What are the Social Relations that Make a Set of Human Groups and Individuals a Society?

Authors

• Maurice Godelier L'EHESS

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30676/jfas.v34i1.116491

Abstract

Before beginning, I would like to thank Dr. Minna Ruckenstein and Professor Jukka Siikala as well as the Finnish Anthropological Society for having done me the honor of inviting me to give this lecture.

The question I am going to try to answer today concerns all of the social sciences at once. It is:
What are the social relations, of whatever kind they may be—political, religious, economic, kinship, etc.—that have the capacity to bring together and to weld into an all-encompassing whole and to endow with an additional, global and shared identity a number of human groups and individuals who thereby form a ‘society’ with borders that are known if not recognized by their neighbor societies?

The human groups to which individuals belong can be of a great variety of natures: lineages, ‘houses’, clans, orders, castes, classes, local or religious communities, etc.; and an individual usually belongs to several of these groups, each of which provides him or her with one or several particular, specific identities. It is to these identities that is added the global shared identity attaching to all individuals, whatever their particular identity, by the fact of belonging to the same ‘society’, to the same Whole.