19th Century Evolutionism: TYLOR AND MORGAN

Definition: 1

L.H. Morgan: 1

Shorter: 1

Longer: 2

E. B. Tylor: 4

Shorter: 4

Longer: 4

The concept of social evolution is one of the most important in the history of the social sciences. In the nineteenth century the disciplines of sociology and anthropology were greatly devoted to studying the evolution of human societies from their earliest and simplest forms to the present day. Social evolution is today only one among many issues pursued by sociologists and anthropologists, but it remains an important concern nonetheless.

Definition:

"social evolution" refers to social changes that exhibit some sort of directionality or linear sequence. In addition, it is usually thought to involve transformations in the form or type of society or one of its subunits (qualitative change), and not just changes in degree or extent (quantitative change). Theories of social evolution are thus theories that concentrate on identifying and explaining directional sequences of qualitative social change. Many scholars have claimed that an evolutionary theory assumes some sort of teleological unfolding of potentialities that are latent in social life, but this is not so. Many evolutionary theories including most of the recent ones have not rested on this assumption. It has also frequently been assumed that evolutionary theories postulate a rigid sequence of stages through which all societies must move, and that evolutionary theories deny the possibility of regression, or even of long-term steady states, in social life. But these, too, are misconceptions. Most evolutionary theories propose flexible typologies that give to history a certain open-ended quality, and most likewise see social continuity and regression as important social phenomena that, like evolution, cry out for explanation. L.H. Morgan: Shorter: Morgan developed a different conception of social evolution, which was set forth in his Ancient society (1877). He traced out three major "ethnical periods" in human history. Savagery, Barbarism, and Civilization. These are essentially stages of technological development in which humans moved from primitive hunter gatherers to societies based on complex agriculture and writing. Morgan also examined the evolution of government the family, and property. In his analysis of governmental institutions, to which he devoted great attention, he conceived of two main evolutionary plans of government: societas consists of relatively democratic and egalitarian societies that are organized around kinship relations; civitas, by contrast, is characterized by property and territory as the integrating principles of society. Social and economic inequalities are widespread, and the state has come into existence. Longer:

Morgan's first book, on the Iroquois, grew out of a secret society he and his friends formed in Aurora called the Grand Order of the Iroquois (GOI). The GOI patterned itself upon the Iroquois League, which was a confederacy uniting the five nations of the Iroquois (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca; a sixth, Tuscarora, was added later). As constitutionalist for the GOI Morgan made researches into the Iroquois League, including fieldwork assisted by Ely S. Parker, a Seneca. This became the basis of his book. At bottom, he found that the Iroquois League rested upon kinship relations in the form of matrilineal clans; that the eight clans (Wolf, Bear, etc.) were found in each of the Iroquois nations; and that the 50 chiefships that made up the deliberating body of the League were owned by particular matrilineal clan segments, so that they passed not from father to son but from mother's brother to sister's son. Furthermore, the Iroquois LONGHOUSE brought members of a clan segment together into a single household. These matters of Iroquois sociopolitical structure, plus his study of Iroquois material culture based on items he commissioned and collected for the state Cabinet of Natural History, form the substance of League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois, which remains the best single book on Iroquois culture. Morgan came to hypothesize that the Iroquois pattern of social organization would be found among all Indian groups and would prove their common origin. But when he tested his ideas out on the Ojibwa of Michigan's Upper Peninsula he found that they had clans but were decidedly patrilineal, not matrilineal. There was another feature of Iroquois kinship, however, that he also found among the Ojibwa: Classificatory Kinship. Thus among the Iroquois the father's brother was called "father," and the mother's sister was called "mother." Finding the same pattern in Ojibwa, which falls in a different language family, Morgan concluded that he had come across a method of demonstrating historical relationships among American Indian groups beyond the powers of linguistics to do so. Using this "new instrument for ethnology" to give scientific proof of the unity and Asiatic origin of the American Indians was the object of a big book on Kinship, the Systems of consanguinity. In a series of field trips to the west during the period 1859-62 he amassed information making up a table of kinship terms for over 200 genealogical positions for 80 Indian groups. He extended the comparison to other parts of the world by sending his printed questionnaire to missionaries, scholars, and US consuls in many places. In the book he showed that the "classificatory" pattern of kinship is not only common among American Indians but is found among Tamils and other groups of India and, more generally, of Asia and Oceania, and that it is different from the "descriptive" pattern of Europe and the Middle East   thus proving unity and Asiatic origin of the Indians. Although Morgan's proof is no longer considered valid, he identified the major types of kinship system and devised methods to describe and analyze kinship systems that remain widely in use today. The third book, Ancient society, is Morgan's summing up of the results of his anthropological research and thought on the broadest canvas of time and space. It is a work of high Victorian social Evolutionism that traces the progress of the human family from savagery through barbarism to civilization, in respect of technology, political organization, kinship, and ideas of property. Like comparable works of his British contemporaries it is the story of progress on a grand scale; as a class these works are responses to the dramatic backward lengthening of human history with the discovery, at Brixham Cave and other sites, of human remains with the bones of extinct animals (Trautmann 1992). Society had progressed from a hunting-and-gathering stage (which he denoted by the term “savagery”) to a stage of settled agriculture (“barbarism”) and then on to an urban society possessing a more advanced agriculture (“civilization”). He illustrated these developmental stages with examples drawn from various cultures. His scheme is roughly as the following Period Sub-period Characteristics Savagery: Natural Subsistence, at least 60,000 years. Lower First distinction of man from the other animals. Fruits and Roots, tropical or subtropical habitats, at least partial tree-dwelling, gesture language, intelligence, Consanguine Family. Middle Fish Subsistence, Use of Fire, spread of man worldwide along shorelines, monosyllabic language, Punaluan Family. Upper Weapons: bow and arrow, club, spear; addition of game to diet, cannibalism, syllabical language, Syndyasmian Family, organization into gentes, phratries and tribes, worship of the elements. Barbarism: Cultivation, Domestication, 35,000 years.[10] Lower Horticulture: maize, bean, squash, tobacco; art of pottery, tribal confederacy, finger weaving, blow-gun, village stockade, tribal games, element worship, Great Spirit, formation of Aryan and Semitic families. Middle Domestication of animals among the Semitic and Aryan families: goat, sheep, horse, ass, cow, dog; milk, making bronze, irrigation, great joint tenement houses in the nature of fortresses. Upper Cultivation of cereals and plants by the Aryans, smelting iron ore, poetry, mythology, walled cities, wheeled vehicles, metallic armor and weapons (bronze and iron), the forge, potter's wheel, grain mill, loom weaving, forging, monogamian family, individual property, municipal life, popular assembly. Civilization: Field Agriculture, 5000 years. Ancient Plow with an iron point, iron implements, animal power, unlimited subsistence, phonetic alphabet, writing, Arabic numerals, the military art, the city, commerce, coinage, the state, founded upon territory and upon property, the bridge, arch, crane, water-wheel, sewer. Mediaeval Gothic architecture, feudal aristocracy with hereditary titles of rank, hierarchy under the headship of a pope. Modern Telegraph, coal gas, spinning-jenny, power loom, steam engine, telescope, printing, canal lock, compass, gunpowder, photography, modern science, religious freedom, public schools, representative democracy, classes, different types of law. Morgan's book was closely read by Karl Marx, whose notes (Marx 1972) show that he was interested in the most technical aspects of Morgan's kinship work; after Marx's death Friedrich Engels wrote up the marxist reading of Morgan's social evolutionism (Engels 1902). Morgan's book was attractive to Marx because it held out the promise of a scientific history and seemed to prove that bourgeois norms of property and family had been preceded by the "communism in living" exemplified by the Iroquois longhouse. And the proof had come from someone who was not a socialist but a Presbyterian and a Republican, and so was disinterested. In this way Morgan became authoritative in the anthropology of countries with marxist regimes.

E. B. Tylor:

Shorter:

Tylor (1871) is famous for his use of "survivals" as a basis for demonstrating evolutionary sequences. These are aspects of culture that have been carried into stages of social evolution beyond the one in which they originated. For Tylor, they proved that contemporary stages of culture had evolved from earlier ones. Tylor's evolutionism, much more than Spencer's or Morgan's, concentrated on the evolution of the mental and ideational aspects of social life, especially on religion.

Longer:

E. B. Tylor was responsible for developing a theory of social EVOLUTION that laid the basis for treating anthropology as a science in the nineteenth century. The theory, outlined in his two-volume Primitive culture (1871), laid out an idea of progress in which human societies evolved and improved through time.

Tylor was well exposed to the discovery of archaeological evidences all documented in his travel book Anahuac which is published in 1861. His primary interest in anthropology was in linguistics, mythology, and folklore. He was influenced by discoveries in geology, archaeology and palaeonotology as well as the dominant paradigm of Evolusionism. Meanwhile in 1865, Darwin’s neighbor, anthropologist John Lubbock invented the word Neolithic. Accordingly the progress of humans from palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic stanges of the stone age was established and the afterwards copper, bronze and iron followed.

In his two volume masterpiece Primitive Culture (1871) Tylor traced the development of religious thoughts from Animism through polytheism to monotheism, from religious forms which depended non anthropomorphism and concrete rituals to the more refined and abstracted religious practice of Victorian Protestatns. Tylor used comparative method, producing hundreds of examples from every part of the world to demonstrate the existence of Psychic Unity of Mankind as it manifested in each stage of religious and cultural evolution.

Tylor argued that all human beings had similar intellectual potential. He rejected the notion, common at the time, that contemporary primitive societies had degenerated after a common Biblical origin. As a basis for demonstrating his evolutionary sequences, Tylor employed what he called the "doctrine of survivals." Survivals were obsolete or archaic aspects of culture preserved from one stage of social evolution into another. Living cultural fossils, they could provide clues to the past and proved that contemporary stages of culture must have evolved from earlier ones.

Tylor's evolutionism differed from that of Spencer and Morgan by concentrating more on such humanist topics as the evolution of Religion, particularly Animism, and less on material culture. He defined animism as the belief in spiritual beings and argued it was the basis of all religions, developing an elaborate evolutionary sequence that ran from a multiplicity of spirits to monotheism.

Neo-Evolutionism with special emphasis on Steward and White

Contents

Background:

Revivals:

Julian Steward:

Leslie White:

Background:

The "golden age" of social evolutionism had basically ended by the 1890s, and after that time a sharp reaction against evolutionary theories emerged. In anthropology this reaction was led by Franz Boas and his students and disciples and lasted into the 1940s and 1950s. The Boasian school objected to evolutionary theories on four basic counts: the use of an illegitimate methodological device, the Comparative Method; the development of rigid schemes of unilinear evolution in which all societies were assumed to progress in lockstep fashion through the same set of stages; inadequate recognition of the process of diffusion; and the illegitimate equation of evolution with progress (see Sanderson 1990). Nonetheless, by the 1930s the extreme historical particularism espoused by the Boasian school of anthropology began to be challenged, and an "evolutionary revival" was underway.         

Revivals:

The first to lead this revival was the archaeologist V. Gordon Childe (1936, 1951). Emphasizing the broad technological changes characteristic of human prehistory, Childe identified two great technological revolutions that had occurred in several regions of the world. The Neolithic Revolution brought about the domestication of plants and animals. It gave humans the possibility of accumulating economic surpluses, and thus paved the way for the second revolution, which Childe called the "urban revolution." This involved the passage of human societies into a much more complex form characterized by occupational specialization, cities, sharp class divisions, and the state. Beginning in the 1940s, Leslie White (1943, 1959a) developed a version of social evolutionism similar to Childe's. White insisted that evolutionary theories did not try to explain specific sequences of historical change, but rather focused on the overall movement of human culture as a whole. He formulated a law to explain this general evolution of culture, which stated that culture evolved in proportion to the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year, or by an increase in the efficiency of putting this energy to work. In other words, technological change is the driving force of the evolution of culture. Julian Steward, the third important figure in the evolutionary revival, reacted against what he thought were the overly general and excessively simplified evolutionary conceptions of Childe and White, which he called "universal evolution." He proposed instead what he termed "multilinear evolution" (Steward 1955). Multilinear evolution concentrated less on the overall movement of history and more on the different lines along which social evolution moved. Steward granted that there were broad parallels in historical change, but he did not want these overstated. There were still many different lines along which evolution radiated, and these could not be ignored.        

Since about 1960, there has been a new wave of important evolutionary work among American anthropologists, most of whom have been greatly influenced by the evolutionism of Childe and White. Marshall Sahlins (1958) wrote an important book on the evolution of social stratification that was inspired by the technological emphasis of Childe and White. He also contributed an important article (Sahlins 1960) that distinguished between general and specific evolution, the former being the overall movement of historical development, the latter the more specific radiation of culture and society along many lines. Elman Service (1962/71) and Robert Carneiro (1970) have also made important contributions to the study of political evolution. Service advanced the typology of "band tribe chiefdom state" to characterize political evolution, a typology that has been widely employed in ethnographic and archaeological research. The evolution from one stage to another is a movement to more hierarchical and complexly integrated political systems. Service's theory is a kind of functionalist one in which new political forms are said to evolve because of their greater functional effectiveness. Carneiro, by contrast, presented a conflict theory to account for the evolution of chiefdoms and states. He saw population pressure and warfare as contributing to the development of more complex political systems in areas that are environmentally circumscribed. As population pressure and warfare increase, people have nowhere to go and ultimately become conquered and subordinated by other groups. As a result, political systems grow increasingly powerful and complex. Gerhard Lenski (1970), a sociologist by training, worked out a well-known theory of social evolution that was largely an extension and elaboration of the ideas of Childe and White. Lenski saw technological expansion as the prime mover of social evolution. As technology expands, economies become more productive and economic surpluses emerge and expand. These technoeconomic changes ramify throughout social life and lead to major evolutionary transformations. One of Lenski's most important applications of this theory was to the evolution of social stratification. 

Marvin Harris (1977, 1979) has presented a quite different conception of social evolution. Rather than viewing technology as evolution's driving force, he sees most people throughout history resisting technological change because of the greater costs in human time and energy it requires. What drives social evolution is the tendency of humans to suffer eventual depletions in their standard of living as the result of population pressure and environmental degradation. People must then work harder and longer and eventually advance their technology   that is, they must intensify their production   just to keep their standard of living from falling even lower. But these changes produce yet further (and even greater) depletions, and so the depletion intensification depletion process spirals ever forward and upward. 

 The current situation is a mixed one. In recent years there has been a substantial reaction against general theories of historical change, and many scholars now assume it is only possible to do limited kinds of theorizing about specific historical situations and trajectories. All of this has meant a sharp decline in confidence in any type of evolutionary theory. Indeed, some social scientists have been severely critical of evolutionism (see Sanderson 1990: ch. 9). Nonetheless, many social scientists remain committed to evolutionary analyses and extensive research on social evolution continues. This is especially true in anthropology and its subfield of archaeology. Archaeology has long been evolutionary, and, although some archaeologists have turned against evolutionism, most probably remain within that camp.  

Julian Steward:

Steward's materialist orientation likely stems from a combination of factors, including his preparatory school experience, undergraduate studies, early fieldwork in the 1930s in archaeology in the harsh environments of the southwest and Great Basin and Plateau, ethnographic field experience with the Shoshoni (whose culture appears to have focused on survival), and the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. Through his fieldwork he cultivated cultural ecology which eventually became a means to the end of his theory of multilinear evolution (Steward 1938). Ultimately Steward was always interested in the scientific and materialist explanation of culture, including causality; that is, discovering laws of regularities in the patterns, functions, and processes of cultural diversity. This penchant for theorizing and generalizing also set Steward apart from the Boasians. In short, Steward was a rebel, an inclination that actually started in his youth, when he turned away from the Christian Science religion of his parents to pursue instead natural causes through scientific explanations. 

These considerations help explain why Steward became the single most important anthropologist in the development of cultural ecology from the 1930s into the 1960s. In his field research, publications, and teaching, Steward persistently developed a theoretical and methodological framework for studying Cultural Change as adaptation in which environmental influences were especially important. Unfortunately, Steward did not develop his theory and method in a single, readily accessible publication. Rather, his theory and method have to be extracted from numerous sources, including two edited books of diverse essays (Steward 1955, 1977). 

 It is important to clearly distinguish two different levels at which Steward operated   the ethnographic sphere, in which a particular culture was described through intensive fieldwork in the Boasian tradition, and the ethnological sphere, in which a small number of cultures were compared for the purposes of generalization and explanation. Cultural ecology has continued to strongly influence anthropological research on human environment interactions, while multilinear evolution has been pursued to a much lesser extent (Carneiro 1990; Kirch 1984). However, Steward is seldom adequately acknowledged by researchers studying cultural ecology or multilinear evolution. 

            Rather than arguing on the basis of available literature that either the environment rigidly determines culture (environmental determinism) or the environment allows some degree of latitude for alternative cultural responses (environmental possibilism), Steward avoided prejudgement and advocacy, allowing for influences in either direction (environment to culture and culture to environment). He subjected this relationship to direct empirical investigation through fieldwork on particular cultures in their habitat. Through ethnographic fieldwork with the Shoshoni and Paiute, Steward (1955) specified three successive but interrelated steps in the investigation of the cultural ecology of a particular society: (1) the natural resources and the technology used to extract and process them; (2) the social organization of work for these subsistence and economic activities; and (3) the influence of these two phenomena on other aspects of culture, including social, political, and religious institutions. In this manner Steward developed an ecological framework for describing and to some degree explaining a particular culture. This framework focused on the specific behavior involved in the technology and work of extracting natural resources for survival. Thus Steward's approach has proven most applicable to societies with economies focused on subsistence; that is, foragers or hunter gatherers, Swidden horticulturalists, fishers, and pastoral nomads. 

 Steward, however, was not satisfied with this particular level of research. Ultimately he was more interested in the comparative level in order to discover the underlying causes and laws of cultural phenomena. He was especially concerned with employing empirical data from research in cultural ecology to compare a small sample of cultures in order to formulate generalizations about limited parallels in patterns, functions, and processes. He called this "multilinear evolution," as distinct from the unilinear evolution of Edward Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan in the late nineteenth century, or the universal evolution of his contemporary Leslie White (Carneiro 1973). Steward's methodological approach to multilinear evolution was to select for detailed comparison a small number of particular cultures that were in similar environments (e.g., types of desert or forest) and at the same level of sociocultural integration (Family, Band, Tribe, Chiefdom, Or State), but widely separated geographically. The great spatial distance between the cultures chosen for the sample was supposed to eliminate the possibility of cultural similarities arising from Diffusion, thus controlling for the historical factor that had been so prominent in the anthropology of the Boasians. Accordingly, similarities in the sample of cultures that Steward selected would have to be the result of parallel adaptations, that is, similar responses to similar environmental conditions. In this way Steward attempted to go beyond ethnographic description to the scientific and materialist explanation of cultural similarities and differences (Sponsel 1987). 

 The principal criticisms of Steward's approach are that his theoretical concepts were not very clear and useful; that his method was mostly intuitive; that he was a functionalist; and that he focused rather narrowly on subsistence economy to the neglect of many other important factors, such as population dynamics, natural hazards, political institutions, and religion (see J. Anderson 1973; Orlove 1980; Vayda & Rappaport 1968). However, assessed in historical context, Steward's contributions were and remain significant.

Leslie White:

White's support of evolutionary theory was not well received until near the end of his career, in part because he took aim at Boas and his followers in a polemical style that took no prisoners. His position, stated most completely in The evolution of culture (1959a), was strongly materialist and became best known for its assertion that use of energy per capita was the best way to measure social complexity and rank societies in an evolutionary scheme. Although Julian Steward (whom White had replaced at Michigan) argued along similar lines, White rejected his model as not general enough and too focused on the environment (Carniero 1973). 

The environmental objection may seem strange for a materialist, but White's other passion was promoting what he called "culturology," the idea that Culture was defined only by human manipulation of symbols and formed an autonomous class of phenomena that could be studied as a science. Similar to Kroeber's (1917a) "superorganic," culture was something real that existed outside the individual, independent of psychology, biology, or the environment. Expressed at length in The science of culture (1949), White's theory suggested that there could be laws of culture.

White saw energy or, more accurately the model of harnessing it and putting it to human use, as the key component in how societies evolved and changed. Moving from food gathering to food production, then on to the use of fossil fuels, culture was transformed – evolved – from primitive to modern. Culture was made possible by the ability to symbol, but for White material inventions were the most important product of such symboling. His famous formula stated: “As the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year increases, culture will advance.” In White’ scheme of things technology was the key driver of Culture and specific cultures. That is while he believed that culture developed generally toward states of higher complexity and greater harnessing of energy, he acknowledged that individual cultures developed in response to a variety of particular factors. His interest was in all human culture rather than in particular cultures. Initially the human species had lived in small societies that depended on hunting and gathering to survive, using their own energy, augmented by tools. In time, humans learned to farm, planting culgens and using the energy of domesticated animals. This led to larger communities and more complex societies, some of which used water power in irrigation and milling, as well as wind power. Then ccame of modern civilization White was writing as nuclear energy was increasingly heralded as the energy source of the future, and he believed that we were entering a new era that would lead to still more complexity.

Many found White's position contradictory: how could a materialist give primacy to cultural determinism when his own evolutionary model had focused on such noncultural criteria as energy use? Nor were students of symbolic anthropology likely to believe that they were producing a set of scientific laws. 

The specifics of White's theories have ultimately proved less influential than his support of the principle of evolution. White insisted on its value over many decades when such models were looked upon with distaste or derision. His writings and his students laid the groundwork for evolution's reemergence into the mainstream of anthropology beginning in the 1960s, although few adopted his specific models. By the end of his career White had received numerous awards, including his election as President of the American Anthropological Association in 1964. After retiring from Michigan in 1970, he moved to the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he died in 1975.

Social Stratification

Stratification. 1

Approaches: 1

Functionalist perspectives: 2

Talcott Parsons. 2

Kinsley Davis and Wilbert E. Moore. 2

Marxist perspective: 2

Weberian perspective: 3

Stratification in contemporary usage. 3

 

Stratification      

"Social stratification" is the most general term used to describe the hierarchical division of a society whereby its members are ranked according to their relative power, wealth, or prestige. Although it is often used as a generic term applicable to all ranked societies, including caste societies and those based on social class, "stratification" is more generally used when the theoretical focus is upon individual action, so that the overall patterns of social stratification are regarded as the outcome of individuals' efforts to achieve social mobility. Stratification theorists can thus compare societies according to the nature and extent of vertical mobility within them, and can arrange them along a scale from the supposed rigidities of caste to the hypothetically completely open societies of the modern world   a scale that inevitably turns into an evolutionary sequence leading to modernization. (Dumont 1970).

The concept of stratification is particularly appropriate to structural-functional analyses of complex societies, where the theory assumes a mode of social integration around the common values of achievement and individual responsibility for social STATUS. The resulting hierarchy is then assumed to represent the distribution of individual talents, responsibilities, and appropriate rewards. This model of perfect individual social mobility then becomes the benchmark against which other societies are measured, a procedure adopted by sociologists employing sophisticated statistical techniques.

Approaches:

Strata may be nominal, constructed by sociologists, or real, reflecting actual social distances. Real strata are divided by social distances and systematic exclusions. Sociologists also distinguish closed stratification systems, such as the Hindu caste system, from open ones, such as ‘modern’ occupational/class systems. In the former, social mobility is discouraged and restricted by traditional conventions. In the latter, mobility is typical, intense, and socially approved. In the functional theory of stratification, sociologists portray stratification as socially beneficial and consensual. Conflict theorists perceive stratification as contested and accompanied by domination. Marxists see it as an outcome of economic exploitation engendered in class relations, while Weberians treat it as an outcome of multifaceted domination in combination with socioeconomic class, sociocultural status and sociopolitical power/authority hierarchies.

While there is a wide consensus that occupational and employment statuses form the backbone of modern stratification, it is accepted that social strata may also develop around other assets and locations:

•        political influence, authority (as in Ralph Dahrendorf );

•        ethno-racial status, prestige (as in W. Lloyd Warner or Edward A. Shils);

•        education, skills, human capital, expert knowledge (as in Gary Becker and Daniel Bell);

•        social networks, ties, social capital (as in James S. Coleman);

•        “cultural capital,” taste, lifestyle, gender (as in Pierre Bourdieu);

•        rights, entitlements, privileges (as in Bryan S. Turner).

Functionalist perspectives:

Basic assumption of functionalism is that society must address certain basic needs or functional prerequisites to survive.

Talcott Parsons

Order, stability and cooperation in society are based on value consensus -  a general agreement by members of society concerning what is good and worthwhile. Parson argued that stratification systems derive from common values. If values exist, then it follows that individuals will be evaluated and placed in some form of rank order. In other words those who perform successfully in terms of society’s values are ranked highly.

Kinsley Davis and Wilbert E. Moore

For Davis and Moore stratification exists in every society. For them one of the functional prerequisites is effective role allocation and performance. Which simply means that

1.       all roles must be filled

2.       they must be filled by those best able to perform them

3.       The necessary training for them must be undertaken

4.       The roles must be performed conscientiously.

Therefore, society has some sort of mechanism to ensure such effective role allocation. The mechanism is known as stratification.

Marxist perspective:

Marxist perspective is a radical alternative to functionalist perspective. They regard social stratification as divisive and not integrative as suggested by functionalists. Marxists focus on social strata rather than social inequality in general.

From a Marxist perspective, systems of stratification derived from the relationships of social groups to the means of production. A class is a social group whose members share the same relationship to the means of production.

There is a historical analysis of class relations and progress of society in Marxian analysis. Class relations, i.e. relationship of classes with means of production if gets changed, society or whole social system undergoes changes through stages (as shown in the figure).

 Weberian perspective:

Weber also saw social stratification as classes in terms of economics. He argued that classes develop in market economies in which individuals compete for economic gain. He defined a class as a group of individuals who share a similar position in a market economy.

Perhaps one of the most valuable contributions made by Weber is by bringing the dimensions of status situation (often known as prestige) to show an alternative form of stratification in society. Occupations, ethnic and religious groups, and most importantly lifestyles, as Weber observes, are accord different degrees of prestige which is another dimension of stratification.

Stratification in contemporary usage

Contemporary students of social stratification typically combine class, occupational status, and authority dimensions into synthetic gradations (stratification schemes and class maps). Anthony Giddens (The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies, 1973) and Ralph Dahrendorf (The Modern Social Conflict, 1988), for example, draw stratification maps that include occupational classes, elites, and socially marginalized strata (underclasses). Similarly, John Goldthorpe (Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain, 1987) synthesizes class and occupational schemes into an elevenclass map. Erik Olin Wright (Class Counts, 1997), in turn, juxtaposes class analysis to a study of race and gender stratification. His class/stratification schemes also incorporate the dimensions of managerial control and skill/expertise. Finally, Bell (The Coming of Post Industrial Society, 1973) and Gøsta Esping-Anderson (Changing Classes, 1993) accommodate in their postindustrial class maps the dimension of power/authority (elite or political directorate), economic integration, and citizenship rights (outsiders and underclass). With advancing globalization, many sociologists see the whole world as stratified, typically along the economic/developmental and power dimensions. 

Social Stratification - a brief introduction (bilingual, meant for my students)

Social Fact

 

Social Fact

In Durkheim’s sociology, a social fact is a social phenomenon that has a coercive effect upon the individual. Thus, although, social facts may originally be the product of human action, they have developed an autonomy from their creators (i.e. human beings) to confront humans as something external  to them. They have an objectivity close to that of natural objects and physical laws. For Durkheim (1895) the goal sociology is the study of social facts. Durkheimian sociology considers social fact both as an object and approach of studying society.   

Therefore, social fact may be defined as any way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exerting over the individual an external constraint.

Background:

The concept of social fact has intricate connection with Auguste Comte’s ‘positive philosophy.’ For him there is a hierarchy of sciences (see the figure).

 He was confident enough to argue that scientific knowledge of society is possible. It could be accumulated and used to improve the human existence so that society could be run rationally without religion or superstition getting in the way of progress.

For Durkheim the scientific study will be the study of social facts. His celebrated work on Suicide (1890) exemplifies the positivistic approach in studying society.

As positivist Comte believed that the scientific study of society should be confined to collecting information about phenomena that can be objectively observed and classified. Comte argued that sociologists should not be concerned with the internal meanings, motives, feeling and emotions of individuals. Since these mental states exist only in the person’s consciousness, they cannot be observed and so they cannot be measured in any objective way.

Durkheim agreed that sociologies should confine themselves to studying social facts. He argued ‘the first and most fundamental ruls is “consider social facts as things” (Durkheim 1895). This means that the belief systems, customs and institutions of society – the facts of the social world – should be considered as things in the same way as the objects ane events of the natural world.

However, Durkheim did not believe that social facts consisted only of those things that could be directly observed or measured. To Durkheim, social facts included such phenomena as the belief systems, customs and institutions of society. Belief systems are not directly measurable or observable, since, they exist in consciousness of humans. Nevertheless, Durkheim saw them as existing over and above individual consciousness. Individuals did not choose them and they could not be changed at will.

Durkheim believed that society is not simply a collection of individuals acting independently in terms of their particular psychology or mental state. Instead, collective beliefs, values and laws direct member of society – by social facts that have an existence of their own. Social facts therefore make individuals behave in particular ways.

This is a brief introduction to the concept of social fact (bilingual, meant for my college students)

Further reading:

http://media.pfeiffer.edu/lridener/DSS/Durkheim/SOCFACT.HTML