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Saturday, April 6, 2019

Émile Durkheim

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Émile Durkheim
Emile Durkheim.jpg
Born
David Émile Durkheim

15 April 1858
Died15 November 1917 (aged 59)
NationalityFrench
Alma materÉcole Normale Supérieure
Known forSacred–profane dichotomy
Collective consciousness
Social fact
Social integration
Anomie
Collective effervescence
Scientific career
FieldsPhilosophy, sociology, education, anthropology, religious studies
InstitutionsUniversity of Paris, University of Bordeaux
InfluencesImmanuel Kant, René Descartes, Plato, Herbert Spencer, Aristotle, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Auguste Comte. William James, John Dewey, Fustel de Coulanges, Jean-Marie Guyau, Charles Bernard Renouvier, John Stuart Mill
InfluencedMarcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Talcott Parsons, Maurice Halbwachs, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Bronisław Malinowski, Fernand Braudel, Pierre Bourdieu, Charles Taylor, Henri Bergson, Emmanuel Levinas, Steven Lukes, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Mary Douglas, Paul Fauconnet, Robert N. Bellah, Ziya Gökalp, David Bloor, Randall Collins

David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and—with W. E. B. Du Bois, Karl Marx and Max Weber—is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science.

Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity, an era in which traditional social and religious ties are no longer assumed, and in which new social institutions have come into being. His first major sociological work was The Division of Labour in Society (1893). In 1895, he published The Rules of Sociological Method and set up the first European department of sociology, becoming France's first professor of sociology. In 1898, he established the journal L'Année Sociologique. Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a study of suicide rates in Catholic and Protestant populations, pioneered modern social research and served to distinguish social science from psychology and political philosophy. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) presented a theory of religion, comparing the social and cultural lives of aboriginal and modern societies.

Durkheim was also deeply preoccupied with the acceptance of sociology as a legitimate science. He refined the positivism originally set forth by Auguste Comte, promoting what could be considered as a form of epistemological realism, as well as the use of the hypothetico-deductive model in social science. For him, sociology was the science of institutions, if this term is understood in its broader meaning as "beliefs and modes of behaviour instituted by the collectivity" and its aim being to discover structural social facts. Durkheim was a major proponent of structural functionalism, a foundational perspective in both sociology and anthropology. In his view, social science should be purely holistic; that is, sociology should study phenomena attributed to society at large, rather than being limited to the specific actions of individuals.

He remained a dominant force in French intellectual life until his death in 1917, presenting numerous lectures and published works on a variety of topics, including the sociology of knowledge, morality, social stratification, religion, law, education, and deviance. Durkheimian terms such as "collective consciousness" have since entered the popular lexicon.

Biography

Childhood and education

Emile Durkheim was born in Épinal in Lorraine, the son of Mélanie (Isidor) and Moïse Durkheim. He came from a long line of devout French Jews; his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been rabbis. He began his education in a rabbinical school, but at an early age, he decided not to follow in his family's footsteps and switched schools. Durkheim led a completely secular life. Much of his work was dedicated to demonstrating that religious phenomena stemmed from social rather than divine factors. While Durkheim chose not to follow in the family tradition, he did not sever ties with his family or with the Jewish community. Many of his most prominent collaborators and students were Jewish, and some were blood relations. Marcel Mauss, a notable social anthropologist of the pre-war era, was his nephew. One of his nieces was Claudette (née Raphael) Bloch, a marine biologist and mother of Maurice Bloch, who became a noted anthropologist. 

A precocious student, Durkheim entered the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in 1879, at his third attempt. The entering class that year was one of the most brilliant of the nineteenth century and many of his classmates, such as Jean Jaurès and Henri Bergson, would go on to become major figures in France's intellectual history. At the ENS, Durkheim studied under the direction of Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, a classicist with a social scientific outlook, and wrote his Latin dissertation on Montesquieu. At the same time, he read Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. Thus Durkheim became interested in a scientific approach to society very early on in his career. This meant the first of many conflicts with the French academic system, which had no social science curriculum at the time. Durkheim found humanistic studies uninteresting, turning his attention from psychology and philosophy to ethics and eventually, sociology. He obtained his agrégation in philosophy in 1882, though finishing next to last in his graduating class owing to serious illness the year before.

The opportunity for Durkheim to receive a major academic appointment in Paris was inhibited by his approach to society. From 1882 to 1887 he taught philosophy at several provincial schools. In 1885 he decided to leave for Germany, where for two years he studied sociology at the universities of Marburg, Berlin and Leipzig. As Durkheim indicated in several essays, it was in Leipzig that he learned to appreciate the value of empiricism and its language of concrete, complex things, in sharp contrast to the more abstract, clear and simple ideas of the Cartesian method. By 1886, as part of his doctoral dissertation, he had completed the draft of his The Division of Labour in Society, and was working towards establishing the new science of sociology.

Academic career

A collection of Durkheim's courses on the origins of socialism (1896), edited and published by his nephew, Marcel Mauss, in 1928
 
Durkheim's period in Germany resulted in the publication of numerous articles on German social science and philosophy; Durkheim was particularly impressed by the work of Wilhelm Wundt. Durkheim's articles gained recognition in France, and he received a teaching appointment in the University of Bordeaux in 1887, where he was to teach the university's first social science course. His official title was Chargé d'un Cours de Science Sociale et de Pédagogie and thus he taught both pedagogy and sociology (the latter had never been taught in France before). The appointment of the social scientist to the mostly humanistic faculty was an important sign of the change of times, and also the growing importance and recognition of the social sciences. From this position Durkheim helped reform the French school system and introduced the study of social science in its curriculum. However, his controversial beliefs that religion and morality could be explained in terms purely of social interaction earned him many critics. 

Also in 1887, Durkheim married Louise Dreyfus. They would have two children, Marie and André.

The 1890s were a period of remarkable creative output for Durkheim. In 1893, he published The Division of Labour in Society, his doctoral dissertation and fundamental statement of the nature of human society and its development. Durkheim's interest in social phenomena was spurred on by politics. France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War led to the fall of the regime of Napoleon III, which was then replaced by the Third Republic. This in turn resulted in a backlash against the new secular and republican rule, as many people considered a vigorously nationalistic approach necessary to rejuvenate France's fading power. Durkheim, a Jew and a staunch supporter of the Third Republic with a sympathy towards socialism, was thus in the political minority, a situation that galvanized him politically. The Dreyfus affair of 1894 only strengthened his activist stance.

In 1895, he published The Rules of Sociological Method, a manifesto stating what sociology is and how it ought to be done, and founded the first European department of sociology at the University of Bordeaux. In 1898, he founded L'Année Sociologique, the first French social science journal. Its aim was to publish and publicize the work of what was, by then, a growing number of students and collaborators (this is also the name used to refer to the group of students who developed his sociological program). In 1897, he published Suicide, a case study that provided an example of what the sociological monograph might look like. Durkheim was one of the pioneers of the use of quantitative methods in criminology during his suicide case study.

By 1902, Durkheim had finally achieved his goal of attaining a prominent position in Paris when he became the chair of education at the Sorbonne. Durkheim aimed for the Parisian position earlier, but the Parisian faculty took longer to accept what some called "sociological imperialism" and admit social science to their curriculum. He became a full professor (Professor of the Science of Education) there in 1906, and in 1913 he was named Chair in "Education and Sociology". Because French universities are technically institutions for training secondary school teachers, this position gave Durkheim considerable influence—his lectures were the only ones that were mandatory for the entire student body. Durkheim had much influence over the new generation of teachers; around that time he also served as an advisor to the Ministry of Education. In 1912, he published his last major work, The Elementary Forms of The Religious Life.

Death

Émile Durkheim's grave in Montparnasse Cemetery
 
The outbreak of World War I was to have a tragic effect on Durkheim's life. His leftism was always patriotic rather than internationalist—he sought a secular, rational form of French life. But the coming of the war and the inevitable nationalist propaganda that followed made it difficult to sustain this already nuanced position. While Durkheim actively worked to support his country in the war, his reluctance to give in to simplistic nationalist fervor (combined with his Jewish background) made him a natural target of the now-ascendant French Right. Even more seriously, the generations of students that Durkheim had trained were now being drafted to serve in the army, and many of them perished in the trenches. Finally, Durkheim's own son, André, died on the war front in December 1915—a loss from which Durkheim never recovered. Emotionally devastated, Durkheim collapsed of a stroke in Paris on November 15, 1917. He was buried at the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.

Durkheim's thought

Throughout his career, Durkheim was concerned primarily with three goals. First, to establish sociology as a new academic discipline. Second, to analyse how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in the modern era, when things such as shared religious and ethnic background could no longer be assumed; to that end he wrote much about the effect of laws, religion, education and similar forces on society and social integration. Lastly, Durkheim was concerned with the practical implications of scientific knowledge. The importance of social integration is expressed throughout Durkheim's work:
For if society lacks the unity that derives from the fact that the relationships between its parts are exactly regulated, that unity resulting from the harmonious articulation of its various functions assured by effective discipline and if, in addition, society lacks the unity based upon the commitment of men's wills to a common objective, then it is no more than a pile of sand that the least jolt or the slightest puff will suffice to scatter.
— Émile Durkheim

Inspirations

During his university studies at the École, Durkheim was influenced by two neo-Kantian scholars, Charles Bernard Renouvier and Émile Boutroux. The principles Durkheim absorbed from them included rationalism, scientific study of morality, anti-utilitarianism and secular education. His methodology was influenced by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, a supporter of the scientific method.

A fundamental influence on Durkheim's thought was the sociological positivism of Auguste Comte, who effectively sought to extend and apply the scientific method found in the natural sciences to the social sciences. According to Comte, a true social science should stress for empirical facts, as well as induce general scientific laws from the relationship among these facts. There were many points on which Durkheim agreed with the positivist thesis. First, he accepted that the study of society was to be founded on an examination of facts. Second, like Comte, he acknowledged that the only valid guide to objective knowledge was the scientific method. Third, he agreed with Comte that the social sciences could become scientific only when they were stripped of their metaphysical abstractions and philosophical speculation. At the same time, Durkheim believed that Comte was still too philosophical in his outlook.

A second influence on Durkheim's view of society beyond Comte's positivism was the epistemological outlook called social realism. Although he never explicitly exposed it, Durkheim adopted a realist perspective in order to demonstrate the existence of social realities outside the individual and to show that these realities existed in the form of the objective relations of society. As an epistemology of science, realism can be defined as a perspective that takes as its central point of departure the view that external social realities exist in the outer world and that these realities are independent of the individual's perception of them. This view opposes other predominant philosophical perspectives such as empiricism and positivism. Empiricists such as David Hume had argued that all realities in the outside world are products of human sense perception. According to empiricists, all realities are thus merely perceived: they do not exist independently of our perceptions, and have no causal power in themselves. Comte's positivism went a step further by claiming that scientific laws could be deduced from empirical observations. Going beyond this, Durkheim claimed that sociology would not only discover "apparent" laws, but would be able to discover the inherent nature of society. 

Scholars also debate the exact influence of Jewish thought on Durkheim's work. The answer remains uncertain; some scholars have argued that Durkheim's thought is a form of secularized Jewish thought, while others argue that proving the existence of a direct influence of Jewish thought on Durkheim's achievements is difficult or impossible.

Establishing sociology

Durkheim authored some of the most programmatic statements on what sociology is and how it should be practiced. His concern was to establish sociology as a science. Arguing for a place for sociology among other sciences he wrote:
Sociology is, then, not an auxiliary of any other science; it is itself a distinct and autonomous science.
To give sociology a place in the academic world and to ensure that it is a legitimate science, it must have an object that is clear and distinct from philosophy or psychology, and its own methodology. He argued, "There is in every society a certain group of phenomena which may be differentiated from ....those studied by the other natural sciences."

A fundamental aim of sociology is to discover structural "social facts".

Establishment of sociology as an independent, recognized academic discipline is amongst Durkheim's largest and most lasting legacies. Within sociology, his work has significantly influenced structuralism or structural functionalism. Scholars inspired by Durkheim include Marcel Mauss, Maurice Halbwachs, Célestin Bouglé, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Talcott Parsons, Robert K. Merton, Jean Piaget, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Ferdinand de Saussure, Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz, Peter Berger, Robert N. Bellah, social reformer Patrick Hunout and others.

Methodology

Cover of the French edition of The Rules of Sociological Method (1919)
 
In The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Durkheim expressed his will to establish a method that would guarantee sociology's truly scientific character. One of the questions raised by the author concerns the objectivity of the sociologist: how may one study an object that, from the very beginning, conditions and relates to the observer? According to Durkheim, observation must be as impartial and impersonal as possible, even though a "perfectly objective observation" in this sense may never be attained. A social fact must always be studied according to its relation with other social facts, never according to the individual who studies it. Sociology should therefore privilege comparison rather than the study of singular independent facts.

Durkheim sought to create one of the first rigorous scientific approaches to social phenomena. Along with Herbert Spencer, he was one of the first people to explain the existence and quality of different parts of a society by reference to what function they served in maintaining the quotidian (i.e. by how they make society "work"). He also agreed with Spencer's organic analogy, comparing society to a living organism. Thus his work is sometimes seen as a precursor to functionalism. Durkheim also insisted that society was more than the sum of its parts.

Unlike his contemporaries Ferdinand Tönnies and Max Weber, he did not focus on what motivates the actions of individuals (an approach associated with methodological individualism), but rather on the study of social facts.

Social facts

A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations.
— Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method
Durkheim's work revolved around the study of social facts, a term he coined to describe phenomena that have an existence in and of themselves, are not bound to the actions of individuals, but have a coercive influence upon them. Durkheim argued that social facts have, sui generis, an independent existence greater and more objective than the actions of the individuals that compose society. Only such social facts can explain the observed social phenomena. Being exterior to the individual person, social facts may thus also exercise coercive power on the various people composing society, as it can sometimes be observed in the case of formal laws and regulations, but also in situations implying the presence of informal rules, such as religious rituals or family norms. Unlike the facts studied in natural sciences, a "social" fact thus refers to a specific category of phenomena:
The determining cause of a social fact must be sought among the antecedent social facts and not among the states of the individual consciousness.
— Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method
Such social facts are endowed with a power of coercion, by reason of which they may control individual behaviors. According to Durkheim, these phenomena cannot be reduced to biological or psychological grounds. Social facts can be material (physical objects) or immaterial (meanings, sentiments, etc.). The latter cannot be seen or touched, but they are external and coercive, and as such, they become real, gain "facticity". Physical objects can represent both material and immaterial social facts; for example a flag is a physical social fact that often has various immaterial social facts (the meaning and importance of the flag) attached to it.

Many social facts, however, have no material form. Even the most "individualistic" or "subjective" phenomena, such as love, freedom or suicide, would be regarded by Durkheim as objective social facts. Individuals composing society do not directly cause suicide: suicide, as a social fact, exists independently in society, and is caused by other social facts (such as rules governing behavior and group attachment), whether an individual likes it or not. Whether a person "leaves" a society does not alter the fact that this society will still contain suicides. Suicide, like other immaterial social facts, exists independently of the will of an individual, cannot be eliminated, and is as influential – coercive – as physical laws such as gravity. Sociology's task thus consists of discovering the qualities and characteristics of such social facts, which can be discovered through a quantitative or experimental approach (Durkheim extensively relied on statistics).

Society, collective consciousness and culture

Cover of the French edition of The Division of Labour in Society
 
Regarding the society itself, like social institutions in general, Durkheim saw it as a set of social facts. Even more than "what society is", Durkheim was interested in answering "how is a society created" and "what holds a society together". In The Division of Labour in Society, Durkheim attempted to answer the question of what holds the society together. He assumes that humans are inherently egoistic, but norms, beliefs and values (collective consciousness) form the moral basis of the society, resulting in social integration. Collective consciousness is of key importance to the society, its requisite function without which the society cannot survive. Collective consciousness produces the society and holds it together, and at the same time individuals produce collective consciousness through their interactions. Through collective consciousness human beings become aware of one another as social beings, not just animals.
The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or common consciousness.
— Emile Durkheim
In particular, the emotional part of the collective consciousness overrides our egoism: as we are emotionally bound to culture, we act socially because we recognize it is the responsible, moral way to act. A key to forming society is social interaction, and Durkheim believes that human beings, when in a group, will inevitably act in such a way that a society is formed.

The importance of another key social fact: the culture. Groups, when interacting, create their own culture and attach powerful emotions to it. He was one of the first scholars to consider the question of culture so intensely. Durkheim was interested in cultural diversity, and how the existence of diversity nonetheless fails to destroy a society. To that, Durkheim answered that any apparent cultural diversity is overridden by a larger, common, and more generalized cultural system, and the law.

In a socioevolutionary approach, Durkheim described the evolution of societies from mechanical solidarity to organic solidarity (one rising from mutual need). As the societies become more complex, evolving from mechanical to organic solidarity, the division of labour is counteracting and replacing collective consciousness. In the simpler societies, people are connected to others due to personal ties and traditions; in the larger, modern society they are connected due to increased reliance on others with regard to them performing their specialized tasks needed for the modern, highly complex society to survive. In mechanical solidarity, people are self-sufficient, there is little integration and thus there is the need for use of force and repression to keep society together. Also, in such societies, people have much fewer options in life. In organic solidarity, people are much more integrated and interdependent and specialisation and cooperation is extensive. Progress from mechanical to organic solidarity is based first on population growth and increasing population density, second on increasing "morality density" (development of more complex social interactions) and thirdly, on the increasing specialisation in workplace. One of the ways mechanical and organic societies differ is the function of law: in mechanical society the law is focused on its punitive aspect, and aims to reinforce the cohesion of the community, often by making the punishment public and extreme; whereas in the organic society the law focuses on repairing the damage done and is more focused on individuals than the community.

One of the main features of the modern, organic society is the importance, sacredness even, given to the concept – social fact – of the individual. The individual, rather than the collective, becomes the focus of rights and responsibilities, the center of public and private rituals holding the society together – a function once performed by the religion. To stress the importance of this concept, Durkheim talked of the "cult of the individual":
Thus very far from there being the antagonism between the individual and society which is often claimed, moral individualism, the cult of the individual, is in fact the product of society itself. It is society that instituted it and made of man the god whose servant it is.
— Émile Durkheim
Durkheim saw the population density and growth as key factors in the evolution of the societies and advent of modernity. As the number of people in a given area increase, so does the number of interactions, and the society becomes more complex. Growing competition between the more numerous people also leads to further division of labour. In time, the importance of the state, the law and the individual increases, while that of the religion and moral solidarity decreases.

In another example of evolution of culture, Durkheim pointed to fashion, although in this case he noted a more cyclical phenomenon. According to Durkheim, fashion serves to differentiate between lower classes and upper classes, but because lower classes want to look like the upper classes, they will eventually adapt the upper class fashion, depreciating it, and forcing the upper class to adopt a new fashion.

Social pathologies and crime

As the society, Durkheim noted there are several possible pathologies that could lead to a breakdown of social integration and disintegration of the society: the two most important ones are anomie and forced division of labour; lesser ones include the lack of coordination and suicide. By anomie Durkheim means a state when too rapid population growth reduces the amount of interaction between various groups, which in turn leads to a breakdown of understanding (norms, values, and so on).[62] By forced division of labour Durkheim means a situation where power holders, driven by their desire for profit (greed), results in people doing the work they are unsuited for. Such people are unhappy, and their desire to change the system can destabilize the society.

Durkheim's views on crime were a departure from conventional notions. He believed that crime is "bound up with the fundamental conditions of all social life" and serves a social function. He stated that crime implies "not only that the way remains open to necessary changes but that in certain cases it directly prepares these changes". Examining the trial of Socrates, he argues that "his crime, namely, the independence of his thought, rendered a service not only to humanity but to his country" as "it served to prepare a new morality and faith that the Athenians needed". As such, his crime "was a useful prelude to reforms". In this sense, he saw crime as being able to release certain social tensions and so have a cleansing or purging effect in society. He further stated that "the authority which the moral conscience enjoys must not be excessive; otherwise, no-one would dare to criticize it, and it would too easily congeal into an immutable form. To make progress, individual originality must be able to express itself...[even] the originality of the criminal... shall also be possible".

Suicide

In Suicide (1897), Durkheim explores the differing suicide rates among Protestants and Catholics, arguing that stronger social control among Catholics results in lower suicide rates. According to Durkheim, Catholic society has normal levels of integration while Protestant society has low levels. Overall, Durkheim treated suicide as a social fact, explaining variations in its rate on a macro level, considering society-scale phenomena such as lack of connections between people (group attachment) and lack of regulations of behavior, rather than individuals' feelings and motivations.

Durkheim believed there was more to suicide than extremely personal individual life circumstances: for example, a loss of a job, divorce, or bankruptcy. Instead, he took suicide and explained it as a social fact instead of a result of one's circumstances. Durkheim believed that suicide was an instance of social deviance. Social deviance being any transgression of socially established norms. He created a normative theory of suicide focusing on the conditions of group life. The four different types of suicide that he proposed are egoistic, altruistic, anomic, and fatalistic. He began by plotting social regulation on the x-axis of his chart, and social integration on the y-axis. Egoistic suicide corresponds to a low level of social integration. When one is not well integrated into a social group it can lead to a feeling that he or she has not made a difference in anyone's lives. On the other hand, too much social integration would be altruistic suicide. This occurs when a group dominates the life of an individual to a degree where they feel meaningless to society. Anomic suicide occurs when one has an insufficient amount of social regulation. This stems from the sociological term anomie meaning a sense of aimlessness or despair that arises from the inability to reasonably expect life to be predictable. Lastly, there is fatalistic suicide, which results from too much social regulation. An example of this would be when one follows the same routine day after day. This leads to he or she believing there is nothing good to look forward to. Durkheim suggested this was the most popular form of suicide for prisoners. 

This study has been extensively discussed by later scholars and several major criticisms have emerged. First, Durkheim took most of his data from earlier researchers, notably Adolph Wagner and Henry Morselli, who were much more careful in generalizing from their own data. Second, later researchers found that the Protestant–Catholic differences in suicide seemed to be limited to German-speaking Europe and thus may have always been the spurious reflection of other factors. Durkheim's study of suicide has been criticized as an example of the logical error termed the ecological fallacy. However, diverging views have contested whether Durkheim's work really contained an ecological fallacy. More recent authors such as Berk (2006) have also questioned the micro–macro relations underlying Durkheim's work. Some, such as Inkeles (1959), Johnson (1965), and Gibbs (1968), have claimed that Durkheim's only intent was to explain suicide sociologically within a holistic perspective, emphasizing that "he intended his theory to explain variation among social environments in the incidence of suicide, not the suicides of particular individuals".

Despite its limitations, Durkheim's work on suicide has influenced proponents of control theory, and is often mentioned as a classic sociological study. The book pioneered modern social research and served to distinguish social science from psychology and political philosophy.

Religion

In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Durkheim's first purpose was to identify the social origin and function of religion as he felt that religion was a source of camaraderie and solidarity. His second purpose was to identify links between certain religions in different cultures, finding a common denominator. He wanted to understand the empirical, social aspect of religion that is common to all religions and goes beyond the concepts of spirituality and God.

Durkheim defined religion as
A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, i.e., things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite in one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.
— Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Book 1, Ch. 1
In this definition, Durkheim avoids references to supernatural or God. Durkheim argued that the concept of supernatural is relatively new, tied to the development of science and separation of supernatural—that which cannot be rationally explained—from natural, that which can. Thus, according to Durkheim, for early humans, everything was supernatural. Similarly, he points out that religions that give little importance to the concept of god exist, such as Buddhism, where the Four Noble Truths are much more important than any individual deity. With that, Durkheim argues, we are left with the following three concepts: the sacred (the ideas that cannot be properly explained, inspire awe and are considered worthy of spiritual respect or devotion), the beliefs and practices (which create highly emotional state—collective effervescence—and invest symbols with sacred importance), and the moral community (a group of people sharing a common moral philosophy). Out of those three concepts, Durkheim focused on the sacred, noting that it is at the very core of a religion. He defined sacred things as:
...simply collective ideals that have fixed themselves on material objects... they are only collective forces hypostasized, that is to say, moral forces; they are made up of the ideas and sentiments awakened in us by the spectacle of society, and not of sensations coming from the physical world.
— Émile Durkheim
Durkheim saw religion as the most fundamental social institution of humankind, and one that gave rise to other social forms. It was the religion that gave humanity the strongest sense of collective consciousness. Durkheim saw the religion as a force that emerged in the early hunter and gatherer societies, as the emotions collective effervescence run high in the growing groups, forcing them to act in a new ways, and giving them a sense of some hidden force driving them. Over time, as emotions became symbolized and interactions ritualized, religion became more organized, giving a rise to the division between the sacred and the profane. However, Durkheim also believed that religion was becoming less important, as it was being gradually superseded by science and the cult of an individual.
Thus there is something eternal in religion that is destined to outlive the succession of particular symbols in which religious thought has clothed itself.
— Émile Durkheim
However, even if the religion was losing its importance for Durkheim, it still laid the foundation of modern society and the interactions that governed it. And despite the advent of alternative forces, Durkheim argued that no replacement for the force of religion had yet been created. He expressed his doubt about modernity, seeing the modern times as "a period of transition and moral mediocrity".

Durkheim also argued that our primary categories for understanding the world have their origins in religion. It is religion, Durkheim writes, that gave rise to most if not all other social constructs, including the larger society. Durkheim argued that categories are produced by the society, and thus are collective creations. Thus as people create societies, they also create categories, but at the same time, they do so unconsciously, and the categories are prior to any individual's experience. In this way Durkheim attempted to bridge the divide between seeing categories as constructed out of human experience and as logically prior to that experience. Our understanding of the world is shaped by social facts; for example the notion of time is defined by being measured through a calendar, which in turn was created to allow us to keep track of our social gatherings and rituals; those in turn on their most basic level originated from religion. In the end, even the most logical and rational pursuit of science can trace its origins to religion. Durkheim states that, "Religion gave birth to all that is essential in the society.

In his work, Durkheim focused on totemism, the religion of the aboriginal Australians and Native Americans. Durkheim saw totemism as the most ancient religion, and focused on it as he believed its simplicity would ease the discussion of the essential elements of religion.
Now the totem is the flag of the clan. It is therefore natural that the impressions aroused by the clan in individual minds— impressions of dependence and of increased vitality—should fix themselves to the idea of the totem rather than that of the clan : for the clan is too complex a reality to be represented clearly in all its complex unity by such rudimentary intelligences.
— Émile Durkheim, 
Durkheim's work on religion was criticized on both empirical and theoretical grounds by specialists in the field. The most important critique came from Durkheim's contemporary, Arnold van Gennep, an expert on religion and ritual, and also on Australian belief systems. Van Gennep argued that Durkheim's views of primitive peoples and simple societies were "entirely erroneous". Van Gennep further argued that Durkheim demonstrated a lack of critical stance towards his sources, collected by traders and priests, naively accepting their veracity, and that Durkheim interpreted freely from dubious data. At the conceptual level, van Gennep pointed out Durkheim's tendency to press ethnography into a prefabricated theoretical scheme.

Despite such critiques, Durkheim's work on religion has been widely praised for its theoretical insight and whose arguments and propositions, according to Robert Alun Jones, "have stimulated the interest and excitement of several generations of sociologists irrespective of theoretical 'school' or field of specialization".

Sociology and philosophy

Sociology of knowledge

While Durkheim's work deals with a number of subjects, including suicide, the family, social structures, and social institutions, a large part of his work deals with the sociology of knowledge.

While publishing short articles on the subject earlier in his career (for example the essay De quelques formes primitives de classification written in 1902 with Marcel Mauss), Durkheim's definitive statement concerning the sociology of knowledge comes in his 1912 magnum opus The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. This book has as its goal not only the elucidation of the social origins and function of religion, but also the social origins and impact of society on language and logical thought. Durkheim worked largely out of a Kantian framework and sought to understand how the concepts and categories of logical thought could arise out of social life. He argued, for example, that the categories of space and time were not a priori. Rather, the category of space depends on a society's social grouping and geographical use of space, and a group's social rhythm that determines our understanding of time. In this Durkheim sought to combine elements of rationalism and empiricism, arguing that certain aspects of logical thought common to all humans did exist, but that they were products of collective life (thus contradicting the tabla rasa empiricist understanding whereby categories are acquired by individual experience alone), and that they were not universal a priori's (as Kant argued) since the content of the categories differed from society to society.

Another key elements to Durkheim's theory of knowledge is his concept of représentations collectives (collective representations), which is outlined in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Représentations collectives are the symbols and images that come to represent the ideas, beliefs, and values elaborated by a collectivity and are not reducible to individual constituents. They can include words, slogans, ideas, or any number of material items that can serve as a symbol, such as a cross, a rock, a temple, a feather etc. As Durkheim elaborates, représentations collectives are created through intense social interaction and are products of collective activity. As such these representations have the particular, and somewhat contradictory, aspect that they exist externally to the individual (since they are created and controlled not by the individual but by society as a whole), and yet simultaneously within each individual of the society (by virtue of that individual's participation within society).

Arguably the most important "représentation collective" is language, which according to Durkheim is a product of collective action. And because language is a collective action, language contains within it a history of accumulated knowledge and experience that no individual would be capable of creating on their own. As Durkheim says, 'représentations collectives', and language in particular:
... add to that which we can learn by our own personal experience all that wisdom and science which the group has accumulated in the course of centuries. Thinking by concepts, is not merely seeing reality on its most general side, but it is projecting a light upon the sensation which illuminates it, penetrates it and transforms it.
As such, language, as a social product, literally structures and shapes our experience of reality. This discursive approach to language and society would be developed by later French philosophers, such as Michel Foucault.

Morality

Durkheim defines morality as "a system of rules for conduct". His analysis of morality is strongly marked by Immanuel Kant and his notion of duty. While Durkheim was influenced by Kant, he was highly critical of aspects of the latter's moral theory and developed his own positions.

Durkheim agrees with Kant that within morality, there is an element of obligation, "a moral authority which, by manifesting itself in certain precepts particularly important to it, confers upon [moral rules] an obligatory character". Morality tells us how to act from a position of superiority. There exists a certain, pre-established moral norm to which we must conform. It is through this view that Durkheim makes a first critique of Kant in saying that moral duties originate in society, and are not to be found in some universal moral concept such as the categorical imperative. Durkheim also argues that morality is characterized not just by this obligation, but is also something that is desired by the individual. The individual believes that by adhering to morality, they are serving the common Good, and for this reason, the individual submits voluntarily to the moral commandment.

However, in order to accomplish its aims, morality must be legitimate in the eyes of those to whom it speaks. As Durkheim argues, this moral authority is primarily to be located in religion, which is why in any religion one finds a code of morality. For Durkheim, it is only society that has the resources, the respect, and the power to cultivate within an individual both the obligatory and the desirous aspects of morality.

Deviance

How many times, indeed, it [crime] is only an anticipation of future morality - a step toward what will be! — Émile Durkheim, 'Division of Labour in Society'
Durkheim thought that deviance was an essential component of a functional society. He believed that deviance had three possible effects on society. First, Durkheim thought that deviance could challenge the perspective and thoughts of the general population, leading to social change by pointing out a flaw in society. Secondly, deviant acts could also support existing social norms and beliefs by evoking the population to discipline the actors. Finally, Durkheim believed that reactions to deviant activity could increase camaraderie and social support among the population affected by the activity. Durkheim's thoughts on deviance contributed to Robert Merton's Strain Theory 

Influences and legacy

Durkheim had an important impact on the development of Anthropology and Sociology, influencing thinkers from his school of sociology, such as Marcel Mauss, but also later thinkers, such as Maurice Halbwachs, Talcott Parsons, Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. More recently, Durkheim has influenced sociologists such as Steven Lukes, Robert N. Bellah, and Pierre Bourdieu. His description of collective consciousness also deeply influenced the Turkish nationalism of Ziya Gökalp, the founding father of Turkish sociology.[96] Randall Collins has developed a theory of what he calls interaction ritual chains, which is a synthesis of Durkheim's work on religion with Erving Goffman's micro-sociology. Goffman himself was also deeply influenced by Durkheim in his development of the interaction order

Outside of sociology, he influenced philosophers Henri Bergson and Emmanuel Levinas, and his ideas can be found latently in the work of certain structuralist thinkers of the 60s, such as Alain Badiou, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault.

Durkheim contra Searle

Much of Durkheim's work, however, remains unacknowledged in philosophy, despite its direct relevance. As proof one can look to John Searle, who wrote a book The Construction of Social Reality, in which he elaborates a theory of social facts and collective representations that he believed to be a landmark work that would bridge the gap between analytic and continental philosophy. Neil Gross however, demonstrates how Searle's views on society are more or less a reconstitution of Durkheim's theories of social facts, social institutions, collective representations and the like. Searle's ideas are thus open to the same criticisms as Durkheim's. Searle responded by saying that Durkheim's work was worse than he had originally believed, and, admitting that he had not read much of Durkheim's work, said that, "Because Durkheim’s account seemed so impoverished I did not read any further in his work." Stephen Lukes, however, responded to Searle's response to Gross and refutes point by point the allegations that Searle makes against Durkheim, essentially upholding the argument of Gross, that Searle's work bears great resemblance to that of Durkheim's. Lukes attributes Searle's miscomprehension of Durkheim's work to the fact that Searle, quite simply, never read Durkheim.

Gilbert pro Durkheim

A contemporary philosopher of social phenomena who has offered a sympathetic close reading of Durkheim's discussion of social facts in chapter 1 and the prefaces of The Rules of Sociological Method is Margaret Gilbert. In chapter 4, section 2, of her 1989 book On Social Facts (whose title may represent an homage to Durkheim, alluding to his "faits sociaux") Gilbert argues that some of his statements that may seem to be philosophically untenable are important and fruitful.

Selected works

Published posthumously:
  • Education and Sociology (1922)
  • Sociology and Philosophy (1924)
  • Moral Education (1925)
  • Socialism (1928)
  • Pragmatism and Sociology (1955)

Origins of society

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The origins of society — the evolutionary emergence of distinctively human social organization — is an important topic within evolutionary biology, anthropology, prehistory and palaeolithic archaeology. While little is known for certain, debates since Hobbes and Rousseau have returned again and again to the philosophical, moral and evolutionary questions posed.

Social origins in nature

Origin of social groups

Thomas Hobbes

Frontispiece of "Leviathan," by Abraham Bosse, with input from Hobbes
 
Arguably the most influential theory of human social origins is that of Thomas Hobbes, who in his Leviathan argued that without strong government, society would collapse into Bellum omnium contra omnes — "the war of all against all":
In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
— "Chapter XIII: Of the Natural Condition of Mankind As Concerning Their Felicity, and Misery.", Leviathan
Hobbes' innovation was to attribute the establishment of society to a founding 'social contract', in which the Crown's subjects surrender some part of their freedom in return for security. 

If Hobbes' idea is accepted, it follows that society could not have emerged prior to the state. This school of thought has remained influential to this day. Prominent in this respect is British archaeologist Colin Renfrew (Baron Renfrew of Kaimsthorn), who points out that the state did not emerge until long after the evolution of Homo sapiens. The earliest representatives of our species, according to Renfrew, may well have been anatomically modern, but they were not yet cognitively or behaviourally modern. For example, they lacked political leadership, large-scale cooperation, food production, organised religion, law or symbolic artefacts. Humans were simply hunter-gatherers, who — much like extant apes — ate whatever food they could find in the vicinity. Renfrew controversially suggests that hunter-gatherers to this day think and socialise along lines not radically different from those of their nonhuman primate counterparts. In particular, he says that they do not "ascribe symbolic meaning to material objects" and for that reason "lack fully developed 'mind.'"

However, hunter-gatherer ethnographers emphasise that extant foraging peoples certainly do have social institutions — notably institutionalised rights and duties codified in formal systems of kinship. Elaborate rituals such as initiation ceremonies serve to cement contracts and commitments, quite independently of the state. Other scholars would add that insofar as we can speak of "human revolutions" — "major transitions" in human evolution — the first was not the Neolithic Revolution but the rise of symbolic culture that occurred toward the end of the Middle Stone Age.

Arguing the exact opposite of Hobbes's position, anarchist anthropologist Pierre Clastres views the state and society as mutually incompatible: genuine society is always struggling to survive against the state.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau in 1753
 
Like Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that society was born in a social contract. In Rousseau's case, however, sovereignty is vested in the entire populace, who enter into the contract directly with one another. "The problem", he explained, "is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before." This is the fundamental problem of which the Social Contract provides the solution. The contract's clauses, Rousseau continued, may be reduced to one — "the total alienation of each associate, together with all his rights, to the whole community. Each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody; and as there is no associate over whom he does not acquire the same right as he yields others over himself, he gains an equivalent for everything he loses, and an increase of force for the preservation of what he has". In other words: "Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole." At once, in place of the individual personality of each contracting party, this act of association creates a moral and collective body, composed of as many members as the assembly contains votes, and receiving from this act its unity, its common identity, its life and its will. By this means, each member of the community acquires not only the capacities of the whole but also, for the first time, rational mentality:
The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his actions the morality they had formerly lacked. Then only, when the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulses and right of appetite, does man, who so far had considered only himself, find that he is forced to act on different principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses. Trans. G. D. H. Cole. New edition. London & Melbourne: Dent. Book I Ch. 8.

Sir Henry Sumner Maine

In his influential book, Ancient Law (1861), Maine argued that in early times, the basic unit of human social organisation was the patriarchal family: 

Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
The effect of the evidence derived from comparative jurisprudence is to establish the view of the primeval condition of the human race which is known as the Patriarchal Theory.
— Maine, H. S. 1861. Ancient Law. London: John Murray. p. 122.
Hostile to French revolutionary and other radical social ideas, Maine's motives were partly political. He sought to undermine the legacy of Rousseau and other advocates of man’s natural rights by asserting that originally, no one had any rights at all – ‘every man, living during the greater part of his life under the patriarchal despotism, was practically controlled in all his actions by a regimen not of law but of caprice’. Not only were the patriarch’s children subject to what Maine calls his ‘despotism’: his wife and his slaves were equally affected. The very notion of kinship, according to Maine, was simply a way of categorizing those who were forcibly subjected to the despot’s arbitrary rule. Maine later added a Darwinian strand to this argument. In his The Descent of Man, Darwin had cited reports that a wild-living male gorilla would monopolise for itself as large a harem of females as it could violently defend. Maine endorsed Darwin’s speculation that ‘primeval man’ probably 'lived in small communities, each with as many wives as he could support and obtain, whom he would have jealously guarded against all other men’. Under pressure to spell out exactly what he meant by the term 'patriarchy', Maine clarified that ‘sexual jealousy, indulged through power, might serve as a definition of the Patriarchal Family’.

Lewis Henry Morgan

Lewis H. Morgan
 
In his influential book, Ancient Society (1877), its title echoing Maine's Ancient Law, Lewis Henry Morgan proposed a very different theory. Morgan insisted that throughout the earlier periods of human history, neither the state nor the family existed.
It may be here premised that all forms of government are reducible to two general plans, using the word plan in its scientific sense. In their bases the two are fundamentally distinct. The first, in the order of time, is founded upon persons, and upon relations purely personal, and may be distinguished as a society (societas). The gens is the unit of this organization; giving as the successive stages of integration, in the archaic period, the gens, the phratry, the tribe, and the confederacy of tribes, which constituted a people or nation (populus). At a later period a coalescence of tribes in the same area into a nation took the place of a confederacy of tribes occupying independent areas. Such, through prolonged ages, after the gens appeared, was the substantially universal organization of ancient society; and it remained among the Greeks and Romans after civilization supervened. The second is founded upon territory and upon property, and may be distinguished as a state (civitas).
— Morgan, L. H. 1877. Ancient Society. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, p. 6.
In place of both family and state, according to Morgan, was the gens — nowadays termed the 'clan' — based initially on matrilocal residence and matrilineal descent. This aspect of Morgan's theory, later endorsed by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, is nowadays widely considered discredited (but for a critical survey of the current consensus, see Knight 2008, 'Early Human Kinship Was Matrilineal').

Frederick Engels

Frederick Engels
 
Frederick Engels built on Morgan's ideas in his 1884 essay, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in the light of the researches of Lewis Henry Morgan. His primary interest was the position of women in early society, and — in particular — Morgan's insistence that the matrilineal clan preceded the family as society's fundamental unit. 'The mother-right gens', wrote Engels in his survey of contemporary historical materialist scholarship, 'has become the pivot around which the entire science turns...' Engels argued that the matrilineal clan represented a principle of self-organization so vibrant and effective that it allowed no room for patriarchal dominance or the territorial state.
The first class antagonism which appears in human history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamian marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male.
— Engels, F. 1940 [1884] The origin of the family, private property and the state. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Emile Durkheim

Émile Durkheim
 
Emile Durkheim considered that in order to exist, any human social system must counteract the natural tendency for the sexes to promiscuously conjoin. He argued that social order presupposes sexual morality, which is expressed in prohibitions against sex with certain people or during certain periods — in traditional societies particularly during menstruation.
One first fact is certain: that is, that the entire system of prohibitions must strictly conform to the ideas that primitive man had about menstruation and about menstrual blood. For all these taboos start only with the onset of puberty: and it is only when the first signs of blood appear that they reach their maximum rigour.
— Durkheim, E. 1963 [1898]. La prohibition de l'inceste et ses origines. L'Année Sociologique 1: 1–70. Reprinted as Incest. The nature and origin of the taboo, trans. E. Sagarin. New York: Stuart, p. 81.
The incest taboo, wrote Durkheim in 1898, is no more than a particular example of something more basic and universal - the ritualistic setting apart of 'the sacred' from 'the profane'. This begins as the segregation of the sexes, each of which - at least on important occasions - is 'sacred' or 'set apart' from the other. 'The two sexes', as Durkheim explains, 'must avoid each other with the same care as the profane flees from the sacred and the sacred from the profane.' Women as sisters act out the role of 'sacred' beings invested 'with an isolating power of some sort, a power which holds the masculine population at a distance.' Their menstrual blood in particular sets them in a category apart, exercising a 'type of repulsing action which keeps the other sex far from them'. In this way, the earliest ritual structure emerges — establishing morally regulated 'society' for the first time.

Sigmund Freud

Charles Darwin pictured early human society as resembling that of apes, with one or more dominant males jealously guarding a harem of females. In his myth of the 'Primal Horde', Sigmund Freud later took all this as his starting point but then postulated an insurrection mounted by the tyrant's own sons:
All that we find there is a violent and jealous father who keeps all the females for himself and drives away his sons as they grow up…. One day the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde.
— Freud, S. 1965 [1913]. Totem and Taboo. London: Routledge, p. 141.
Following this, the band of brothers were about to take sexual possession of their mothers and sisters when suddenly they were overcome with remorse. In their contradictory emotional state, their dead father now became stronger than the living one had been. In memory of him, the brothers revoked their deed by forbidding the killing and eating of the 'totem' (as their father had now become) and renouncing their claim to the women who had just been set free. In this way, the two fundamental taboos of primitive society – not to eat the totem and not to marry one's sisters – were established for the first time.

Marshall Sahlins

A related but less dramatic version of Freud's 'sexual revolution' idea was proposed in 1960 by American social anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. Somehow, he writes, the world of primate brute competition and sexual dominance was turned upside-down:
The decisive battle between early culture and human nature must have been waged on the field of primate sexuality…. Among subhuman primates sex had organized society; the customs of hunters and gatherers testify eloquently that now society was to organize sex…. In selective adaptation to the perils of the Stone Age, human society overcame or subordinated such primate propensities as selfishness, indiscriminate sexuality, dominance and brute competition. It substituted kinship and co-operation for conflict, placed solidarity over sex, morality over might. In its earliest days it accomplished the greatest reform in history, the overthrow of human primate nature, and thereby secured the evolutionary future of the species.
— Sahlins, M. D. 1960 The origin of society. Scientific American 203(3): 76–87.

Christopher Boehm

Once a prehistoric hunting band institutionalized a successful and decisive rebellion, and did away with the alpha-male role permanently... it is easy to see how this institution would have spread.
— Boehm, C. 2000. Journal of Consciousness Studies 7, 1–2 pp. 79–101; p. 97.
If we accept Rousseau's line of reasoning, no single dominant individual is needed to embody society, to guarantee security or to enforce social contracts. The people themselves can do these things, combining to enforce the general will. A modern origins theory along these lines is that of evolutionary anthropologist Christopher Boehm. Boehm argues that ape social organisation tends to be despotic, typically with one or more dominant males monopolising access to the locally available females. But wherever there is dominance, we can also expect resistance. In the human case, resistance to being personally dominated intensified as humans used their social intelligence to form coalitions. Eventually, a point was reached when the costs of attempting to impose dominance became so high that the strategy was no longer evolutionarily stable, whereupon social life tipped over into 'reverse dominance' — defined as a situation in which only the entire community, on guard against primate-style individual dominance, is permitted to use force to suppress deviant behaviour.

Ernest Gellner

Human beings, writes social anthropologist Ernest Gellner, are not genetically programmed to be members of this or that social order. You can take a human infant and place it into any kind of social order and it will function acceptably. What makes human society so distinctive is the fabulous range of quite different forms it takes across the world. Yet in any given society, the range of permitted behaviours is quite narrowly constrained. This is not owing to the existence of any externally imposed system of rewards and punishments. The constraints come from within — from certain compulsive moral concepts which members of the social order have internalised. The society installs these concepts in each individual's psyche in the manner first identified by Emile Durkheim, namely, by means of collective rituals such as initiation rites. Therefore, the problem of the origins of society boils down to the problem of the origins of collective ritual.
How is a society established, and a series of societies diversified, whilst each of them is restrained from chaotically exploiting that wide diversity of possible human behaviour? A theory is available concerning how this may be done and it is one of the basic theories of social anthropology. The way in which you restrain people from doing a wide variety of things, not compatible with the social order of which they are members, is that you subject them to ritual. The process is simple: you make them dance around a totem pole until they are wild with excitement, and become jellies in the hysteria of collective frenzy; you enhance their emotional state by any device, by all the locally available audio-visual aids, drugs, music and so on; and once they are really high, you stamp upon their minds the type of concept or notion to which they subsequently become enslaved.
— Gellner, E. 1988. Origins of Society. In A. C. Fabian (ed.), Origins. The Darwin College Lectures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.128–140; p. 130.

Gender and origins

Feminist scholars — among them palaeoanthropologists Leslie Aiello and Camilla Power — take similar arguments a step further, arguing that any reform or revolution which overthrew male dominance must surely have been led by women. Evolving human females, Power and Aiello suggest, actively separated themselves from males on a periodic basis, using their own blood (and/or pigments such as red ochre) to mark themselves as fertile and defiant:
The sexual division of labor entails differentiation of roles in food procurement, with logistic hunting of large game by males, co-operation and exchange of products. Our hypothesis is that symbolism arose in this context. To minimize energetic costs of travel, coalitions of women began to invest in home bases. To secure this strategy, women would have to use their attractive, collective signal of impending fertility in a wholly new way: by signalling refusal of sexual access except to males who returned "home" with provisions. Menstruation — real or artificial — while biologically the wrong time for fertile sex, is psychologically the right moment for focusing men's minds on imminent hunting, since it offers the prospect of fertile sex in the near future.
— Power, C. and L. C. Aiello 1997. Female proto-symbolic strategies. In L. D. Hager (ed.), Women in Human Evolution. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 153–171; p. 159.
In similar vein, anthropologist Chris Knight argues that Boehm's idea of a 'coalition of everyone' is hard to envisage, unless — along the lines of a modern industrial picket line — it was formed to co-ordinate 'sex-strike' action against badly behaving males:
....male dominance had to be overthrown because the unending prioritising of male short-term sexual interests could lead only to the permanence and institutionalisation of behavioural conflict between the sexes, between the generations and also between rival males. If the symbolic, cultural domain was to emerge, what was needed was a political collectivity — an alliance — capable of transcending such conflicts. ... Only the consistent defence and self-defence of mothers with their offspring could produce a collectivity embodying interests of a sufficiently broad, universalistic kind.
— Knight, C. 1991. Blood Relations. Menstruation and the origins of culture. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, p. 514
In virtually all hunter-gatherer ethnographies, according to Knight, a persistent theme is that 'women like meat', and that they determinedly use their collective bargaining power to motivate men to hunt for them and bring home their kills — on pain of exclusion from sex. Arguments about women's crucial role in domesticating males — motivating them to cooperate — have also been advanced by anthropologists Kristen Hawkes, Sarah Hrdy, and Bruce Knauft among others. Meanwhile, other evolutionary scientists continue to envisage uninterrupted male dominance, continuity with primate social systems and the emergence of society on a gradualist basis without revolutionary leaps.

Sociobiological theories

Robert Trivers

I consider Trivers one of the great thinkers in the history of Western thought. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that he has provided a scientific explanation for the human condition: the intricately complicated and endlessly fascinating relationships that bind us to one another.
In his 1985 book, Social Evolution, Robert Trivers outlines the theoretical framework used today by most evolutionary biologists to understand how and why societies are established. Trivers sets out from the fundamental fact that genes survive beyond the death of the bodies they inhabit, because copies of the same gene may be replicated in multiple different bodies. From this, it follows that a creature should behave altruistically to the extent that those benefiting carry the same genes — 'inclusive fitness', as this source of cooperation in nature is termed. Where animals are unrelated, cooperation should be limited to 'reciprocal altruism' or 'tit-for-tat'. Where previously, biologists took parent-offspring cooperation for granted, Trivers predicted on theoretical grounds both cooperation and conflict — as when a mother needs to wean an existing baby (even against its will) in order to make way for another. Previously, biologists had interpreted male infanticidal behaviour as aberrant and inexplicable or, alternatively, as a necessary strategy for culling excess population. Trivers was able to show that such behaviour was a logical strategy by males to enhance their own reproductive success at the expense of conspecifics including rival males. Ape or monkey females whose babies are threatened have directly opposed interests, often forming coalitions to defend themselves and their offspring against infanticidal males.

Human society, according to Trivers, is unusual in that it involves the male of the species investing parental care in his own offspring — a rare pattern for a primate. Where such cooperation occurs, it's not enough to take it for granted: in Trivers' view we need to explain it using an overarching theoretical framework applicable to humans and nonhumans alike.
Everybody has a social life. All living creatures reproduce and reproduction is a social event, since at its bare minimum it involves the genetic and material construction of one individual by another. In turn, differences between individuals in the number of their surviving offspring (natural selection) is the driving force behind organic evolution. Life is intrinsically social and it evolves through a process of natural selection which is itself social. For these reasons social evolution refers not only to the evolution of social relationships between individuals but also to deeper themes of biological organization stretching from gene to community.
— Robert Trivers, 1985. Social Evolution. Menlo Park, California: Benjamin/Cummings, p. vii.

Robin Dunbar

Robin Dunbar
 
Robin Dunbar originally studied gelada baboons in the wild in Ethiopia, and has done much to synthesise modern primatological knowledge with Darwinian theory into a comprehensive overall picture. The components of primate social systems 'are essentially alliances of a political nature aimed at enabling the animals concerned to achieve more effective solutions to particular problems of survival and reproduction'. Primate societies are in essence 'multi-layered sets of coalitions'. Although physical fights are ultimately decisive, the social mobilisation of allies usually decides matters and requires skills that go beyond mere fighting ability. The manipulation and use of coalitions demands sophisticated social — more precisely political — intelligence. Usually but not always, males exercise dominance over females. Even where male despotism prevails, females typically gang up with one another to pursue agendas of their own. When a male gelada baboon attacks a previously dominant rival so as to take over his harem, the females concerned may insist on their own say in the outcome. At various stages during the fighting, the females may 'vote' among themselves on whether to accept the provisional outcome. Rejection is signalled by refusing to groom the challenger; acceptance is signalled by going up to him and grooming him. According to Dunbar, the ultimate outcome of an inter-male 'sexual fight' always depends on the female 'vote'.

Dunbar points out that in a primate social system, lower-ranking females will typically suffer the most intense harassment. Consequently, they will be the first to form coalitions in self-defence. But maintaining commitment from coalition allies involves much time-consuming manual grooming, putting pressure on time-budgets. In the case of evolving humans, who were living in increasingly large groups, the costs would soon have outweighed the benefits — unless some more efficient way of maintaining relationships could be found. Dunbar argues that 'vocal grooming' — using the voice to signal commitment — was the time-saving solution adopted, and that this led eventually to speech. Dunbar goes on to suggest (citing evolutionary anthropologist Chris Knight) that distinctively human society may have been evolved under pressure from female ritual and 'gossiping' coalitions established to dissuade males from fighting one another and instead cooperate in hunting for the benefit of the whole camp:
If females formed the core of these early groups, and language evolved to bond these groups, it naturally follows that the early human females were the first to speak. This reinforces the suggestion that language was first used to create a sense of emotional solidarity between allies. Chris Knight has argued a passionate case for the idea that language first evolved to allow the females in these early groups to band together to force males to invest in them and their offspring, principally by hunting for meat. This would be consistent with the fact that, among modern humans, women are generally better at verbal skills than men, as well as being more skilful in the social domain.
— Dunbar, R. I. M. 1996. Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language. London: Faber and Faber, p. 149.
Dunbar stresses that this is currently a minority theory among specialists in human origins — most still support the 'bison-down-at-the-lake' theory attributing early language and cooperation to the imperatives of men's activities such as hunting. Despite this, he argues that 'female bonding may have been a more powerful force in human evolution than is sometimes supposed'. Although still controversial, the idea that female coalitions may have played a decisive role has subsequently received strong support from a number of anthropologists including Sarah Hrdy, Camilla Power, Ian Watts. and Jerome Lewis. It is also consistent with recent studies by population geneticists (see Verdu et al. 2013  for Central African Pygmies; Schlebusch 2010 for Khoisan) showing a deep-time tendency to matrilocality among African hunter-gatherers.

Surgery

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