But his colleagues refer to many other characteristics besides technology: Evans-Pritchard notes that religious life in highly developed and complex society is not so inextricably involved in the rest of social life as it is in primitive society Evans-Pritchard Lucy Mair, for example, emphasises the absence of writing, a monetary economy, and political centralization as crucial features of primitive society Mair Thus primitive means undifferentiated, modern means differentiated.
Advance in technology involves differentiation in every sphere, in techniques and materials, in productive and political roles…There are not, in the most small scale types of society, any specialized political institutions. Historical progress is marked by development of diverse judicial, military, police, parliamentary and bureaucratic institutions.
In the rest of the chapter she traces some of the consequences of primitive technology and social organization for modes of thought in particular. Daryll Forde elaborates at length on the distinctive characteristics of societies with primitive technologies:. These restrictions derive mainly from a low level of technical knowledge, which severely limits productive capacity.
Whenever these characteristics are found, certain consequences flow from them. The economic unit is small and, save for occasionally bartered specialities, do not transcend the population of a small village. Such relations are of the personal, face-to-face kind. Everyone has known everyone else from childhood, everyone is related to everyone else…Impersonal commercial relations hardly exist…The small size of the social groups within which production is organized also reduces the opportunity for specialization.
Such skills as are practised are known to everyone else of the appropriate age and sex. Forde also points out that economic processes are embedded in wider social needs, and are inextricably mixed with political, ceremonial, and general festivals:.
On the other hand, if the surplus is to be used at all, it must somehow be disposed of at once because of the technical difficulty of storage … Often the only way an individual can dispose of a surplus is by holding a lavish feast or simply by giving it to kinsmen and neighbours who will feel bound to repay one day.
Modes of warfare are much less often cited as distinctive of primitive society, but this criterion, too, has been quite clear since , when Turney-High published Primitive War.
Types of warfare and political organization are thus closely associated. See also Otterbein Kuper has virtually nothing to say about the effects of technology on population density, permanence of settlement, community size, and all the other consequences of small size and subsistence economy on social organization and modes of thought.
This is, to put it charitably, an ineffectual response to the very large literature on state formation which has accumulated in recent years e. Has Leach been any more successful? The answer is: No! These are comparatively minor characteristics by comparison with those of technology, economy, size, division of labour, simplicity of political organization, modes of warfare, and lack of literacy, and in any case his attempts to refute even these stereotypes are quite ineffectual.
All this simply evades the very obvious point that in small scale societies of a few hundreds or thousands, with little division of labour, there will be, axiomatically if you like, greater homogeneity in beliefs, values, and customs than in large states with differences of region, class, occupation, education, religion, and ethnic background.
At various other points in his book Leach makes further efforts to dismiss the major differences between primitive and industrial societies:. At the level of domestic relations with which most people are concerned for most of each working day, the superficial [ sic ] contrasts are simply different transformations of a single complex of ideas about the proper relationships between men and things and men and other men.
It is wholly misleading to suppose that people who seem different from us at this level must on that account be archaic in their mental or social organization. This is typically required from kinsmen in stateless societies and forbidden by states. Again, how does one separate the norms of everyday reciprocity from the economy as a whole? These norms will obviously be very different in subsistence economies and in those dominated by the market.
Not only does he evade all the essential issues, but in the course of the book he keeps forgetting that there is not supposed to be any difference between primitive and industrial societies, and distinguishes between them by the traditional criteria:. Offices are deemed to be permanently related to one another in a structure of kinship. While it was generally agreed that simplicity of technology and economy, smallness of scale, the dominance of kinship and other ascriptive principles, and lack of political centralization were significant differences between primitive and industrial societies, there was usually no attempt to work out in any detail how these and other features of primitive society were linked together.
Unfortunately the denial of the idea of social evolution became one of the many obsessions with which anthropology has fettered itself.
Evolutionism was closely associated with Marxism, materialism, and laws of historical necessity which most anthropologists found morally and politically repugnant, and schemes of social evolution were also believed to represent our society as superior to all others in an ethnocentric and imperialist scheme of progress.
It was often supposed that any theory of social evolution must seek to discover the original forms of social institutions and the first form of human society, and this was rejected as pseudo-historical speculation. These conventional assumptions about what any scheme of social evolution must entail are clearly evident in the books of Kuper and Leach.
Certainly, no such thing can be reconstructed now. The term implies some historical point of reference. It presumably defines a type of society ancestral to more advanced forms, on the analogy of some natural species. But human societies cannot be traced back to a single point of origin, and there is no way of reconstructing prehistoric forms, classifying them and aligning them in a temporal series. There are no fossils of social organization… If it is useful to apply evolutionary theory to social history, then it must direct attention to variation, to adaptation to all sorts of local circumstances, and so to diversification.
And it does seem likely that early human societies were indeed rather diverse. Surviving hunter-gatherers certainly do not conform to a single organizational type.
Since ecological variations constrain social organization, especially where technology is simple, there must have been considerable differences in social structure between the earliest human societies. He is also strongly opposed to the idea that human history has been governed by laws:. I do not believe in the existence of laws of historical development which will help us either explain or reconstruct the past or to predict the future.
I am interested in the details rather than the generalities of the diversity of human culture, but I do not consider that these details are, in any discoverable sense, causally determined.
These assumptions about evolutionary theory are quite mistaken, however. In the first place a valid theory of social evolution does not require the reconstruction of some initial state of society that was once common to the whole human race, a kind of agnostic version of the Garden of Eden.
We certainly have no means of knowing whether the Neanderthals or even the cro-Magnons had the institutions of polyandry or polygyny, exogamy, totemism, or bride-capture, and speculation on such problems is a waste of time because there is no evidence to support it and never will be. But we have considerable evidence from archaeology, history, and ethnography about the consequences of a number of innovations such as agriculture and the domestication of animals, the use of metals, the emergence of the state, conquest warfare, writing, money, and industrialization.
Some of these have occurred before others in the course of history, and social evolution is the study of how such innovations occur, why they have the effects that they do, and how they are linked together. While hunter-gatherers clearly have many differences in cosmologies, rituals, marriage rules and so on they also have many important and distinctive similarities: population density is very low, groups are very small, residence is impermanent, leadership is informal and very restricted in scope, there are no specialized judicial or ritual functionaries and the division of labour in general is very simple, while reciprocity in the form of sharing and gift exchange is the dominant mode of personal interaction.
In these respects, at least, it is obvious that modern hunter-gatherer societies must resemble those of pre-agricultural society the world over. One does not have to be a cultural materialist to recognize the importance of such innovations in human history, and the emergence of the state, indeed, has relatively little to do with changes in technology. They do so because some at least of the later developments in human history seem to presuppose the earlier ones, and could not have preceded them.
Human history is a play in which the cast tends to increase over time and within which constraints seem to be imposed on the order in which the characters appear. The theorist of human society cannot introduce them in any old order at will. Some changes are at least relatively irreversible; agriculture, centralization, literacy, science can of course disappear in areas where they were once established, and occasionally such regressions do occur; but, by and large, there does seem to be a kind of overall cumulativeness.
Nor can these cumulative changes be treated as nothing more than differentiation. In biological evolution there was an historical sequence of habitats from sea to land to air, but fish, reptiles, and birds merely have different capacities which are related to their respective habitats.
A bird can do many things which a fish cannot, and vice versa. But the capacities of birds, reptiles and fishes are all far greater than those of the amoeba, for example, and they can do everything that the amoeba can as well. In the same way, modern industrial states have greater capacities than agricultural states, which in turn had greater capacities than stateless societies.
It might be wondered why, if the whole notion of primitive society is an illusion, it should have been so fundamental to social anthropology.
According to Kuper,. The rise and fall of nationalism is probably equally relevant. The idea of primitive society fed the common belief that societies were based on blood and soil, and that these principles of descent and territoriality may be equated with race and citizenship, the contrasting components of every imperialism and every nationalism. He also suggest that the idea survived because it generated a specialized set of concepts forming the privileged preserve of a new academic discipline which had a vested interest in maintaining them.
Leach is much more forthright:. Even today the technical jargon of anthropology is laden with value-loaded implications which stem from their origins in the context of the colonial world…The contemporary primitive peoples… were not regarded as interesting in themselves but only because of what they might, by inference, tell us about the distant past.
Leach attributes the same kind of crude prejudice and contempt for primitive peoples to many of the authors of modern introductory textbooks in anthropology:. This is an extraordinarily prejudiced assessment of the work of generations of anthropologists who have had a sincere intellectual interest in working out how small scale societies without writing, or the state, or money, and with simple technology organize their lives and their view of the world.
It does not seem unfair or unreasonable to infer that these are basically political, and that Leach and Kuper are dominated by the anti-colonialist, egalitarian, relativistic ethos of Western academic liberalism.
One of the more amusing aspects of relativism is that its advocates are under the illusion that everyone is prejudiced except them. The kind of massive intellectual dishonesty which permeates these two books is not likely to provide the foundations for any scholarly or scientific discipline worthy of the name.
According to Leach,. Subscriber sign in You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Username Please enter your Username. Password Please enter your Password. Forgot password?
Don't have an account? Sign in via your Institution. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number. Show Summary Details Overview primitive society. Reference entries primitive society in A Dictionary of Sociology 3 rev Length: 82 words. All rights reserved. Sign in to annotate. Delete Cancel Save. Cancel Save.
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