A society is an organized and interdependent group of individuals who live together in a specific geographic area, who interact more with each other than they do with outsiders, who cooperate for the attainment of common goals, and who share a common culture over time. In most cases, societies are the same as the countries that make up the world. Each society includes key parts called institutions—family, education, religion, politics, economies, and health care or medicine—that help humans meet basic needs. This structure that makes up society is what we refer to here as the hardware, like the hard drive mentioned earlier. Culture, the software, is learned, transmitted, shared, and reshaped from generation to generation. All activities in the society, whether educating young members, preparing and eating dinner, selecting leaders for the group, finding a mate, or negotiating with other societies, are guided by cultural rules and expectations. In each society, culture provides the social rules for how individuals carry out necessary tasks.
▲ Traditional, rural Mayan women in Guatemala make tortillas or boxboles. Food preparation, as well as consumption, is a communal experience among these people with customs to be followed.
© Getty Images/Benjamin Pipe/Moment
Society—organized groups of people—and culture—their way of life—are interdependent. The two are not the same thing, but they cannot exist without each other, just as computer hardware and software are each useless without the other.
This chapter explores the ideas of society and culture and their relation to each other, what society is and how it is organized, how it influences and is influenced by culture, what culture is, how and why culture develops, the components of culture, cultural theories, and policy issues. After reading this chapter, you will have a better idea of how you learn the ways of your society and culture.
Society: The Hardware
The structures that make up society include the micro-level positions we hold (parent, student, and employee); the groups to which we belong (family, work group, and clubs); and the larger groups, organizations, or institutions in which we participate (educational, political, and economic organizations). This “hardware” (structure) of our social world provides the framework for “software” (culture) to function.
Societies, usually countries but sometimes distinct sovereign groups within countries (such as Native Americans), differ because they exist in different locations with unique resources—mountains, coastal areas, jungles, and deserts. Although human societies have become more complex over time, especially in recent history, people have been hunters and gatherers for 99% of human existence. Only a few groups remain hunters and gatherers today. As Table 3.1 illustrates, if all human history were to be compressed into the lifetime of an 80-year-old person, humans would have started cultivating crops and herding animals for their food supply only a few months ago. Note the incredible rate of change that has occurred just in the past 2 centuries.
Thinking Sociologically
What major changes took place in your grandparents’ lifetimes that affect the way you and your family live today?
▼ Table 3.1
Societies are organized in particular patterns shaped by factors that include the way people procure food, the availability of resources, contact with other societies, and cultural beliefs. For example, people can change from herding to farming only if they have the knowledge, skills, and desire to do so and only in environments that will support agriculture. As societies develop, changes take place in the social structures and relationships between people. For example, in industrialized societies, relationships between people typically become more formal because people must interact with strangers and not just their relatives. It is important to note that not all societies go through all stages. Some are jolted into the future by political events or changes in the global system, and some resist pressures to become modernized and continue to live in simpler social systems.
Evolution of Societies
The Saharan desert life for the Tuareg tribe is pretty much as it has been for centuries. In simple traditional societies, individuals are assigned to comparatively few social positions or statuses. Today, however, few societies are isolated from global impact. Even the Tuareg are called on to escort adventurous tourists through the desert for a currency new to them and unneeded until recently. In such traditional societies, men teach their sons everything they need to know, for all men do much the same jobs, depending on where they live: hunting, fishing, or farming and protecting the community from danger. Likewise, girls learn their jobs—such as childcare, fetching water, food preparation, farming, weaving, and perhaps house building—from their mothers. In contrast, in more complex societies, such as industrial or “modern” societies, thousands of interdependent job statuses are based on complex divisions of labor with designated tasks.
Émile Durkheim ([1893] 1947), an early French sociologist, pictured a continuum between simple and complex societies. He described simple premodern societies as held together by mechanical solidarity—social cohesion and integration based on the similarity of individuals in the group, including shared beliefs, values, and emotional ties between members of the group. Furthermore, the division of labor is based largely on male/female distinctions and age groupings; everyone fulfills his or her expected social positions. This provides the glue that holds the society together. The entire society may involve only a few hundred people, with no meso-level institutions, organizations, or subcultures. Prior to the emergence of nation-states, there was no macro level either—only tribal groupings.
According to Durkheim, as societies transformed, they became more complex through increasingly multifaceted divisions of labor and changes in the ways people carried out necessary tasks for survival ([1893] 1947). Organic solidarity refers to social cohesion (glue) based on division of labor, with each member playing a highly specialized role in the society and each person being dependent on others due to interdependent, interrelated tasks. The society has cohesion regardless of whether people have common values and shared outlooks. Prior to the factory system, for example, individual cobblers made shoes to order. With the Industrial Revolution, factories took over the process, with many individuals carrying out interdependent tasks. The division of labor is critical because it leads to new forms of social cohesion based on interdependence, and much less on familial and emotional ties. Gradual changes from mechanical (traditional) to organic (modern) society also involve harnessing new forms of energy and finding more efficient ways to use them (Nolan and Lenski 2014). For example, the use of steam engines and coal for fuel triggered the Industrial Revolution, leading to the development of industrial societies.
As societies changed toward organic solidarity, they added large organizations and institutions. The meso level—institutions and large bureaucratic organizations—became more influential for individuals and families. Still, as recently as 200 years ago, even large societies had little global interdependence, and life for the typical citizen was influenced mostly by events at the micro and meso levels. As communication and transportation around the world developed and expanded, the global level grew.
As you read about each of the following types of societies, from the simplest to the most complex, notice the presence of these variables: (a) division of labor, (b) interdependence of people’s positions,