Human groups {society, sociology} can have complex social behaviors and organizations.
levels
Societies are groups intermediate between families and states. Society levels are band, tribe, chiefdom, and state.
purposes
Societies try to ensure efficient interactions among members and meet member economic and psychological needs.
purposes: food
Societies produce and gather food.
purposes: security
Societies provide defense and safety. Societies have governments.
culture
Societies have language and culture, which affect all behaviors. Culture includes rituals and religions. Societies teach customs. Societies have religious beliefs, games, leisure time activities, and property laws.
groups
Societies have territoriality, tribalism, cliques, or subgroups. Societies have dominance of some members over others. Societies have social classes.
groups: families
Societies typically have nuclear families, with sexual and parent-child bonding. They have marriage practices, kinship systems, codes, and alliances, with kin selection. Families serve many roles in society, mostly in raising children. Families socialize children, discipline children, transmit culture to children, provide first status level to children, and provide security in outside social relations. Families also increase social controls and increase population, through pride in children and desire to continue family line.
groups: families and norms
Societies affect families by setting norms. Norms for children involve children number, children sex ratio, parent and children roles, and family-behavior rules. There are norms for household organization and location. There are norms for romantic love, motherhood, and sexual behavior. Ritual norms are marriage ceremonies, birth rites, and rites at entering adolescence and puberty.
roles
Societies require individuals to have many roles and compete to shift roles. Societies teach roles.
interactions: conflicts
Societies have conflicts and behaviors that vary with age and sex. Societies balance conflicting motivations or behaviors, such as aggression versus passivity, competition versus cooperation, selfishness versus altruism, and immediate need satisfaction versus delayed satisfaction for future rewards.
interactions: cooperation
Societies have cooperation, sharing, bartering, and reciprocal altruism. They use deception and hypocrisy only at moderate level. Societies have continual interaction and interdependence among members.
changes
Societies have cyclic changes, such as business cycles, seasonal cycles, and political cycles of democracy vs. aristocracy. Societies can evolve to use more energy and information and/or toward more diversity. Primitive societies have no definite patterns of transition to modern societies.
changes: extinction
Societies can become extinct by military defeat, disease, absorption into larger or more powerful and attractive cultures, and major innovations.
traits
Human-society traits include age-grading, athletic sports, body adornment, bonding behaviors, calendar, cleanliness training, community organization, cooking, cooperative behavior, cosmology, courtship, dancing, decorative art, divination, dream interpretation, education, eschatology, ethics, ethnobotany, etiquette, faith healing, family feasting, fire making, folklore, food taboos, funeral rites, games, gestures, gift giving, government, greetings, hairstyles, hospitality, housing, hygiene, incest taboos, inheritance rules, jokes, kin groups, kinship nomenclature, labor division, language, law, luck, magic, marriage, mealtimes, medicine, obstetrics, parent-child bonding, penal sanctions, personal names, population policy, post-natal care, pregnancy customs, property rights, spirit propitiation, puberty customs, religious rituals, residence rules, sexual bonding, sexual restrictions, soul concept, status differences, surgery, superstitions, tool making, trade, visiting, weaving, and weather control.
apes
Ape societies have 10 to 100 animals, long childhoods, parental care, and play.
ideal society
Individuals become more important, protected from harm, educated, and cared for by others. Individuals have more-various life experiences and more tolerance. Successful societies appear to require several subgroups, varied goals and means, many institutions, balance between centralized planning and freedom, and many experiments.
theory
People can study human societies using structural-functional approaches to relate organizations, institutions, and customs. People can study human societies using ecological-evolutionary approaches to find environments, adaptations, and evolution. Evolutionary approaches can explain change and conflict as evolving symbol systems that represent culture. Perhaps, strong or smart leaders control events {great-man theory}. Racial theories attribute societal characteristics to supposed racial attributes. Geographical and climatic theories attribute societal characteristics to territory climate or resources.
Social Sciences>Sociology>Society
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Date Modified: 2022.0224