SAMFUND? Durkheim revisited i Amazonas og videre

Resumé

“Society” appears a difficult notion. We use

it all the time. But is it any good as an

analytical concept? Sociologists seem to

agree it is not. Few societies have the

empirical characteristics of the bounded

entity that structural-functionalist theory

assumed. Constructivist notions of society as

“imagined community” appear to be tied up

with the existence of the State or with the

spread of information technology. This

leaves contemporary anthropology with

“society” as a residue, the left-over from

culture’s gluttonous theoretical supper. Still,

social science aims to explain or understand

social relations, interactions, and the

processes by which structures and functions

are worked into social systems as implied by

the notion of society. The notion of society

allows us to assume the existence of

objective structures of order in the social life

of people. Unlike the notion of culture,

however, the notion of society has not been

critically scrutinized by anthropologists. In

contemporary Danish anthropology with its

focus on culture and cultural representations,

writers tend to simply take society for

granted as the intrinsic empirical context of

culture. From the perspective of Durkheimian

notions of “the social”, the paper

provides a brief review of interpretations that

retrospectively have appeared analytical

dead-ends. The author goes on to suggest that

the notion of “symbolically generalized

media of communication” may offer a

productive opening that embraces both sides

of the culture/society dichotomy in the

search for structured systems of social

existence whether subjectively or

objectively conceived. The idea of

“symbolically generalized media or

communication” was originally formulated

by Talcott Parsons and subsequently

reworked by German sociologist Niklas

Luhmann. Rather than an interrelated series

of parts that make up a whole plus something

else in the classic Durkheimian sense,

society from this perspective appears in the

form of structured sets of actions oriented by

a horizon of possibilities and expectations,

symbolically constituted, yet always

provisional and emergent. Inspired by

analyses of two different cases in Amazonian

research the paper offers a brief hint at how

the notion may be employed in

anthropology.