, the question of
how individuals might have come to dominate groups and how one group
might have come to dominate another
- Legal anthropologists, too, have studied cross culturally the different
systems through which power is legitimized, enforced and contested.
- that social stratification and hierarchy are forcefully maintained by the
‘power elite’, those who, between themselves, mobilize the power to
transcend ‘ordinary’ social environments and make decisions that pertain to
the lives of people they will never meet, in nations they might never visit.
- Giddens’s theory of structuration – in which ‘power is regarded as
generated in and through the reproduction of structures of domination’
- the concept of totalizing power (in which the state and/or a popular
majority dominate, through every means, ‘civil society’) provided
anthropologists with a way to think about pervasive institutionalized power.
15. Power
- described power as ‘not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a
certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributesto a
complex strategical situation in a particular society’
- power is ‘creative, coercive, and coextensive with meaning’. A view of
power as not simply embedded in structural relations – maintained by force
of one kind or another – but also as constituted through language and
everyday practice
- studies of power as evidenced in times and sites of war, where claims to
power
- are forcefully clear, if contradictory, anthropological analyses have
increasingly also been focused on the elusive power of transnational capital
in determining social relations in various localities and on manifestations of
symbolic power.
- as ‘that invisible power which can be exercised only with the complicity of
those who do not want to know that they are subject to it or even that they
themselves exercise it’.
16. Sociology
- a discipline that it can be identified only very loosely as the study of social
relationships, institutions and structures, is a child of industrial capitalism
and its predominant field of study is modern Western societies.
- concern with the nature of modern societies, sociology much more than
- anthropology seeks to identify modernity and the problems associated with
it by producing valid empirical generalizations about its subject matter.
- sociology did not develop a valued body of specific case studies that parallel
anthropology’s ethnography. Instead, it has concentrated on ‘comparative
- the discipline has been concerned not just to study modern society but also
to alleviate the problems associated with modernity.
- sociologists are much more likely than anthropologists to present their
findings in numerical terms and to make their arguments in statistical terms.
17. Sociology
- Sociology and anthropology
- two disciplines have developed in different ways and there has been less
communication between the two sciences
- question of modern society: while sociology was concerned with the world
that the modern West had gained, anthropology was concerned with the
world that it had lost
- Anthropologists, then, tend not only to be ignorant of the nature of modern
societies, but tend also to have a stereotyped view of such societies that
exaggerates the difference between them and the societies that
anthropologists normally study. Some call this stereotyping Occidentalism.
- Equally, sociologists tend not only to be ignorant of the nature of societies
outside the modern sphere, but also to have a stereotyped view of such
societies that exaggerates the difference between them and the modern
societies they conventionally study. Some call this stereotyping Orientalism.
18. Sociology
- The intellectual barriers between the two disciplines are not absolute
- include studies that were more narrowly focused but that used
ethnographic techniques
- sociologists dissatisfied with their own discipline’s imited view of culture
draw on anthropologists
- number of anthropologists began to study Western societies; a change
that occurred without a corresponding growth in the number of
sociologists studying societies outside the modern sphere
- has been a growing interest in historical and cultural topics at the same
time that the statistical techniques used in sociology have become more
refined.
- two disciplines will become more complex
19. Society
- Specific groups of people living together in particular ways, different
societies.
- Society has been the central theoretical object of much European
anthropology, especially British social anthropology, so that any history of
the theoretical use of the term swiftly becomes a history of anthropological
theory. In that history, various tensions and oppositions appear and
reappear: society and the state, society and the individual, society and
culture, society and nature, primitive society and modern society
- Two senses: society and societies
- Society can be seen as a basic, but not exclusive, attribute of human
nature: we are genetically predisposed to social life.
- 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.
20. Society
- 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
- ‘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.
- society is used as people, social system or social organization’, the socio-
political framework
- society is a group, 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 cooperation,
modes of exchange).
21. Society
- Division of 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.
- Two genealogies: individualism and holism. Universitas is associated with
the premodern world dominated by Aristotelian thought, societas with early
modern ‘Natural Law’ thinkers
- to derive social anthropology directly from the individualism of societas and
cultural anthropology equally directly from the holism of universitas.
- Two oppositions: nature/culture and individual/society
- relationship between individual and society, or between nature and culture,
is one of continuity or one of discontinuity.
- culture an outgrowth of human nature that can be exhaustively analysed in
terms of the biology of the human species, and is society merely the sum of
the interactions and representations of the individuals that make
22. Society
- Kroeber’s theory of culture, for instance, oscillates between has meant
nature in the sense of ‘human nature’, which leads to analyses of the
affective and cognitive moulding of individuals by culture, has meant non-
human nature, as in the kind of materialism that treats culture as an
instrument of adaptation to the environment.
- individual/society’ polarity and the associated concepts of ‘structure’ and
‘function’.
- Lévi- Strauss’s idea of ‘culture’ is in many ways analogous to the notion of
‘civil society’. 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,
- Two types of society: primitive and civilized
- 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.
- Morgan’s division into hunter-gatherer societies (savagery), agricultural
societies (barbarism) and complex societies (civilization),
23. Society
- Anthropology is concerned with simple, kinship-based, stateless societies
with a gift economy, while sociology deals with modern, industrial, and
(originally) Western societies.
- ‘modern’ society is a societas which emerged from the universitas of
‘primitive’, ‘ancient’, or ‘traditional’ society.
- qualitative difference between the terms ends to treat universitas as the
normal form of society,
- while societas is conceived as a historical oddity or an ideological illusion.
- primitive society as its traditional object, anthropology has virtually
identified its concept
- of society with the theme of kinship.
- Evolutionism already showed a conceptual compromise; it projected the
opposition
- between primitive collectivism (founded on group kinship and normative
status relationships),and modern individualism (organized on the basis of
local contiguity, the individual contract and freedom of association),
24. Society
- divide the social sphere into two complementary aspects, one more ‘social’
and the other more ‘individual’.
- the image of ‘primitive society’ in classical social anthropology ‘internalized’
the contrast previously established between global societies or global views
of society.
- derives from the idea that society is made up of asocial individuals who
require socialization society
- Criticism and crisis
- The standard anthropological representation of ‘a society’ in the
functionalist and culturalist
- traditions is that of an ethnically distinct people,living in accordance with
specific institutions and having a particular culture. The ideal coincidence of
the three components is seen as making up an individual totality, with its
own internal organization and purpose.
- Lévi-Strauss insisted that structuralism was not a method for the analysis of
‘global societies’. He suggested that a society is a contradictory manifold in
which structures of different orders coexist, and that the ‘order of orders’ is
a problem more for cultural self-consciousness than for analysis.
25. Society
- the notion of society has also been losing ground; contemporary
anthropology tends to reject essentialist or teleological views of society as
an agency that transcends individuals.
- As every social theory at some point believed it held the key to the
resolution of the classic dichotomies and oppositions
- Contemporary criticism has thus undermined the anthropological view of
society from all sides: ‘primitive society’ as a real type; society as an
empirically delimited object; society as an objective basis for collective
representations, an entity endowed with structural coherence and
functional purpose.
- The ideal object of anthropology, ‘primitive society’, was dissolved, not so
much because of the objective globalization of local ‘primitive’ worlds, or as
a result of the progress of anthropological enlightenment, but rather
because of the demise of the notion of ‘modern society’ that was its
obverse