Understanding Culture, Society and Politics

HUMAN BIOCULTURAL AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION - WEEK 3 MODULE

Definition of Society
Society is a group of people living together in a particular place or at a particular time and having many things in
common.
What does society look like?
 Society looks like an object itself (sui generis or unique)
 Then, if society is an object, we can examine it closely and analyze it like any other subject (We break it into pieces and
explore each piece carefully)
 What a biologist does to a living organism, or a geologist does to a rock, so as a sociologist does to a society.
 Society becomes something scientifically weighted, measured and dissected

If we analyze society, we determine what it is made up. It is composed of culture, working class and ethnicity. These
components appear on their own but they can be broken down into pieces that makes the study of society more
challenging and confusing.

Visions of Society that account for Social Change and Societal

Evolution
Four Diverse Perspectives:
Karl Marx
- He looked at society that is in conflict (social conflict). This is a struggle between segments of society over valued
resources.
 The capitalists are the people who own and operate factories and other businesses in pursuit of profits
 Proletariat are people who sell their productive labor for wages
 Social institutions include all the major spheres of social life, or societal subsystems organized to meet human
needs
 Infrastructure – society’s economic system
 Superstructure – other social institutions: family, religion, political institution
 Marx rejected false consciousness or explanation of social problems as the shortcomings of individuals rather
than the flaws of society
- He believed that the history of all existing society is the history of class struggle (or class conflict) – conflict between
entire classes over the distribution of a society’s wealth and power
- Marx believed that worker must replace false consciousness with class consciousness – workers’ recognition of
themselves as a class unified in opposition to capitalists and, ultimately, to capitalism itself. Workers would then rise up
and destroy capitalism in a socialist revolution.

Marx’s Model of Society

 Alienation – the experience of isolation and misery resulting from powerlessness
 Capitalism alienates workers in four specific ways:
-Form the act of working - Workers have no say in production, work is tedious and repetitive
-Form the products of work - Workers have no ownership in the product that is merely sold for profit  Form
other workers Work has become competitive rather than cooperative
-From human potential - Workers deny, not fulfill themselves in their work

Max Weber
- Rationalization of Society. This is the historical change from tradition – sentiments and beliefs passed from one
generation to another to rationality – deliberate, matter-of-fact calculation of the cost effective means to accomplish a
task as a dominant mode of human thought.
- Weber also believes in predestination and God’s favor, religious ethic and transformed to work ethic.
Weber’s Rational Social Organization. It has seven characteristics:
 Distinctive social institutions
 Large scale organization
 Specialized tasks
 Personal discipline
 Awareness of time
 Technical competence
 Impersonality
They are expressed in bureaucracy and capitalism
Emile Durkheim
- He describes society as more than individuals. Society has a life of its own – beyond our personal experiences
- He also said that social facts, any patterns rooted in society rather than the experience of individuals.
 Society has an “objective reality” beyond our own subjective perceptions of the world. Examples are norms,
values, religious beliefs, and rituals
 Society has the power to guide our thoughts and actions
- Warned that modern society creates anomie - a condition in which society provides little moral guidance to individuals
 He said that change is from mechanical solidarity. Social bonds are based on common sentiment and shared
moral value that are strong among members of industrial societies
 To Organic solidarity, social bonds are based on specialization and interdependence that are strong among
members of industrial societies.
 He said that key to change is an expanding division of labor – a specialization of economic activity.

Gerhard Lenski
- He said that sociocultural evolution is the change that occurs as a society acquires new technology
- Societies range from simple to the technologically complex
- Societies that are simple in technology tend to resemble one another
- More complex societies reveal striking cultural diversity.

Socio-cultural evolution
 It is the change that occurs as a society acquires new technology
 Technology shapes other cultural patterns and that simple technology can only support small numbers of people who
live simple lives
 The greater amount of technology a society has within its grasp, the faster cultural change will take place
 High-tech societies are capable of sustaining large numbers of people who are engaged in a diverse division of labor.

Types of Society
The society we live in did not spring up overnight. Human societies have evolved slowly over millions of years. However,
throughout history, technological developments have sometimes brought about dramatic change that has boosted
human society into its next age.

Hunting and Gathering stage

 During this stage, man used simple tools to hunt animals and vegetation. The hunting and gathering societies
characteristics are:
a. The primary institution is the family, which decides how food is to be shared and how children are to be
socialized, and which provides for the protection of its members.
b. Number of families in this society tend to be small with fewer than fifty members
c. They were nomadic in search of food
d. Society members have very high level of interdependence
e. Division of labor is based on sex: men hunt, women gather

Horticultural and Pastoral Societies

 Horticultural societies use hand tools to raise crops. People started to stay in one place and grow their own
food.
 Pastoral societies started the domestication and breeding of animals for food.

Agricultural Societies
 The invention of the plow led to the establishment of agricultural societies. Members of these societies tend
crops with an animal harnessed to a plow. The use of animals to pull a plow eventually led to the creation of
cities and formed the basic structure of modern societies.
The development of agricultural societies followed this general sequence.
a. Animals are used to pull plow
b. Lager areas of land can then be cultivated
c. More crops were yielded for longer periods of time
d. Productivity increased and people did not move to another place with abundant supply of food for them
e. Towns form and then cities
f. When yields increased, members engaged in some other forms of farming, thus developing other skills. Job
specialization increased
g. When fewer people are directly involved with production of food, the economy became more complex
 Industrial Societies

Use advanced sources of energy, rather than humans and animals, to run large machinery. Industrialization
started in the mid-1700s, when the steam engine was first used in Great Britain as a means of running other
machines. In the 20th century, industrialized societies had changed dramatically.

 People and goods traversed much longer distances because of innovations in transportation such as train and
steamship
 Rural areas lost population because people move to the cities as factory workers
 Societies became urbanized, which means that the majority of population lived within commuting distance of a
major city
 Suburbs grew up around cities to provide city-dwellers with alternative places to live

Postindustrial Societies

This type of society that has developed over the past few decades, features an economy based on services and
technology, not production. There are three major characteristics of postindustrial economy:

 These societies focus on ideas as tangible goods no longer drive the economy
 There has been a need for higher education for the postindustrial societies because the new focus on
information and technology means that people must pursue higher education
 There was a shift in working place from cities to homes because new communications technology allows work to
be performed from a variety of locations.