Society, Race, Civilization, Nation-2

Society

A society can thus be defined as a super-tribe, a collectivity of individu­als who, although they may not all have the same tribal origins, never­theless participate, by and large, in the signifying order of the founding or conquering tribe (or tribes). The establishment of a dominant signify­ing order makes it possible for individuals to interact practically and habitually with each other. Unlike tribes, super-tribes can enfold more than one signifying order. As a consequence, individuals may, and typically do, choose to live apart—totally or partially—from the main signifying order.As a concrete example, consider what people living in the modern society known as the United States call loosely "American culture." The signifying order that defines this culture traces its origins primarily to the signifying order of the British people who settled in the United States a few centuries ago. Since then, American society has also ac­commodated and sanctioned aboriginal and other parallel cultural sys­tems, each one entailing a different way of life, a different language, a different system of rituals, etc Moreover, within the dominant signify­ing order, diversification has come about as a consequence of the ten­dency of splinter groups—known as subcultures—to emerge within large and impersonal societies. Thus, it is possible for an individual living in the United States to remain apart from the dominant signify­ing order by espousing a parallel one or becoming a participant in a subcultural one. But very much like tribal people, a city-dwelling indi­vidual living in America today who chooses to live apart from thedominant signifying order will typically face social risks, such as expo­sure to various forms of ridicule or censure and perhaps even exclusion from participation in various institutional systems or communal activi­ties.

Race

Human beings the world over typically classify and think of them­selves as members of races and /or ethnic groups, i.e. as belonging to a group of people with whom they have a common genetic link. But ra­cial or ethnic classifications are often ambiguous and misleading. No two human beings, not even twins, are identical. The proportions of traits, and even the kinds of traits, are distributed differently from one part of the world to another. But, as it turns out, these proportions are quantitatively negligible. Geneticists have yet to turn up a single group of people who can be distinguished from outsiders by their chromo­somes. There is no genetic test or criterion that can be used to deter­mine if one is racially or ethnically, say, Caucasian, Slavic, or Hopi. Populations arc constantly in genetic contact with another. The many varieties of modern Homo sapiens sapiens belong to one interbreeding species, with surprisingly little genetic difference among individuals. In fact, it has been established that 99.9% of DNA sequences are com­mon to all humans (Sagan and Druyan 1992: 415).So, from a purely biological standpoint, human beings defy classifi­cation into types. Nevertheless, the historical record shows that from ancient times people have, for some reason or other (perhaps tribalistic in origin), always felt it necessary to classify themselves in terms of ra­cial or ethnic categories.

The Egyptians, the ancient Greeks of Homer's time, and the Greeks and Romans of classical times, for instance, left paintings and sculptures showing human beings with perceived racial differences. And most languages of the world have words referring to people in terms of physiological, anatomical, and social differences.In the Western world, the systematic study and classification of races was a consequence of the worldwide explorations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which piqued the interest of Europeans in the peoples of other lands. A century later, the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) was among the first to consider catego­rizing the apparent varieties of human beings. But it was the German scholar Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) who gave the West­ern world its first racial typology. After examining the skulls and com­paring the physical characteristics of the different peoples of the world, Blumenbach concluded thai humanity had five races: Caucasians (West Asians, north Africans, and Europeans except the Finns and the Saami), Mongolians (other Asian peoples, the Finns and the Saami, and the Inuit of America), Ethiopians (the people of Africa except those of the north), Americans (all aboriginal New World peoples except the Inuit), and Malayans (peoples of the Pacific islands).

These five divisions remained the basis of most racial classifications well into the twentieth century and continue to be commonly accepted in popular thinking even today. But population scientists now recog­nize the indefiniteness and arbitrariness of any such demarcations. In­deed, many individuals can be classified into more than one race or into none. All that can be said here is that the concept of race makes sense, if at all, only in terms of lineage: i.e. people can be said to belong to the same race if they share the same pool of ancestors. But, as it turns out, even this seemingly simple criterion is insufficient for rationalizing a truly scientific classification of humans into discrete biological groups in such a way that everybody belongs to one and only one because, ex­cept for brothers and sisters, no individuals have precisely the same array of ancestors. This is why, rather than using genetic, anatomical, or physiological traits to study human variability, anthropologists to­day prefer to study groups in terms of geographic or social criteria. Race and ethnicity are now viewed by social scientists fundamentally as historical or cultural notions.

Civilization

The term civilization implies essentially a modern society, or group of societies, with a distinctive recorded history and with common institu­tions (religious, political, legal, economic, educational, etc.). A civiliza­tion is, more specifically, a complex social system encompassing a mix­ture of tribal and super-tribal signifying orders, but marked by its own civil (city-based), rather than just tribal or religious, history.

The first civilizations in the current-day Middle East, for example, came onto the scene between 5000 and 3000 BC. Sumer, Babylon, and Egypt were among the first large social groupings to encompass not only a main­stream form of culture, but also a complex diversity of peoples and languages, and to distinguish between civil and religious institutions.Europeans became interested in the civilizations of other lands dur­ing the Enlightenment, when scholars started searching for universal patterns in the history of humanity. But their efforts were somewhat skewed by their tendency to ignore customs that they saw as irrational. In the nineteenth century, on the other hand, philosophers like Johann von Herder (1744-1803) and G. W. E. Hegel (1770-1831) viewed all cul­tural systems as intrinsically valid, equal, and rational in their own terms, springing from a universal propensity of human groups to make sense of the habitats in which they lived. Writing a "rational" history of any civilization, they claimed, would therefore be a futile task, given the lack of universal criteria for defining rationality.

Nation

Like other terms discussed above, nation is a problematic one to define. People experience national sentiments only in relation to some specific situation that they feel unites them in an abstract way—e.g. Americans tend to become nationalistic when American teams or soldiers are in combat in the sports arena or the military one as the case may be. But people tend typically to feel allegiance more to the city, town, or region in which they were reared or in which they reside. This is why they are quick to show loyalty to the sports teams, individual athletes, perform­ers, etc. representing their local area (city, town, etc.) in competitions. In a very real sense, these areas are felt to be communal extensions of personal identity—in semiotic terms, they can be said to be perceived as spatial representations of the collective persona.A remarkable casc-in-point of this tendency is an event that takes place twice a year in the city of Siena. In this Tuscan city, the popular Palio horse race traces its history right back to Siena's origins as a city-state. The city is divided into contradas—streets within the city. A per­son belonging by reason of birth and /or ancestry to a contrada is ex­pected to have allegiance to its totemic symbol (the caterpillar, the duck, etc.) for life. The week preceding the Palio is characterized by elaborate ceremonies and rituals within each contrada, ending with the blessing of the horse. Feelings of loyalty become intense, to the point that spouses belonging to different contradas are expected to leave their immediate family and return to their original folds for the entire week. Emotions run high during the actual horse race in the central Piazza del Campo. The winning jockey is celebrated and glorified; losing jockeys are often denigrated and, not infrequently, even attacked physically. Winning or losing the Palio is a matter of collective contrada pride.

Clearly, the Sienese perceive themselves, first and foremost, as be­longing to a local space, the contrada, which is concretely understand­able in terms of their life experiences, rather than to the city as a whole, let alone the Italian nation. The contrada is felt by the Sienese to be the critical component of identity. Nationalism is, so to speak, an abstract extension of this type of col­lective persona. As such, it reflects the desire felt by people living in large and complex social systems to share values, speak a common lan­guage, and occupy a clearly bounded piece of real estate with each other. The nation concept can be traced to the rise in importance of the ancient city-states. This led, in turn, to the establishment of military and civil systems designed to protect them. The battles fought by armies in the name of Egypt, Rome, and other ancient civilizations stirred the first inklings of nationalistic patriotism.During the Middle Ages, the cultural life of feudal Europe was based on a common inheritance of ideas, social practices, and belief systems transmitted through Latin, the language of the educated classes, and a common religion, Catholic Christianity. However, with the breakup of feudalism other communities and dynasties arose, fos­tering new feelings of nationality (literally, "birth right") in order to win support for their rule. These feelings were strengthened in various countries during the Reformation of the sixteenth century, when the adoption of either Catholicism or Protestantism as a national religion became an added impetus for social cohesion on a broader scale.The turning point in the rise of nationalism in Europe was the French Revolution of 1789. National feeling in France until then was centered in the monarchy. As a result of the Revolution, loyalty to the monarch was replaced by loyalty to the patrie ("fatherland"). This is why the Marseillaise, the anthem of the French Revolution that later became the national anthem, begins with the words Allnns, enfants de la patrie ("March on, children of the fatherland").

In 1789 the medieval French Estates-General, consisting of separate bodies representing the ciergy, the aristocracy, and the common people, was transformed into a National Assembly. Regional divisions, with their separate traditions and rights, were abolished, and France became a uniform and united territory, with common laws and institutions.The ascent of nationalism throughout Europe coincided generally with the spread of the Industrial Revolution, which promoted unified economic development, a working middle class, and parallel forms of representative government. As a consequence, national literatures and artistic forms (in music and the visual arts) arose to express common traditions. New emphasis was given to historical symbols. New holi­days were introduced to commemorate various events in social history. The drafting of national constitutions and the struggle for political rights gave people after the Industrial Revolution the sense of helping to determine their fate as large communities and of sharing responsibil­ity for the future well-being of all nations. At the same time, the growth of trade and industry led to the rise of economic units larger than the traditional cities.

In the period after World War II, successful nationalist movements sprang up throughout the world, particularly in Africa and the Middle East. By 1958 newly established nation-states in those regions included Israel, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, the Sudan, Ghana, the United Arab Re­public (Egypt and Syria), and Iraq. In the 1960s and 1970s Algeria, Libya, and many British, French, and Belgian colonies in Africa became independent. In Eastern Europe in the 1990s, where nationalist passions had largely been held in check since World War II, the decline of Communist rule unleashed separatist forces that contributed to the dis­solution of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia.

Source: Analyzing cultures: an introduction and handbook / Marcel Danesi and Paul Perron. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, c1999.