Suchergebnisse

chapter I DATA AND THEORY -- chapter II PROPERTY RIGHTS AND ECONOMIC ACTIVITY -- chapter III STATELESS SOCIETIES AND THE MAINTENANC E OF ORDER -- chapter IV THE STATE AND CIVIL STRIFE -- chapter V DISPUTE AND SETTLEMENT -- chapter VI MYSTICAL DISTURBANCE AND RITUAL ADJUSTMENT -- chapter VII CUSTOM IN STABILITY AND CHANGE.

Recent scholarly indications that Homo sapiens is little diff from Homo fossilis neanderthalensis are tied to some reflections on the need for human beings to recognize their common human-kindness, ie, the quality of being human, regardless of ethnic, cultural, soc groups, racial, & sex diff's. Cultural diff's & soc att's & their distribution are related to soc & econ privileges, & it can be expected that a whole series of new theories will be produced to warrant their inequality. It is well validated that sci'fic theories about the nature of human beings & their societies are liable to be very strongly influenced by the pol'al, econ or soc position of the proponents of such theories. The legitimate desire of people to preserve their own culture in many ways can obstruct realistic efforts at settlement in terms of civic & cultural equality. False comparisons further hamper achievement of equality, eg, measuring the achievements & output of newly industr'ized peoples with those of established industr'ized societies without taking into account specific soc & cultural conditions & the extent to which the behavior of people varies from situation to situation. Technological development is compared to a horse that can be harnessed in front of many makes of cart, but the cart must not be put before the horse. It is naive to believe that sources of group & racial conflict can be eliminated by equipping all the peoples of the world equally with modern sci & technology. Human beings come to attach high value to their ideologies, culture, beliefs, etc. The processes producing separate identities are now being countered by 2 major developments: (a) the increasing econ Interdependence between diff countries, & (b) the spread of a new form of universal culture which promotes a strong sense of mutual identification & a strong resentment against all forms of racial & ethnic discrimination. M. Maxfield.

There has been considerable criticism of the use of the equilibrium model by social anthropologists. The argument of this paper is that much of this criticism is due to a misunderstanding arising because though all social life exists in time, and all processes in time involve changes, we have to define several different kinds of "time" as well as distinctive types of "change." It is contended that each type of social institution, or cultural pattern, has a particular kind of time scale in its very structure. Thus the structure of a family system can only be analyzed in four generations, and in subsistence systems perhaps only in five to six generations. Other institutions have other built‐in time scales. It is proposed to call the time scale of an institution its structural duration. One important way of studying an institution is to analyze its structural duration. In an analysis of this kind, the emphasis is on the manner in which the institution would operate through time if internal contradictions or external intruding events did not interfere with its passage through its structural duration. Therefore an analysis of the structural duration of an institution is necessarily in an equilibrium model. Many studies have taken this form, but have been misread as if they were dealing with what happened in actual historical time. It is argued that since changes are of several kinds in a suggested range, from repetitive or recurrent changes of personnel through limited structural changes to radical structural changes, it is possible to assess what kinds of changes are occurring only by examining them within the structural durations of institutions, held steady as a first step in analysis as if in actual equilibrium. But this provides only a heuristic scheme in which to handle the observations; it is not a theory giving us a set of interdependent propositions. More and more actual changes may be fed in as the analysis tries to cope with greater ranges of reality. The argument is illustrated with examples from studies of several social spheres. There is also a discussion of how the method enables the analyst to analyze observations collected over a limited period of time in terms of a much longer period in order to assess the types of change that are occurring.