Changing Emphases in Social Structure

Abstract

W HEN SCIENTISTS approach a new subject, their first task, after that of raw description and preliminary ordering, is to discover which descriptive features of the phenomena under observation are particularly useful for grouping or differentiation, and to initiate classification on the basis of such criteria. Their next task is to determine which features isolated according to one set of criteria coexist with features isolated according to other useful criteria. In this way they arrive at larger typological classifications which bring a measure of systematic order into what had first seemed sheer descriptive chaos. Noteworthy examples in other sciences include the Linnaean classification of living organisms and the periodic system of classifying chemical elements devised by Mendelyeev. In anthropology, the initial classificatory task has by now been substantially accomplished in the field of social structure. Through the contributions of men like Morgan, Tylor, Rivers, Kroeber, Lowie, Linton, Spier, Kirchhoff, Radcliffe-Brown, Steward, and Eggan we now possess satisfactory criteria for differentiating types of family organization, kin and local groups, and kinship terminology and behavior patterns. Moreover, the work of Rivers, Lowie, Radcliffe-Brown, and many others, including the present writer, has shown how these features are combined with one another in particular ways to produce a finite number of types of social organization, which in their totality represent a systematic classification comparable to those of Linnaeus and Mindelyeev. However useful, and indeed indispensable, is this task of classification, it is by no means the ultimate goal of science. Any typological system is, by its very nature, static in character. It takes on full meaning only when scientists are able to demonstrate the dynamic processes which give rise to the phenomena thus classified. The Linnaean system, for example, came alive only after Darwin had discerned the processes of variation and natural selection, and especially after the geneticists had laid bare the dynamic mechanisms of heredity. It is the contention of this paper that the anthropological study of social structure has gradually been emerging from its classificatory or typological phase, and that the changing emphases which we can currently observe are characterized for the most part by a common concern with dynamics or process. Before examples are