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The study of man's social arrangements-his relationships with his fellow man and how be conceives of those relationships-has traditionally been the province of cultural anthropology. This does not mean that social relationships and what people think of them are not important to archeology and phYSical anthropology. It Simply means that society and social relationships, rathe!' than man's physical constitution or the record of his development through time, are a part of the basic subject matter of cultural anthropology. Cultural anthropology is almost as large and vaguely defined as anthropology in general. Since cultural anthropology can and does include studies of everything from poetry to plowing fields, anthropologists have often distinguished the study of social arrangements as social anthropology, a particular sub field of cultural anthropology. This deSignation tends to be misleading, for it suggests that the difference between social anthropology and the other aspects of cultural anthropology is mainly one of subject matter. In fact this is not so. social is some vel)' special assumptions about the1IDportance. of society -assumptions that are not necessarili shared by other cultural anthropologists-.and it contains a large body of theory developed on those as tb.{)se are_and whether we are justified in separating the study of society from the rest of cultural anthropology is the subject of this chapteT'!n order to answer it, however, we shall have to tum from this ambigUous and confUSing realm of definitions and examine the historical development of the concepts involved. After all, the only excuse for recognizing some particular kind of anthropology at all is that there is a body of theory that enables us to do that kind of anthropology.
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In order to more fully understand social anthropology, we must first attempt to answer some basic questions: What is the rationale for social anthropology, the anthropology of sOciety? Where did its assumptions come from and where did the questions and about these assumptions come from?
THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY
In many respects the assumptions of social anthropology are the legacy of Emile :Ourkheim, the brilliant French social thinker of the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Durkheim addressed himself to man's moral and collective life-the forces and inBuences that hold human beings together, their "groupiness" in all of its aspects-as a phenomenon for scientific investigation. His writings so exclusively emphasized the basic importance of the "social," the collective and moral aspects of human life, that it is easy to base a social determinism on them or accuse Durkheim of "reifying" society-making society into a "thing." What he achieved was the foundation for a science of social integration focusing on how human associations and society itself, that most "permanent" of associations, are put together and what keeps them together. Thjs cOllceIllFith "integration" was the rock upon which social antbro
Following Durkheirn, the "problem" of society was taken up and developed by two distinct national traditions. In France Durkheim's collaborators and students founded a symposium for theorization around a journal called the Annee Sociologique. Much of this work, especially that of Durkheirn's nephew, Marcel Mauss, formed the groundwork for the later structuralism of Levi-Strauss. But it was in EI!g!and, and wherever else abroad that the influence of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown penetrated, _that the descent theory had its first and most telling successes. These successes were generally called functionalis?n (though Radcliffe-Brown himself shied away from the title), and functionalism provided the theoretical core for the classical social anthropology that developed in England in the thirties, forties, and fifties of this century. Functionalism was grounded in the notion that no matter how bizarre or - peCliliartne--practices and of a people and regardless of, how they had got that way, the important question was how Furthermore, though there a great many ways in which they might work or not work, there was always one more or less function, that of something that the social anthropologists always insisted was a "political" or "politico-jural" matter. The "politico-jural" assumption was the contribution of a very secular and pragmatic British turn of mind to Durkheim's original problem. And it was Radcliffe-Brown who chose the realm of jurisprudence, with
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its fine distinctions and its painstaking adjudication of "rights," as a model for thinking about the moral collectivities of society. Of course, the tribal societies of the sort studied by Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard, Fortes, Gluckman, and other social anthropologists did not have politics in our sense, nor did they have laws, though many of them held courts and en-. gaged in litigation. Furthermore, the emphasis on "rights" led naturally to a consideration of rights of inheritance and a concern with although .the property in question was in most cases valued precisely because it was exchangeable for people, something that is almost never true of property in our society. anthropology gradually into a kind of game of heuristic pretending: concepg with a very broad base of acceptaQce apd understanding. in W estern "politics," c1aw," "rights," and "prop_ erty," were oftlibal peoples, with a sort of implicit "as if" attached.to as theplar..ers in the game kept the "as1L-in mind, their. concepts to translate the native customs into the kind of rational legal consistency that we expect of our own institutions was.accepteg,; even though it cast the na in the unseemly roles of barristers and bewigged judges and made their collective existence into a droll parody .of the Bank of Englgnd. However, the game could not be played in a vacuum. It was first of all descriptive anthropology, and it had to come to terms with the customs of the people it described. And this is what the problems and concepts of social anthropology are all about. If the Southern Bantu or the Nuer or Tallensi did not have laws as such, then analogous collective usages would have to be found to take their place. The analogies were in fact drawn with the regularities (or as a later generation would call them, "norms") that govern kin relationships, .and became ope of turningJgns...hip into jurisprudence and corporate economics, the study oC:descent_systems" and of the formed in tribal societies by the. descent o( rigbts Social the science of descent.gr.oups, and descent groups aridtnelr constitution came to be crucial issues in accounting for the core fUI?-ctio'p:()fJ!ltegrating society and keeping it The more emphatically the investigators insisted on the importance of definitions, rationality, and their own conceptions of law and property, the more substantial and strictly bounded the groups became./They became, in short, much more like the conSciously organized, planned, and structured groups of \Vestern society in spite of a lack of any kind of evidence that natives actually thought of, them in that waiTGroups" werea.function.oLour understanding.of what were they of