The term ‘society’ refers both to a general aspect of the human condition — we are all necessarily social creatures, and therefore depend on society in order to live as humans — and to 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. In recent years, as the particular use of the term to denote a specific group of people and their way of life has grown ever more problematic, while some of these tensions have approached breaking point, anthropologists have started to suggest abandoning the very idea of society as a theoretical construct.
Two senses: society and societies
In a general sense, ‘society’ is a universal condition of human life. This can be put in either biological or symbolic and moral terms. Society can be seen as a basic, but not exclusive, attribute of human nature: we are genetically predisposed to social life. Becoming fully human depends on interaction with our fellow creatures; the phylogenesis of our species runs parallel to the development of language and labour, social abilities without which the organism’s needs cannot be met.
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. The very idea of social agency is revealed in behaviour which is not founded in instincts, selected by evolution, but instead in rules which have their origins in history rather than in the requirements of the human organism. The notion of ‘rule’ may be taken in different senses: in structural-function-alism it is moral and prescriptive; in structuralism or in symbolic anthropology it is cognitive and descriptive. Despite this important difference, in both cases an 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 (Levi-Strauss 1969 [1949]; Fortes 1983). The social condition is no longer seen as one of the attributes of Homo sapiens, but instead defines the very idea of ‘humanity’ as a unique entity, made up not of individuals but of ‘subjects’ who are both creators and creatures of the world of rules.
‘Society’ is also used to refer to more specific entities: different societies. In this specific sense, the idea of a ‘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.
In this sense, society may denote the group’s population, its institutions and relations, or its culture and ideology. In the first case, society is used as a synonym for ‘(a) people’, or a particular type of humanity. In the second sense, in which society is equivalent to ‘social system’ or ‘social organization’, the socio-political framework of the group is important: its morphology (composition, distribution and relations between the subgroups of society), 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). In the third case, in which ‘society’ is interchangeable with ‘culture’, what is emphasized is the affective and cognitive content of group life: the set of dispositions and abilities inculcated in its members by various symbolic means, as well as the concepts and practices that confer order, meaning and value upon reality.
One of the ways to handle the relation between the two senses of ‘society’ has been to divide 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. In spite of efforts to define the two activities as methodologically complementary ‘stages’, anthropology has tended to polarize between ‘ethnography’, which deals with specific societies, and ‘theory’, which deal with society in its abstract and general sense. The universalist perspective predominated in the early years of anthropology, with an emphasis on the ‘comparative method’ and on the definition of major types of society. The golden age of the ethnographic method was the period of fcultur-alism and functionalism, in which ethnography was used polemically to demolish speculative typologies (by Boas) or as the royal road to the universal (for Malinowski). The structuralisms of Radcliffe-Brown and Levi-Strauss, and American "neo-evolutionism ("White, "Steward), in turn shifted back to comparison and generalization.
Since the 1960s this polarization has intensified. On the one hand, the interest in meaning and interpretation has restored ethnography to a preeminent position, privileging the actor’s perspective and seeking a critique of the anthropologist’s concepts in the different emic views of society.
Society in the general sense came to be subordinated to society in the specific, plural sense. On the other hand, developments in socio-biology, the psychological study of cognition, and cultural ecology have led to ambitious hypotheses concerning ‘sociality’ as a genetic property of the human species, along with behavioural and cognitive universals (eventually attributing the ‘phenotypic’ diversity of the human ethogram to such extrinsic variables as the environment). This polarization between ever more specific culturalist interpretation and ever more grandiose naturalist explanation has ultimately emptied the concept of society of any significance, reducing it either to particular representations or to universal behaviour.
Two genealogies: individualism and holism
Two contrasting images of society can be discerned in the history of Western thought, which combine and recombine at different moments, and in which the specific and the general senses of society meet. To use Louis Dumont’s distinction, we may speak of ‘individualistic’ and ‘holistic’ views of the social; and we may call these images societas and universitas (Dumont 1986 [1965]). The individualist version is based on the idea of partnership between ontologically independent individual atoms: society is an artifice resulting from the consensual adhesion of individuals, rationally guided by interest, to a set of conventional norms; social life negates and transcends a pre-political ‘state of nature’. The key metaphor for this view is the constitutional and territorial state, and its central problem is the foundation of political order. The holistic version rests on the idea of society as an organic whole which pre-exists its members. Society is a corporate unit guided by a transcendent value, a ‘concrete universal’ in which human nature is actualized. The key metaphor in this view is kinship, as a natural principle for the constitution of collective moral persons, and its central problem is the cultural integration of a people as a ‘nation’. The most frequent modem images associated with these two views of society are the contract (or its opposite, conflict) and the organism, both of which have persisted in twentieth-century anthropology in many forms, most recently as the contrast between ‘action’ and ‘structure’.
Universitas is associated with the premodern world dominated by Aristotelian thought, societas with early modern ‘Natural Law’ thinkers from "Hobbes to "Hegel. The holistic organic model of universitas resurfaced in the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, playing a key role in the development of the anthropological image of a society as an ethnically based community sharing a universe of traditional meanings legitimated by religion. On the other hand, much of Victorian anthropology and its progeny may be seen as a continuation of the Enlightenment version of societas.
The competition between ‘society’ and ‘culture’ as comprehensive labels for the object of anthropology can also be interpreted in terms of the opposition between societas and universitas, individualism and holism. The notion of society in British social anthropology is derived from the ‘civil society’ of Natural Law theorists, from French and Scottish rationalist thinkers of the eighteenth century and, more directly, from the sociologies of "Comte, "Herbert and "Durkheim. The notion of culture in American cultural anthropology comes from German Romanticism, the ‘historicoethnological’ schools of the first half of the nineteenth century, and directly from the work of Boas.
This does not mean, however, that it is possible to derive social anthropology directly from the individualism of societas and cultural anthropology equally directly from the holism of uni-versitas. In certain respects, the situation is quite the opposite. For instance, Durkheim and Maine assimilated the progressive schemes of the eighteenth-century rationalists, but at the same time reacted against their artificial and utilitarian aspects in the name of essentialist and organic conceptions of society like those that would later inspire the anthropology of Radcliffe-Brown and his followers. And Boas, though a descendant of German idealism and historicism, defended a view of culture in which the individual was the only real locus of cultural integration. But there are unmistakable marks of rationalist utilitarianism in several tendencies of social anthropology, particularly Malinowski’s functionalism and the Spencerian element in Radcliffe-Brown’s thought. And it is equally clear that the ‘config-urational’ concerns of such American anthropologists as Kroeber, Benedict, or C. Geertz derive from the Romantic paradigm of society as a spiritual organism.
Two oppositions: nature/culture and individual/society
The division between ‘society’ and ‘culture’ is further complicated by each term’s relationship with the central oppositions of the social sciences: ‘nature/culture’ and ‘individual/ society’. In both cases there is the same theoretical dilemma: whether the relationship between individual and society, or between nature and culture, is one of continuity or one of discontinuity. Is culture an outgrowth of human nature that can be exhaustively analysed in terms of the biology of the human species, or is it something of a quite different order which transcends any basis in the human organism? And is society merely the sum of the interactions and representations of the individuals that make it up, or is it too a specific level of reality, of a different order to its individual components?
The overlap between these two polarities is complex: often one is subsumed into another, as when society or culture is opposed to individual and nature. Moreover, both ‘individual’ and ‘nature’ are "polysemic notions with several meanings. ‘Individual’ has at least two: a universal empirical sense (the individual representatives of the species, the human component of any society) and a particular cultural sense (the individual as the ultimate value, origin and finality of social institutions). ‘Nature’, in turn, may signify; the material world as opposed to its conceptual representations; the sphere of ‘facts’ versus that of ‘values’; the ‘innate’ or ‘constant’ component of human behaviour as opposed to its ‘acquired’ or ‘variable’ component; the ‘spontaneous’ and ‘necessary’ versus the ‘artificial’ and the ‘conventional’; ‘animality’ in contrast with ‘humanity’, and so on.
The idea that the society and culture stand ‘above’ the individual and/or nature is found in all the most influential anthropological authors, but with important differences (Ingold 1986). Herbert saw society as the end-product of the interactive association of individuals, and as an instrument for the attainment of their goals; it was a supra-individual (but not a suprabiological) sphere of reality. Society was a natural phenomenon (which does not distinguish man from other animals), the "superorganic phase of a universal evolutionary process that encompasses the inorganic and organic spheres. Durkheim’s position was precisely the opposite: for him, society was an exclusively human phenomenon, a unique supra-individual and supra-biological reality of a moral and symbolic nature. It was a totality greater than the sum of its parts and endowed with a purpose of its own, a "collective consciousness higher than and external to individual consciousnesses, produced by the ‘fusion’ of the latter. Finally, Boas proposed a third solution: culture was an extra-somatic and ideational reality, but it did not make up a distinct ontological realm. Because it exists in human minds, it is individual and suprabiological, a nominal entity (similar to the Darwinian species) somehow reducible to the individuals who bear it.
Later anthropological theories present combinations of these three paradigms. Kroeber’s theory of culture, for instance, oscillates between Boasian and Durkheimian positions. In general, American anthropology has tended to concentrate on the nature/culture pair. Sometimes this has meant nature in the sense of ‘human nature’, which leads to analyses of the affective and cognitive moulding of individuals by culture, or alternatively to attempts to establish transcultural psychological constants. Sometimes it has meant non-human nature, as in the kind of materialism that treats culture as an instrument of adaptation to the environment.
British anthropology, on the other hand, has tended to focus on the ‘individual/society’ polarity and the associated concepts of ‘structure’ and ‘function’. For Malinowski, the idea of function referred to the role played by social institutions in the satisfaction of the basic needs of individual organisms. For Radcliffe-Brown, function meant the contribution of these institutions to the maintenance of the conditions of existence of the collective organism. Radcliffe-Brown’s definition provided an answer to the central problem of structural-functionalist theory: elucidating the foundations and modes of permanence of a given social form. Modishly rephrased as ‘reproduction’, the same issue was taken up again in the Marxist anthropology of the 1970s.
Radcliffe-Brown proposed definitions of ‘social structure’ in terms of both natural interaction and moral regulation, hesitating between the image of a network of relationships between individuals and that of a structure of normative relations between groups. The prevailing image, however, was that of structure as a jural codex, or body of rules, in which individuals or collectives have social personalities and define their relative positions in terms of rights and duties. This idea, as developed by Fortes, was dominant for a while. But the individualistic and utilitarian position, first championed in anthropology by Malinowski, made a comeback with Edmund Leach’s reaction against structural-functionalism, and then flourished in various transactionalist alternatives to the Dur-kheimian paradigm, all of them emphasizing the difference between what was normative and ‘ideal’ and what was empirical and ‘actual’, and favouring ‘strategies’ or ‘processes’ over ‘rules’ and ‘structures’, ‘action’ over ‘representation’, and ‘power’ over ‘order’. These opposed concepts express the classical dilemma of British anthropology, the disjunction between ‘norms’ and ‘practices’, which reflects the persistence of the society/individual antinomy in this tradition.
Levi-Strauss, in turn, inherited from the Boa-sians the issue of the relation between psychological universals and cultural determinism, the interest in the unconscious dimension of social phenomena, and the ‘nature/culture’ dichotomy. But his treatment of nature and culture evokes classical attempts to derive an ideal genesis of ‘society’ from a ‘state of nature’; and Levi-Strauss’s idea of ‘culture’ is in many ways analogous to the notion of ‘civil society’. Defining the incest taboo and marriage exchange as universal conditions of collective life, Levi-Strauss described the transition from nature to culture in socio-political terms directly influenced by Mauss’s theory of exchange and reciprocity. Mauss’s theory has itself been interpreted as an alternative response to the Hobbe-sian problem of the emergence of the social order from the natural state of war, with the gift and exchange as the primitive analogues of the state and the contract (Sahlins 1972). But Levi-Strauss also drew from Boas and Saussure to explore a new analogy for sociocultural phenomena, language. And, by countering Dur-kheim’s thesis on the social origins of symbolism with the theme of the symbolic foundations of the social, Levi-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, are resolved.
The linguistic model underlies Levi-Strauss’s concept of structure as a code; that is, as a system of signs with positional values. The problem of function is here replaced by the problem of meaning, a move which, among other things, explains structuralism’s relative indifference to the notion of social structure.His famous definition of ethnology as a kind of psychology finally abolished the distinction between society and culture, and in this way structuralism indirectly contributed to the predominance of culture over society in recent anthropology. This very emphasis on the taxo-nomic and cognitive aspects of social life has been frequently pointed out as a symptom of one of structuralism’s most serious limitations: its difficulty in accounting for the ‘passage’ from meaning to action, from the order of ideas to the order of experience, or from structure to history.
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.
The distinction between social types has a long intellectual history. The three-part Enlightenment division between "’savagery’, "’barbarism’ and "’civilization’ was especially important. For Montesquieu this scheme was more geographical than historical. The classification was temporalized by such thinkers as Turgot, Adam Smith, Ferguson and Condorcet, and it also generated Comte’s ‘law of the three states’, which was of great importance for Victorian theories of religion. This scheme acquired full anthropological citizenship with Morgan’s division into hunter-gatherer societies (savagery), agricultural societies (barbarism) and complex societies (civilization), which was subsequently incorporated into Marxist thought and developed by neo-evolutionary theories.
But the most productive scheme in Western thought has been the dichotomy, which is best suited to describe strong discontinuities. The conceptual polarity between universitas and socie-tas, holism and individualism, has been treated as a real opposition, emphasizing various differences that are all ultimately reducible to the contrast between ‘us’ and ‘them’, thus providing the nucleus for those ‘great divide’ theories that make the modern West unique among human societies. All the most famous dichotomies contain some allusion to the pairs ‘primitive/ civilized’ or ‘traditional/modern’. Among the best known are:
kinship/territory (Morgan) status/contract (Maine) mechanical/organic solidarity (Durkheim) community (Gemeinschaft) / association (Gesellschaft) (Tonnies) simple/complex societies gift/commodity or gift/contract (Mauss) traditional/rational (Weber) holism/individualism (Dumont) cold/hot (Levi-Strauss)
These dichotomies draw on the nature/culture opposition, the first term generally representing a more ‘natural’ state. They also draw on the individual/society opposition – here the first term denotes social forms in which the group prevails as the basic unit, whereas the second term points to a social form where the individual is pre-eminent. Finally, they echo the traditional division of theoretical labour, according to which anthropology is concerned with simple, kinship-based, stateless societies with a gift economy, while sociology deals with modern, industrial, and (originally) Western societies.
These dichotomies may be interpreted either in terms of absolute and irreducible differences, or more heuristically as expressing the relative dominance of one pole over the other within each social type. Anthropologists have recently become sceptical of any formulation which suggests a ‘great divide’, especially if it reinforces the image of ‘primitive society’ established by Victorian thinkers and employed as a basic model for anthropology ever since. This, it has been argued, is no more than an inverted projection of the self-image of modern bourgeois society as it has been envisaged from the eighteenth century on (Kuper 1988). But it seems that anthropology cannot easily do without such dichotomies. Though they carry with them a cumbersome ideological burden, they do point to a substantive difference between most of the societies that have traditionally been the object of anthropology and modern capitalist society. The theoretical productivity of this difference may be gauged by the recent revival of certain classical contrasts, like the gift/commodity distinction (Gregory 1982), and theoretical attempts to relativize and redefine the great divide (Latour 1993 [1991]).
There have been different ways of conceiving the relation between the terms in these dichotomies. Evolutionists interpreted it as an objective historical succession: ‘modern’ society is a societas which emerged from the universitas of ‘primitive’, ‘ancient’, or ‘traditional’ society. In this solution what prevails is the viewpoint of societas, seen as the final cause of a progressive movement in which all societies are caught up, and thus as the latent truth of the world of universitas.
Echoes of this model, shorn of its teleological connotations, can be found in those theories which privilege alleged formal action universals (such as maximization of value, for instance) and that see the sociological categories generated by and for modern society (such as ‘individual’, ‘power’, ‘interest’, ‘economy’, and ‘politics’) as applicable to any society, since the opposition between types of society is one of degree rather than one of kind.
The alternative position, which stresses the qualitative difference between the terms, tends to treat universitas as the normal form of society, while societas is conceived as a historical oddity or an ideological illusion. Here the opposition between the two types of society reflects above all the difference between two global socio-cosmological views, one of which, the holistic, reveals the true nature of the social. This idea, the immediate roots of which are in Durkheim’s sociology of religion and in the Boasians’ ‘cultural determinism’, has led to quite different developments in the hands of such authors as Dumont, Sahlins or Schneider. To the extent that many anthropologists conceive their task as above all that of undertaking a political and epistemological critique of Western sociological reason, this position occupies a central place in the discipline. Universitas is valued even by those who point to the deep connection between holistic and individualistic views, refusing both as ‘Western’ in favour of emic, reflexive views of the social condition entertained by other societies.
With primitive society as its traditional object, anthropology has virtually identified its concept of society with the theme of kinship. By taking kinship as the constitutive link of primitive social units, anthropology revived the Aristotelian concept of a natural continuity between the family and the polis that had been rejected by the Natural Law thinkers. Maine’s and Durkheim’s critiques of Bentham’s,Morgan’s discovery of Amerindian classifi-catory terminologies and his attempt to fit them into a scheme that singled out the kinship group as the original political unit of human society, McLenann’s and Bachofen’s speculations on primeval matriarchy — not to mention the impact of the earliest Australian ethnographies on the Victorian intellectual world — led the fledgling discipline of anthropology to explore a dimension of the social that had been neglected by the social contract tradition in favour of the immediate opposition between the individual and the state.
The dichotomies internalized
To contrast anthropological traditions on the basis of these oppositions and dichotomies is no more than a simplification for didactic purposes.
The tension between ‘Hobbesians’ and ‘Aristotelians’, or ‘Malinowskians’ and ‘Durkhei-mians’ (Kuper 1992), to use more recent totemic ancestors, reappears within the major theoretical strands. 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), onto the diachronic plane. It served as a critical foil for almost all later social anthropology, which attempted to show the simultaneous workings of both orientations within ‘primitive’ societies. A very common solution here was to divide the social sphere into two complementary aspects, one more ‘social’ and the other more ‘individual’. This division is apparent in several famous analyses, from the contrast in Trobriand society between ‘mother-right’ and ‘father-love’ (Mal-inowski), through the role of the mother’s brother in patrilineal societies (Radcliffe-Brown), to such contrasts as descent versus complementary filiation (Fortes), descent versus kinship (Evans-Pritchard), social structure versus social organization (Firth), and structure versus communitas (Victor Turner). Once one of these polarities was established, much analytical effort was dedicated to the task of transcending it — that is, determining the institutional mechanisms which mediate between intergroup links and interpersonal links, the political order of global society and the domestic order of kinship, the obligatory or normative component of social relationships and their optional or strategic component.
In short, one may say that the image of ‘primitive society’ in classical social anthropology ‘internalized’ the contrast previously established between global societies or global views of society. And though it owes much of its inspiration to the ‘Aristotelian’ tradition, there is one aspect of ‘Hobbesian’ modernity to which anthropology has not remained immune (Verdon 1991): it is the idea that society (even if it is a ‘natural’ state because it is equivalent to humanity) is a problematic condition — that is, something that must be explained. This, in turn, derives from the idea that society is made up of asocial individuals who require socialization (that is, constraint by the inculcation of normative representations to behave in a given way), and who resist such constraint by means of a selfish manipulation of norms or by an imaginary regression to an original condition of freedom. This idea can be found in various forms in Durkheim as in Freud, in Levi-Strauss as in Fortes or Leach. Homo sapiens may well be a social animal, but to modern thought this phrase suggests a contradiction in terms, and the unease it inspires is what motivates anthropology’s unceasing search for solutions that transcend the oppositions and dichotomies implicit in it.
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. The functionalist emphasis is on the ‘total’ and systemic aspect; the culturalist emphasis is on the ‘individual’ and expressive aspect.
This image has been questioned for a long time. Theoretically, Levi-Strauss (1963 [1958]; 1987 [1950]) 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. Ethnographically, Leach (1965 [1954]) demonstrated the foolishness of epistemologi-cally ‘well-behaved’ models that fail to take into account the historical and political contexts in which social structures are set.
More recently, it has been observed that the specific sense of a society as a self-contained whole relies on categories and institutions that are characteristic of the modern West. Thus it is argued, for instance, that the idea of mankind as divided into discrete, socially and culturally unique ethnic units derives from the ideology of the nation-state, imposed on non-Western peoples by colonialism, the great inventor, both conceptually and practically, of ‘tribes’ and ‘societies’. This criticism has led to an emphasis on the interdependence of actual social systems (seen as the coalescence of heterogeneous, open-ended social networks). The relations making up wider regional configurations determine the internal processes of local units — a view which ultimately breaks up different societies into increasingly global systems, up to the level of the planet. And it has lead to a predilection for pro-cessual, action-centred approaches at the expense of structural, regulative approaches, resolving society into a web of atomic interactions and representations.
In its general sense, the notion of society has also been losing ground; contemporary anthropology tends to reject essentialist or tele-ological views of society as an agency that transcends individuals. The notion of society as an instinctual or normative order, endowed with the objective status of a thing, is giving way to ideas such as ‘sociality’, which supposedly are better at conveying a sense of social life as an intersubjectively constituted process. In this way, social realism is being replaced by a view that extends to society the same constructivism that the sociology of knowledge applied successfully to nature.
If it makes sense to speak of a dominant tendency in contemporary anthropology, it is the rejection of structural views of society in favour of a pragmatics of social agency that seeks ‘to promote a recovery of the subject without lapsing into subjectivism’ (Giddens 1979: 44). Intentionality and conscience, hitherto explained away as mere epiphenomena of structures, or even denounced as epistemological obstacles to the determination of these explanatory principles, have become not only what must urgently be explained, but possibly the very essence (if not the true explanation) of sociality. This can be seen in different theoretical manifestations: the dissatisfaction with the alternative between interactive or naturalistic and regulative or cul-turalist views of society (Ingold 1986); the various theories of ‘practice’, of ‘communicative action’, and ‘structuration’ (Bourdieu 1977 [1972]; Habermas 1984 [1981]; Giddens 1984); or, the unanimous criticism of the ‘Saussurean’ paradigm of action as the passive actualization of a set of rules to be found in some collective counsciousness or in the mental apparatus of the species. In a nutshell: crisis of the structure,return of the subject. This return may be theoretically sophisticated, as in the proposals to overcome the antinomies of Western social thought, especially that between individual and society, which is what is at stake in this idea of a non-voluntaristic view of social action. But it may also mean a straightforward revival of concepts that were rightly rejected by structuralists: philosophy of consciousness, celebration of the infinite creativity of human action, instrumentalist rationalism (or its reciprocal, romantic irrationalism), retranscendentalization of the individual, and so on. As every social theory at some point believed it held the key to the resolution of the classic dichotomies and oppositions, only to be later accused of favouring one of them in the most scandalous manner, one wonders whether these developments have indeed broken free of the perennial oscillation between societas and universitas.
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. This conceptual crisis is, firstly, the consequence of a historical crisis. The end of political colonialism, and the accelerated globalization of economic and cultural flows, have highlighted the ideological and artificial character of some of anthropology’s ideas: the isolated primitive was never primitive and was never isolated. But such a historical crisis also reflects a change in Western social apperception — in other words, a cultural crisis. 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. There seems to be a growing conviction that the West has left behind its ‘modern’ period, predicated upon the absolute separation between the realm of facts and that of values, between nature and culture, the private and the public sphere, and finally between the ‘West’ and the ‘rest’. It remains to be seen whether we (and this ‘we’ includes every society on Earth) have indeed entered a postmodern phase in which such contrasts are no longer operative or, contrary to the assumptions of the great divide cosmology that has made anthropology possible, ‘we have never been modern’ (Latour 1993 [1991]) except in the imagination. We do know, however — and this much we have been taught by anthropology itself — that imaginary conceptions may produce quite real effects. If this is indeed the case, then we must continue searching for concepts that can illuminate the differences between societies, there being no other way for anthropology effectively to view the social condition from a standpoint that is truly universal — that is, one that can generate and acknowledge difference.
