Chapter 6 - 6

06 Sociology

listen to a lecture in a sociology class. fill in the diagram with the information that you hear.

M: When we talk about the largest form of social organization, we are talking about the concept of society.

Society refers to a semi-closed system made up of individuals.

However, it is a collective that is larger than any of the individuals.

Humans have developed a remarkable array of different forms of social organization; yet sociologists have identified a few key types of societies, types that share defining general features common to certain specific societies.

I’d like to talk about three times today, just to give you a look at the considerable diversity of human societies.

And one way to differentiate types of societies is to look at three dimensions − there may be some new words for you, so pay attention.

The first thing we look at in categorizing a society is its level of mobility.

In other words, to its members live in one place, or do they move around?

Then we ask about how members meet their need for food.

We call this their subsistence pattern.

So, we ask what their subsistence pattern is.

And a third thing we also ask is who does what job?

This is what we call the division of labor.

We ask what the division of labor for the society is. So we compare mobility, subsistence patterns, and the division of labor.

Let’s start off at the beginning, with the very first human societies.

The earliest humans developed a form of social organization that centered on movement.

The key word here is movement. And what I mean by that is that the earliest human societies were highly mobile, moving from place to place in search of food, water, and shelter.

Food was obtained exclusively through two means: hunting and gathering.

This is why we call this type of society a hunter/gatherer society.

If you are trying to get food by hunting animals and gathering plants, well, you have to keep moving. Animals won’t stay around if you are trying to kill them.

Similarly, if you are picking all the berries, roots, and edible leaves in an area, you will eventually run out.

So that’s what I mean by movement being so important.

Now the other thing is division of labor. In hunting and gathering societies, people don’t really have specific jobs.

So we say there is little division of labor. Sure, it’s the men that do most of the hunting and the women that do most of the gathering, but when it comes to cooking, building shelters, caring for children, healing, making tools, all those other jobs are done by anybody and sometimes everybody.

There are no specialized jobs in a hunting and gathering society.

Clear so far? OK, then onto the next type−horticultural societies.

Well, at some point, people got tired of moving around all the time and not always finding food, so someone discovered that he could collect the seeds for plants and plant them.

People found a way to get greater control over their food supply by planting some food crops like wheat, corn, beans, etc.

People still move around in a horticultural society, but not as much, and sometimes very little at all.

They begin to settle down and spend more of their time raising animals and plants, but they are still going out hunting and gathering too, just not as much.

There are other differences, too.

Unlike the egalitarian hunter/gatherer societies, horticultural societies have some division of labor.

Some people are political or religious leaders, who don’t do as much of the work producing food as other people do.

In some horticultural societies, there are a limited number of individuals who are healers or have other specialized jobs.

Now, for third type of society, we see a huge change. In this type, the agrarian society, people have settled down more or less permanently.

That’s not always the case with horticulturalists, who often move from time to time or even seasonally in some cases, but in an agrarian society, people are settled down, or sedentary.

They produce all of their own food by growing it in permanent fields or by raising animals.

Sure, some people might hunt, but the important thing is that agriculture is the dominant subsistence pattern.

It is also in agrarian societies that we see significant divisions of labor, the rise of specialist who only do one job.

For example, kings, warriors, doctors, priests, even teachers.

Most people are farmers though in an agrarian society.

1) Based on information from the lecture, to which type of society does each feature relate? Place a checkmark in the correct box.