ANTA02H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 3: Crow Nation, Thermostat, Gemeinschaft And Gesellschaft
Document Summary
People are not purely unique and autonomous individuals, no matter how much we would like to think of ourselves that way. We derive many facets of our identity from the various groups to which we belong. Human behaviour is an aspect of our nature as members of a social species. We are organized into groups whose internal and external relations are governed by rules, perform a variety of functions, and which endure beyond the lives of their constituent members. We may have a culture, but we belong to a society. Culture helps us understand how individuals themselves understand and interpret the world and others. Society tells the rules and regularities that govern human social behavior. Malinowski showed that institutions such as law and complex economics, which many westerners assumed to be exclusive province of civilized" societies, were possessed by primitive" societies in full measure, if in a somewhat different form.
