Social Structure

Background

• He traveled to the Andaman Islands (1906–1908) and Western Australia (1910–1912)
• These places served as the inspiration for his later books The Andaman Islanders (1922) and The Social Organization of Australian Tribes (1930).
• In 1916 he became a director of education in Tonga

Background

• 1920 moved to Cape Town to become professor of social anthropology, founding the School of African Life
• University of Cape Town (1920–25), University of Sydney (1925–31) and University of Chicago (1931–37)
• In 1937 to take up an appointment to the first chair in social anthropology at Oxford in 1937

FORMATION of Ideas

• Greatly influenced by the work of Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx
• His idea involving the formation of theories is that every scientist starts from the works of his predecessors, finds problems or contradictions and through his/her own ways of observing makes a contribution to the growing body of theories

Social Structure

• Defined his theory of social structure as as a complex network of social relations

Social Structure

• "I am aware, of course, that the term "social structure" is used in a number of different senses, some of them very vague... The choice of terms and their definitions is a matter of scientific convenience, but one of the characteristics of a science as soon as it has passed the first formative period is the existence of technical terms which are used in the same precise meaning by all the students of that science."

Social Structure

• "Social structure and social relations are completely different, as any social relationship between two people exists only as as a part of a wide network of social relations involving many other persons (unless its Adam and Eve)"

SOcial Structure

• How societies form social structure
• How societies maintain their social structure, through their economy, language, or customs
• How socities change their social social structure over time

Social Structure

• While Lévi-Strauss claimed that "social structure and the social relations that are its constituents are theoretical constructions used to model social life"
• Radcliffe-Brown argued that social relations are real, and directly observable; but that social structure is a theoretical construction that researchers put forward to offer explanation to what they observed

Social Structure

• The social relationships of a group may change over time however the social structure maintains a level of stability over a long period of time; with the exception of military conquest or political revolution change to social structure may come rapidly

Spatial aspect Social Stucture

• No community has absolute isolation, with globalization every community in the world is connected

Social PHYSIOLOGY

• Law
• Morals
• Etiquette
• Religion
• Government
• Education

Economics and language

• Different societies may have the a different social structure but the same language or vice versa but languages functions to solidify a society or a group of societies
• Exchange of goods and services is dependent and often the means in which a network of social relations is maintained

how Social Structure CHanges

• To examine how societies change you must examine the group as a whole and what changes and what stays the same

The End