what do you understand by society? Explain the stages of societal evolution?
Answers
Most 19th-century and some 20th-century approaches to socioculture aimed to provide models for the evolution of humankind as a whole, arguing that different societies have reached different stages of social development. The most comprehensive attempt to develop a general theory of social evolution centering on the development of sociocultural systems, the work of Talcott Parsons (1902–1979), operated on a scale which included a theory of world history. Another attempt, on a less systematic scale, originated with the world-systems approach from the 1970s.
More recent approaches focus on changes specific to individual societies and reject the idea that cultures differ primarily according to how far each one is on some linear scale of social progress. Most modern archaeologistsand cultural anthropologists work within the frameworks of neoevolutionism, sociobiology, and modernization theory.
Many different societies have existed in the course of human history, with estimates as high as over one million separate societies; however, as of 2013, the number of different societies had reduced to about two hundred.
Social evolution has a wide variety of contradictory and conflicting interpretations among scholars--in fact, according to Perrin (1976), one of the architects of modern social evolution Herbert Spencer [1820-1903], had four working definitions that changed throughout his career.
Through Perrin's lens, Spencerian social evolution studies a little of all of these:
Social Progress: Society is moving towards an ideal, defined as one with amity, individual altruism, specialization based on achieved qualities, and voluntary cooperation among highly disciplined individuals.Social Requirements: Society has a set of functional requirements that shape itself: aspects of human nature such as reproduction and sustenance, external environment aspects such as climate and human life, and social existence aspects, the behavioral constructs that make it possible to live together.Increasing Division of Labor: As population disrupts previous "equilibriums", society evolves by intensifying the functioning of each special individual or classOrigin of Social Species: Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, that is to say, the embryonic development of a society is echoed in its growth and change, albeit with outside forces able to alter the direction of those changes.Where Did This Notion Come From?In the mid-19th century, social evolution came under the influence of Charles Darwin's physical evolution theories expressed in Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, but social evolution is not derived from there. The 19th-century anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan is often named as the person who first applied evolutionary principles to social phenomena.
In retrospect (something that is tantalizingly easy to do in the 21st century), Morgan's notions that society moved inexorably through stages he termed as savagery, barbarism, and civilization seem backward and narrow.
But it wasn't Morgan who saw that first: social evolution as a definable and one-way process is deeply rooted in western philosophy. Bock (1955) listed several antecedents to the 19th-century social evolutionists to scholars in the 17th and 18th centuries (Auguste Comte, Condorcet, Cornelius de Pauw, Adam Ferguson, and lots of others). Then he suggested that all of those scholars were responding to "voyage literature", stories of the 15th and 16th century western explorers who brought back reports of newly discovered plants, animals, and societies. This literature, says Bock, sparked scholars first to marvel that "god created so many different societies", then to attempt to explain the various cultures as not as enlightened as themselves. In 1651, for example, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes explicitly stated that Native Americans were in the rarified state of nature that all societies were before they rose to civilized, political organizations.
Greeks and Romans--Oh My!And even that is not the first glimmers of western social evolution: for that, you have to go back to Greece and Rome.
Ancient scholars such as Polybius and Thucydides built histories of their own societies, by describing the early Roman and Greek cultures as barbaric versions of their own present. Aristotle's idea of social evolution was that society developed from a family-based organization, into village-based, and finally into the Greek state. Much of the modern concepts of social evolution are present in Greek and Roman literature: the origins of society and the importances of discovering them, the need to be able to determine what inner dynamic was at work, and explicit stages of development. There is also, among our Greek and Roman forebears, the tinge of teleology, that "our present" is the correct end and only possible end of the social evolution process.
So, all social evolutionists, modern and ancient, says Bock (writing in 1955), have a classical view of change as growth, that progress is natural, inevitable, gradual, and continuous.
Despite their differences, social evolutionists write in terms of successive, finely-graded stages of development; all seek the seeds in the original; all exclude consideration of specific events as effective factors, and all derive from a reflection of existing social or cultural forms arranged in a series.
Gender and Race IssuesOne glaring problem with social evolution as a study is the explicit (or hidden right in plain sight) prejudice against women and non-whites: the non-western societies seen by the voyagers were made up of people of color who often had female leaders and/or explicit social equality. Obviously, they were unevolved, said the white male wealthy scholars in 19th-century western civilization.