Yeditepe University

Department of Anthropology
ANT-101
Week 5: The dimensions of
social organization
◤ Instructor: Cemre Aydoğan
◤
The dimensions of social organization

▪ How do we define human being?

▪ We must live in society.

▪ Cultural patterns may be borrowed or shared by people in

different societies.

▪ What is social organization? Each social position=status=

corresponding role. For example, kinship status of parent

▪ Violation of the role requirements cause disapproval from other

members of society.
◤
The dimensions of social organization

▪ Ascribed status vs. achieved status

▪ Institutions

▪ On the other side, social organization refers to the interlocking

role relationship that are activated when statuses have
incumbents and groups have members, all of whom are going
about the daily business of living.

▪ Functionalism
◤
The dimensions of social organization

▪ Sociologists were supposed to explain how "civilized" societies

worked, and anthropologists were supposed to explain how "primitive"
societies worked (not totally correct).

▪ Emile Durkheim – modern sociology and modern anthropology

▪ *Mechanical solidarity among kin groups and families*

▪ **Organic solidarity=nation-states (time)

▪ What is nation-state?

▪ Classifications and roles

◤
The dimensions of social organization

▪ Egalitarian society vs. stratified society

▪ A historic transition was not perfectly understood

▪ Rank societies

▪ Egalitarian societies: not just kinship, sodalities

▪ Sodalities, age range/grade, Africa

▪ Secret societies
◤
The dimensions of social organization

▪ Caste and class:

▪ Caste – stratified societies – there is no option of social mobility

▪ Origin: India

▪ Not just on the nexus of endogamy

▪ The top: Brahmins

◤
The dimensions of social organization

▪ The second: Kshatriya

▪ Social class: Karl Marx (1818-83) in terms of income and

distribution of wealth

▪ Bourgeoisie vs. proletariat

▪ Social mobility is not forbidden, but exceptional success.

▪ Class antagonism: overthrow the capitalist system and establish

socialism
◤
The dimensions of social organization
▪ An acceptance within castes or social classes?

▪ Case of India in the last decades

▪ Clientage or patron-client relationship

▪ Latin America, compadrazgo, compadre and comadre

▪ Fictive kinship
◤
The dimensions of social organization
▪ Stratified societies:

▪ Bureaucracy: hierarchically organized set of formal statues

▪ Authority

▪ Race:

▪ At the same time, the absence of any underlying biological basis for
racial categories has never prevented people in some societies from
inventing cultural categories based on a group's supposed origins or
physical appearance and then using such categories as building
blocks for their social institutions.
◤
The dimensions of social organization

▪ Precisely because racial categories are culturally constructed on the basis

of superficial appearances, however, different societies may draw the
boundaries around racially defined social groups in different ways.

▪ For example, as the twenty-first century dawns, people

in the United States tend to classify people into several different racial
categories, but the great divide remains between two major racial
categories, black and white.

▪ Colorism in the USA.

▪ All story is about social race.

▪ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=926PqQUOVOg
◤
The dimensions of social organization
▪ Ethnicity

▪ Ethnic groups: shared religion, shared language, shared custom, shared

history

▪ No distinction btw racial and ethnic identity

▪ Boundaries (Barth) – interactions

▪ Today nation-states

▪ French revolution

▪ Rigid borders

▪ Ethnocide – why does it occur?

◤
The dimensions of social organization
▪ Gender:

▪ The rise of second wave feminism in 1960s-70s

▪ How to become a women (Simone de Beauvoir)?

▪ Before that, thus, most discussions of "the culture" of a group in fact

portrayed culture from the viewpoint of men (often high-status men).

▪ Women in ethnography or participant observations or interviewing to see the

invisible one!

▪ Margaret Mead's demonstration in the 1930s of the lack of correlation

between biological sex and culturally expected behaviours of males and
females in society was a well-known exception to this pattern.
◤
The dimensions of social organization

▪ As a result of the women anthropologists’ research in 1970s: the

term sex to refer to the physical characteristics that distinguish
males from females (for example, body shape, distribution of
body hair, reproductive organs, sex chromosomes). By contrast,
gender referred to the culturally constructed roles assigned to
males or females, which varied considerably from society to
society.
◤
The dimensions of social organization

▪ Marxist-feminist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock (1922-87)

argued that male dominance was connected to the rise of
private property and the state, and she showed how some
gender egalitarian indigenous societies had become male
dominated as a consequence of Western capitalist colonization.
◤
The dimensions of social organization

▪ By the 1980s, both gender roles on women and men

▪ LGBT+ and heteronormativity

▪ Colonial studies: their women our masculinity

▪ Not unique to colony vs. colonizer relation

▪ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4UWxlVvT1A