In sociology, traditional society refers to a society characterized by an orientation to the past, not the future, with a predominant role for custom and habit. [1] Such societies are marked by a lack of distinction between family and business, with the division of labor influenced primarily by age, gender, and status. [2]
Traditional society has often been contrasted with modern industrial society, with figures like Durkheim and Pierre Bourdieu stressing such polarities as community vs. society or mechanical vs. organic solidarity; [3] while Claude Lévi-Strauss saw traditional societies as 'cold' societies in that they refused to allow the historical process to define their social sense of legitimacy. [4]
Within modernisation theory, traditional society is also the first stage of economic development as established in W.W. Rostow's Economic Growth Model. Classified as "pre-newtonian," science and technology are not practiced. Life is agrarian, and family or clan relationships are the basis for social structures. [5]
However, theories positing the simple, unilineal evolution of societies from traditional to modern industrial are now seen as too simplistic, [6] relying on an ideal typology revolving round such polarities as subsistence/growth; face-to-face/impersonal; informal social control/formal social control; or collective ownership/private ownership. [7] Recent work has emphasised instead the variety of traditional cultures, and the existence of intermediate forms as well as of 'alternative' modernisations. [8]
Traditional societies have been seen as characterised by powerful collective memories sanctioned by ritual, and with social guardians ensuring continuity of communal practices. [9] Practice theory, however, has recently emphasised the role of ritual in facilitating change, as well as continuity. [10]
Fredric Jameson saw 20th-century modernisation as encountering two main kinds of traditional society, tribal, as in Africa, and bureaucratic imperial, as in China and India, [11] but a much wider diversity of traditional societies has existed over time.
For most of human existence, small tribes of hunter-gatherers leading an almost static existence formed the only social organisation: where they survived into the 20th century, as in Australia, paintings, songs, myths and rituals [12] were all used to cement links to a deep-reaching sense of continuity with ancestors and ancestral ways. [13]
The invention of farming some 10,000 years ago led to the development of agrarian societies, whether nomadic or peasant, the latter in particular almost always dominated by a strong sense of traditionalism. [14] Within agrarian society, however, a wide diversity still existed. Homeric Greece was a society marked by powerful kinship bonds, fixed status and rigidly defined social expectations; [15] with the classical polis, however, though festivals, in M. I. Finley's words, still "recreated for their audiences the unbroken web of all life, stretching back over generations of men to the gods", [16] new and more complex voluntary forms of social and public life balanced traditional society in a new equilibrium. [17]
Medieval Europe was an intensely local society of self-perpetuating peasant households, [18] living within a slow moving culture dominated by customary law and by respect for ancient authority [19] and pervaded with an ahistorical political mentality focused upon the concepts of experience, usage, and law-as-custom. [20]
Much of the focus of Enlightenment thinking was directed at undoing the mindset of traditional society, and replacing a focus upon such concepts as rural, hierarchical, customary or status with one centred on the ideas of urban, egalitarian, progressive or contractual. Modernism and modernity continued the process of challenging and overcoming traditional society. [21]
Jameson, however, has seen as a defining feature of postmodernism the global elimination of residual, 'traditional' enclaves, giving it its one-dimensional, temporal nature that is no longer offset by living examples of the past alongside the new. [22]
Global media such as the Internet have been seen as effective means of recreating traditional cultures. [23] However, a key contrast now with traditional societies as they were is that participation has become voluntary instead of being ascriptive: fixed in space, social stratification and role expectations. [24]
A tradition is a system of beliefs or behaviors passed down within a group of people or society with symbolic meaning or special significance with origins in the past. A component of cultural expressions and folklore, common examples include holidays or impractical but socially meaningful clothes, but the idea has also been applied to social norms and behaviors such as greetings etc. Traditions can persist and evolve for thousands of years— the word tradition itself derives from the Latin word tradere literally meaning to transmit, to hand over, to give for safekeeping. While it is reportedly assumed that traditions have an ancient history, many traditions have been invented on purpose, whether it be political or cultural, over short periods of time. Various academic disciplines also use the word in a variety of ways.
A society is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Societies are characterized by patterns of relationships between individuals who share a distinctive culture and institutions; a given society may be described as the sum total of such relationships among its constituent members.
David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. Durkheim formally established the academic discipline of sociology and is commonly cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science, along with both Karl Marx and Max Weber.
Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist and public intellectual. Bourdieu's contributions to the sociology of education, the theory of sociology, and sociology of aesthetics have achieved wide influence in several related academic fields. During his academic career he was primarily associated with the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris and the Collège de France.
In sociology, an industrial society is a society driven by the use of technology and machinery to enable mass production, supporting a large population with a high capacity for division of labour. Such a structure developed in the Western world in the period of time following the Industrial Revolution, and replaced the agrarian societies of the pre-modern, pre-industrial age. Industrial societies are generally mass societies, and may be succeeded by an information society. They are often contrasted with traditional societies.
Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, generally translated as "community and society", are categories which were used by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies in order to categorize social relationships into two types. The Gesellschaft is associated with modern society and rational self-interest, which weakens the traditional bonds of family and local community that typify the Gemeinschaft. Max Weber, a founding figure in sociology, also wrote extensively about the relationship between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Weber wrote in direct response to Tönnies.
The cultural turn is a movement beginning in the early 1970s among scholars in the humanities and social sciences to make culture the focus of contemporary debates; it also describes a shift in emphasis toward meaning and away from a positivist epistemology. The cultural turn is described in 2005 by Lynette Spillman and Mark D. Jacobs as "one of the most influential trends in the humanities and social sciences in the last generation." A prominent historiographer argues that the cultural turn involved a "wide array of new theoretical impulses coming from fields formerly peripheral to the social sciences," especially post-structuralism, cultural studies, literary criticism, and various forms of linguistic analysis, which emphasized "the causal and socially constitutive role of cultural processes and systems of signification."
Ritualization refers to the process by which a sequence of non-communicating actions or an event is invested with cultural, social or religious significance. This definition emphasizes the transformation of everyday actions into rituals that carry deeper meaning within a cultural or religious context. Rituals are symbolic, repetitive, and often prescribed activities that hold religious or cultural significance for a certain group of people. They serve various purposes: promoting social solidarity by expressing shared values, facilitating the transmission of cultural knowledge and regulating emotions.
In the social sciences, social structure is the aggregate of patterned social arrangements in society that are both emergent from and determinant of the actions of individuals. Likewise, society is believed to be grouped into structurally related groups or sets of roles, with different functions, meanings, or purposes. Examples of social structure include family, religion, law, economy, and class. It contrasts with "social system", which refers to the parent structure in which these various structures are embedded. Thus, social structures significantly influence larger systems, such as economic systems, legal systems, political systems, cultural systems, etc. Social structure can also be said to be the framework upon which a society is established. It determines the norms and patterns of relations between the various institutions of the society.
Economic sociology is the study of the social cause and effect of various economic phenomena. The field can be broadly divided into a classical period and a contemporary one, known as "new economic sociology".
An agrarian society, or agricultural society, is any community whose economy is based on producing and maintaining crops and farmland. Another way to define an agrarian society is by seeing how much of a nation's total production is in agriculture. In agrarian society, cultivating the land is the primary source of wealth. Such a society may acknowledge other means of livelihood and work habits but stresses the importance of agriculture and farming. Agrarian societies have existed in various parts of the world as far back as 10,000 years ago and continue to exist today. They have been the most common form of socio-economic organization for most of recorded human history.
Microsociology is one of the main levels of analysis of sociology, concerning the nature of everyday human social interactions and agency on a small scale: face to face. Microsociology is based on subjective interpretative analysis rather than statistical or empirical observation, and shares close association with the philosophy of phenomenology. Methods include symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology; ethnomethodology in particular has led to many academic sub-divisions and studies such as micro-linguistical research and other related aspects of human social behaviour. Macrosociology, by contrast, concerns the social structure and broader systems.
Neil Joseph Smelser (1930–2017) was an American sociologist who served as professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was an active researcher from 1958 to 1994. His research was on collective behavior, sociological theory, economic sociology, sociology of education, social change, and comparative methods. Among many lifetime achievements, Smelser "laid the foundations for economic sociology."
The sociology of culture, and the related cultural sociology, concerns the systematic analysis of culture, usually understood as the ensemble of symbolic codes used by a member of a society, as it is manifested in the society. For Georg Simmel, culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history". Culture in the sociological field is analyzed as the ways of thinking and describing, acting, and the material objects that together shape a group of people's way of life.
The sociology of education is the study of how public institutions and individual experiences affect education and its outcomes. It is mostly concerned with the public schooling systems of modern industrial societies, including the expansion of higher, further, adult, and continuing education.
Cultural reproduction, a concept first developed by French sociologist and cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu, is the mechanisms by which existing cultural forms, values, practices, and shared understandings are transmitted from generation to generation, thereby sustaining the continuity of cultural experience across time. In other words, reproduction, as it is applied to culture, is the process by which aspects of culture are passed on from person to person or from society to society.
The sociology of literature is a subfield of the sociology of culture. It studies the social production of literature and its social implications. A notable example is Pierre Bourdieu's 1992 Les Règles de L'Art: Genèse et Structure du Champ Littéraire, translated by Susan Emanuel as Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1996).
Sociology is the scientific and systematic study of human society that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. Regarded as a part of both the social sciences and humanities, sociology uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about social order and social change. Sociological subject matter ranges from micro-level analyses of individual interaction and agency to macro-level analyses of social systems and social structure. Applied sociological research may be applied directly to social policy and welfare, whereas theoretical approaches may focus on the understanding of social processes and phenomenological method.
This bibliography of sociology is a list of works, organized by subdiscipline, on the subject of sociology. Some of the works are selected from general anthologies of sociology, while other works are selected because they are notable enough to be mentioned in a general history of sociology or one of its subdisciplines.
Inner-worldly asceticism was characterized by Max Weber in Economy and Society as the concentration of human behavior upon activities leading to salvation within the context of the everyday world.
