Fixed Membership Groups: The Locus of Culture Processes

Abstract

ANTHROPOLOGISTS, in dealing with culture changes, have usually limited themselves to contrasting newer and older patterns of behavior. Only recently have there been attempts to deal with the process of culture change (Bennett and Despres 1960; d'Azevedo 1959; Geertz 1957; Maher 1960; Vogt 1960). The present paper explores that process by locating the kinds of social groupings that may facilitate culture changes but does not try to suggest what culture changes might occur or even to assert that any will occur. The present thesis employs the Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft distinction originally set by Tonnies and used for various purposes by Weber and others. It will serve here to contrast social groups that tend to permit cultural changes among their members with those that do not. The cohesion of a Gemeinschaft, or communal group, is based largely on emotional ties. Its members regard their relations to one another as lasting indefinitely or at least for a very long time. Kinship groups, tribes, national communities are all examples of the Gemeinschaft or what will hereafter be called fixed-membership groups, each at its own level of integration. A Gesellschaft, or associative group, on the other hand, has as its formative principle a cultural determination. That is, its members are and remain members because of their continued support of the basic values or ideologies of the group. Examples of the Gesellschaft are religious sects, armies, political parties, voluntary associations, and business firms. These will be referred to as flexible-membership groups, and we shall try to justify the use of the terms fixed and flexible membership. For the moment we may note that an enduring social group based primarily on the emotional ties of its members is better suited structurally to making shifts in its ideologies or values than one in which membership is retained by manifest support-or, at least, with no overt rejection-of the cultural beliefs held by the group.2 In dealing with culture changes it seems advantageous to differentiate culture and social structure, as Kroeber (1948: 7, 8, 10, 847), Parsons (1951:15 ff., 327, and passim), Merton (1957:esp. Parts I and II), Nadel (1957:149), and others have done. This distinction will help to direct our attention to those groups in which the process of cultural change is more likely to occur, and to avoid confusing social structural changes with cultural ones. The definitions of culture and social structure used here accord with those offered by the abovementioned authors. Culture is thus regarded as an ideational system, consisting of learned and shared symbols, technical skills, prescriptions for correct