Encyclopedia of social and cultural anthropology 768

Further reading

Guyer, J. (1993) ‘Wealth in People and Self-realization in Equatorial Africa’, Man (n.s.) 28
(2):243–66
Kopytoff, I. (1982) ‘Slavery’, Annual Review of Anthropology 11:207–30
Meillassoux, C. (ed.) (1975) L’Esclavage en Afrique Précoloniale, Paris: Maspero
——([1986] 1991) The Anthropology of Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold, trans. by A.Dasnois,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Miers, S. and Kopytoff, I. (eds) (1977) Slavery in Africa Madison: University of Wisconsin Press
Watson, J. (1980) ‘Slavery as an Institution: Open and Closed Systems’, in J.Watson (ed.) Asian
and African Systems of Slavery, Oxford: Blackwell
Wolf, E.R. (1982) Europe and the People without History, Berkeley: University of California Press

social structure and social organization

The terms ‘social structure’ and ‘social organization’ have long had slightly different
implications, although the distinction between them has not always been as clear-cut as
some commentators would have preferred. ‘Social organization’ has tended to be used
loosely to refer to the sum total of activities performed in a given social context. ‘Social
structure’ has usually been employed for the social context itself, or more precisely for
the set of social relations which link individuals in a society. Yet the definition of ‘social
structure’ varies according to the theoretical perspective of the writer and the degree of
precision required by his or her perspective.
Writers who are mainly concerned with social action tend to concentrate on social
organization, which defines the †roles individuals play in relation to one another. Those
who are concerned more with the formal relations between people tend to concentrate on
social structure, which defines the †statuses of actors performing such roles. Thus, social
organization is of greater interest to Malinowskian functionalists, and to some extent
processualists, notably †Raymond Firth (1951). Social structure is of greater interest to
those whose approaches are descended from classic †structural-functionalist and
*structuralist traditions.
The clearest distinction between the concepts occurs in the introduction to *Radcliffe-
Brown’s Structure and Function in Primitive Society (1952:9–11) and in his essay ‘On
Social Structure’ (1952 [1940]:188–204). In the latter, he further distinguished social
structure from structural form—a distinction which caused some problems for his
readers, not least *Lévi-Strauss. A celebrated debate (or rather, misunderstanding)
between them occurred in 1953, when Lévi-Strauss published his own essay on the
subject.
For Radcliffe-Brown, ‘social structure’ includes the relations between individual
people—he uses the example of a hypothetical Tom, Dick and Harry. Structural form, in
contrast, is at a higher level of abstraction—the positions Tom, Dick or Harry occupy in
relation to one another. Tom may be Dick’s father-in-law, and thus the structural form
defines relations between father-in-law and sons-in-law in general, for a particular
society. Essentially, Radcliffe-Brown saw social structure as a network of real people in a
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real society. Structural form entailed the cultural constants which enabled one to say that
the grandchildren of these people would live in a society with a similar social structure,
albeit one in which social processes had left changes to be understood and analysed in
terms of an evolving structural form. In his 1953 letter to Lévi-Strauss, illustrating the
difference between social structure and structural form, he used the analogy of sea shells:
each individual shell has its own structure, but shells of the same species will share a
structural form. Radcliffe-Brown was consciously constructing an anthropology
analogous to biology, with its like concerns of structure and function. Functional (as
opposed to structural) relations were more part of the social organization through which
social structure was played out.
Lévi-Strauss, and many other anthropologists, have consistently employed the term
‘social structure’ for what Radcliffe-Brown called ‘structural form’. Lévi-Strauss even
uses ‘social structure’ to refer to a still higher degree of abstraction—the structure of
social relations in all societies, as well as that within a particular society
(RadcliffeBrown’s ‘structural form’). In fact, Lévi-Strauss was simply doing the kind of
universal crosscultural comparison Radcliffe-Brown had long advocated but never
practised, and indeed Radcliffe-Brown himself frequently slipped and used the term
‘social structure’ to refer to what he said should be called ‘structural form’. Where they
truly differed was in their respective understandings of the locus of structure (or
structural form). Lévi-Strauss’s conception of it is at the level of the mind, even the
human mind in general. His concern is often with the structure of all possible structures,
e.g. in the study of *kinship. RadcliffeBrown, on the other hand, always regarded
structures and forms as accessible only empirically, from Tom, Dick and Harry upwards
to generalizations based on the comparison of their statuses to those of other individuals,
in the same society, or ultimately in diverse societies.
In *sociology, the term ‘social structure’ has been around at least since †Herbert
Spencer, and ‘social organization’ at least since †Comte. In that discipline, social
structure and social organization have sometimes been defined even more formally than
is generally the case in anthropology. †Parsons’ view of the relation between social
organization and social structure (e.g. 1951) was essentially the same as that of Radcliffe-
Brown, but in addition he posited the idea of the social system, which comprises both.
Parsons distinguished four levels of this system: social values, institutional patterns,
specialized collectivities (groups), and roles performed by individuals in these
collectivities or groups.
To complicate things further, †Murdock’s (1949) famous book by the title seems to
suggest a very wide meaning of ‘social structure’, one which bears little relation to the
more precise formulations of other theorists, though it probably comes closer to the usual
meaning of ‘social organization’. Many anthropologists since have happily employed
‘social structure’ and ‘social organization’ synonymously, to refer to either of the
concepts Radcliffe-Brown distinguished, or to both, as in Parsons’ formulation.
In the Marxist era of the 1970s and 1980s, these concepts gave way to that of †social
formation—itself a dynamic notion which hints at the action-centred idea of social
organization as well as the concern with status and hierarchy which comprises classic
notions of social structure. Of course, postmodernist thinkers have little use for any of
these concepts, and the nuances of their meanings are no longer debated. Yet in that they
define useful, even central, aspects of society, social organization and social structure
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remain part of the common vocabulary of the disciplines of both sociology and social
anthropology—albeit with meanings which Radcliffe-Brown would have regarded as
hopelessly imprecise.
ALAN BARNARD
See also: society, Radcliffe-Brown

Further reading

Firth, R. (1951) Elements of Social Organization, London: Watts

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1953) ‘Social structure’, in A.L. Kroeber (ed.) Anthropology Today: An
Encyclopedic Inventory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Murdock, G.P. (1949) Social Structure, New York: The Free Press
Parsons, T. (1951) The Social System, New York: The Free Press
Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. (1952) Structure and Function in Primitive Society, London: Cohen & West
——([1953] 1977) ‘Letter to Lévi-Strauss’, in A.Kuper (ed.) The Social Anthropology of Radcliffe-
Brown, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul

socialization

Socialization describes the process through which people and especially children are
made to take on the ideas and behaviour appropriate to life in a particular society. As
such it describes an essentially passive process and takes for granted a theory of the
*person as ‘an individual in society’. Here *‘society’ and ‘the *individual’ are conceived
of as phenomena of different orders; society as a phenomenon of collective life is
understood to precede and to encompass the individual.
Anthropologists’ traditional concern was to analyse and compare the ideas and
practices that informed daily life among the different peoples of the world. For the
purposes of analysis, they identified relatively discrete domains of collective phenomena
such as *kinship, *political economy and *religion. And because ‘the individual’ was
understood to be a product of ‘society’, socialization could properly be studied only when
these collective phenomena were understood. This perspective meant that studies of
socialization were accorded a marginal position with respect to mainstream anthropology.

Learning culture

As a theory of ‘the learning of culture’, socialization has to be differentiated from the

theory of cultural conditioning that was assumed by *‘culture and personality’ studies in
early cultural anthropology. These studies were informed by *psychoanalytic theory on