Alexandra Maryanski

The offspring of functionalism: French and british structuralism

Durkheimsfunctional and structural sociology is examined with an eye to the two structuralist modes of inquiry that it inspired, French structuralism and British structuralism. French structuralism comes from Levi-Strausss inverting the basic ideas of Durkheim and others in the French circle, including Marcell Mauss, Robert Hertz, and Ferdinand de Saussure. British structuralism comes from A.R. Radcliffe-Browns adoption of Durkheimian ideas to ethnographic interpretation and theoretical speculation. French structuralism produced a broad intellectual movement, whereas British structuralism culminated in network analysis, which is beginning only now to become a broad intellectual movement. In both cases, the intellectual children and grandchildren of functionalism may prove to be more influential in sociology and elsewhere than Durkheimian functionalism, the parent.

The Biology and Neurology of Group Processes

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to bring data to suggest that group processes have a biological base, lodged in human neurology as it evolved over the last 7 million years. Design/methodology/approach – The method for discovering the neurological basis of group processes is labelled evolutionary sociology, and this method revolves around: (1) cladistic analysis of traits of distant ancestors to humans and the great apes, with whom humans share a very high proportion of genes, (2) comparative neurology between the great apes and humans that can inform us about how the brains of humans were rewired from the structures shared by the last common ancestor to humans and apes, and (3) ecological analysis of the habitats and niches that generated selection pressures on the neurology of apes and hominins. Findings – A key finding is that most of the interpersonal processes that drive group processes are neurologically based and evolved before the brain among hominins was sufficiently large to generate systems of symbols organized in cultural texts remotely near the human measure. There is, then, good reason to study the neurological basis of behavior because neurology explains more about the dynamics of interpersonal behavior than does culture, which was a very late arrival to the hominin line. Research implications – One implication of these findings is that social scientific analysis of interpersonal processes and group dynamics can no longer assume that groups are solely a constructed process, mediated by culture and social structure. There were powerful selection pressures during the course of hominin evolution to increase hominin sociality and especially group formation, which required considerable rewiring of the basic ape brain. Since groups are not “natural” to apes in general and even to an evolved ape-like humans, it is important to discover how humans ever became group-organizing animals. The answer resides in the dramatic enhancing of emotions in hominins and humans, which shifts attention away from the neocortex to the older subcortical areas of the brain. Once this shift is made, theorizing and research, as well as public views on human sociality, need to be recast as, first, an evolved biological trait and, only second, as a most tenuous and fragile of a big-brained animal using language and culture to construct its social world. Originality/value – The value of this kind of analysis is to liberate sociology and the social sciences in general from simplistic views that, because humans have language and can use language to construct culture and social structures, the underlying biology and neurology of human action is not relevant to understanding the social world. Indeed, just the opposite is the case: to the extent that social scientists insist upon a social constructionists research agenda, they will fail to conceptualize and perform research on more fundamental forces in the social world, including group dynamics.

Sociology's Lost Human Relations Area Files

This article examines sociologys first human relations area files. These files were developed by Herbert Spencer, an unfairly maligned figure in the history of sociology. The point of this historical exercise, however, is not so much to praise Spencer as to conduct a hypothetical exercise: What if Spencers files had been taken more seriously? In performing this exercise, we can learn a great deal about both sociology and anthropology. Indeed, we can see that sociology and anthropology would be far more interesting disciplines if they followed Spencers lead in collecting and cataloguing cross-cultural and historical data in ways that would facilitate theorizing.

Explaining Socio-Cultural Evolution. The Limitations of Evolutionary Theory from Biology

The revival of evolutionary thinking in sociology holds out real promise for understanding social change in human societies. This revival has often been highly threatening to sociologists because it is disproportionately based on evolutionary theorizing from biology, where selection works on individuals and their phenotypes (including their behavioral propensities), while populations are seen as evolving. Darwinian notions of selection have always been part of sociological theorizing, particularly in human ecology. In this paper, we argue that there are limits as to how far models from evolutionary theorizing in biology can be taken in the analysis of sociocultural evolution. A new and more distinctly sociological analysis of selection processes and the evolution of sociocultural formations is needed. Indeed, sociology should not be threatened by evolutionary biology, but instead should seek to create its own approach to the evolution of sociocultural systems. We develop our argument by answering four basic questions: What is evolution in the biotic and sociocultural universes? What is evolving? What are the units of selection in these universes? And, what is the nature of selection in these universes? The answer to these questions highlights the limitations of applying evolutionary theory from biology to sociological analysis.

The Social Cage: Human Nature and the Evolution of Society

1. Humans are animals 2. The origins of human social structure 3. The origins of human culture 4. The first human society: hunters and gatherers 5. The cage of kinship: horticultural societies 6. The cage of power: agrarian societies 7. Breaking out of the social cage: industrial societies 8. The overly social conception of humans and society Bibliography Index.