SAMFUND? Durkheim revisited i Amazonas og videre

Abstract

“Society” appears a difficult notion. We use
 it all the time. But is it any good as an
 analytical concept? Sociologists seem to
 agree it is not. Few societies have the
 empirical characteristics of the bounded
 entity that structural-functionalist theory
 assumed. Constructivist notions of society as
 “imagined community” appear to be tied up
 with the existence of the State or with the
 spread of information technology. This
 leaves contemporary anthropology with
 “society” as a residue, the left-over from
 culture’s gluttonous theoretical supper. Still,
 social science aims to explain or understand
 social relations, interactions, and the
 processes by which structures and functions
 are worked into social systems as implied by
 the notion of society. The notion of society
 allows us to assume the existence of
 objective structures of order in the social life
 of people. Unlike the notion of culture,
 however, the notion of society has not been
 critically scrutinized by anthropologists. In
 contemporary Danish anthropology with its
 focus on culture and cultural representations,
 writers tend to simply take society for
 granted as the intrinsic empirical context of
 culture. From the perspective of Durkheimian
 notions of “the social”, the paper
 provides a brief review of interpretations that
 retrospectively have appeared analytical
 dead-ends. The author goes on to suggest that
 the notion of “symbolically generalized
 media of communication” may offer a
 productive opening that embraces both sides
 of the culture/society dichotomy in the
 search for structured systems of social
 existence whether subjectively or
 objectively conceived. The idea of
 “symbolically generalized media or
 communication” was originally formulated
 by Talcott Parsons and subsequently
 reworked by German sociologist Niklas
 Luhmann. Rather than an interrelated series
 of parts that make up a whole plus something
 else in the classic Durkheimian sense,
 society from this perspective appears in the
 form of structured sets of actions oriented by
 a horizon of possibilities and expectations,
 symbolically constituted, yet always
 provisional and emergent. Inspired by
 analyses of two different cases in Amazonian
 research the paper offers a brief hint at how
 the notion may be employed in
 anthropology.