In Harmonium

Posted By Marc on July 31, 2008

In my last post on Renaissance Networks, I alluded to some work on basic forms of social organization so I thought it might be useful to talk a bit about them, at least as some of us are conceiving them. The concept of a “basic form of social relations”, itself goes back quite a ways in Western thinking; Aristotle on Politics is an early example. Nowadays, we tend to use some variant of what Max Weber called “Ideal Types” (similar to Platonic Forms), which are, basically, ideal forms of a relationship that don’t really exist in nature. What the use of Ideal Types does let us do is to set some form of Cartesian co-ordinates against which to measure and graph where any particular form is located and, also, how it changes through time.

Most modern forms of social theory include some type of conceptualization of the “I-Thou” (or “ego-alter”) relationship(s). This conceptualization, along with some type of theory of consciousness, communications, “meaning”, relation of biology to culture (etc.) and economic activity, underly pretty much all modern social theory from, say, the mid-18th century to the present (there are other components, but these tend to be the general requirements for, at least, the larger theoretical schools). Over the centuries, the focus on how this “I-Thou” relationship is conceived has shifted from “inborn” (human “nature” arguments), through group construction back to “inborn” (via evolved psychological mechanisms and neural substrata) again, with some pretty strange byways and variants along the way.

Personally, I think that the best examinations of this “I-Thou” relationship, and its extensions into social relations, have taken place in three different schools. First, is the school of Phenomenonlogy (e.g. Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (SPEP), Schutz’s Phenomenology of the Social World (SPEP), Schutz and Luckman’s The structures of the life-world. Translated by Richard M. Zaner and H. Tristram Engelhardt. and Vol. 2, etc.) which establishes some pretty good models on how “meaning” is communicated within and between groups. Phenomenology, at least in North America, isalso related to the school of Social Constructionism (e.g. Spector and Kitsuse’s Constructing Social Problems) which looks at how “meaning” changes as a process of ongoing competition, negotiation, conflict, etc.

The second school that has really gotten into examining social relations is economic Anthropology. In particular, the work of Karl Polanyi’s The Livelihood of Man (Studies in social discontinuity) and Trade and Market in the Early Empires, and Marshall Sahlins’ Stone Age Economics have been crucial to establishing how, at a group level, forms of economic production and distribution operate.

The third school is Evolutionary Psychology and, in particular, the works Jerome Barkow (Darwin, Sex, and Status: Biological Approaches to Mind and Culture and Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for Social Scientists) and Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture see also their Primer on Evolutionary Psychology). There are a lot of other people working in this area who I’m not mentioning since this isn’t a dissertation .

Probably my favorite author working in the general area of social relations models (as opposed to the special ones noted above) is Alan Page Fiske’s work on Human Sociality (see also Structures of Social Life). Fiske draws heavily on both his own fieldwork and on the Economic Anthropology literature to produce a model of four Ideal Types of human social relations.

• Communal Sharing. “What’s mine is yours and vice versa”, “to each according to his need, from each according to his ability”, etc. Think of “primitive communism” in Marx’s original meaning.
• Authority Ranking. A hierarchical relationship where orders flow down the tree of authority. The relationship implies a reciprocal obligation from those higher up.
• Equality Matching. “Tit for tat”; basically a reciprocity system
• Market Pricing. A “one of” relationship, where the “relationship” only lasts for the duration of the negotiation. Think modern day consumers, although Wallenstein’s relationship with the Catholic League diuring the 30 years war is a classic exemplar of this form.
• the Null set. i.e. no relationship or interaction.

In short, Fiske argues that all human cultures are composed of elements which can be broken down into these five basic forms of relationship, often in a mix and match format. Cultural notions of “right” and “wrong” (ideal “morality”), are defined to a large degree by the selection of the “proper” basic form. Furthermore, it is quite possible for any form to gain dominance in a given culture becoming, in effect, the default value of that culture. Some of the evolutionary psychology comes into Fiske’s Relational Models theory via Nick Haslam (see his Relational Models Theory: A Contemporary Overview; Haslam’s early work in the area used a lot of Cosmides and Toby’s work on the evolution of “cheater modules”) and, in my own work, I pull in a fair amount of phenomenology and social constructionism as well.
Let me go back to the beginning for a minute when I said that these were Ideal Types. When any theoretician uses these concepts, it is really important to hold several caveats in mind. First, Ideal Types don’t actually exist; they are useful heuristics and, possibly, dimensions to map out changes in social relations but that’s it. Second, using these Ideal Types, especially if you include Evolutionary Psychology and neuro-biology, can be very easily misunderstood and/or abused. It is, in many ways, too easy to use grossly inaccurate presentations of data that fit political (not scientific) preconceptions. Third, using these models in an applied sense or, rather, working with them to develop predictive models based on them, is really tough – you have to keep up with a lot of different literature in many different disciplines and learn to speak a lot of different disciplinary “languages”. In short, it require a multi- or inter-disciplinary mind as well as a really good network of people trained in different disciplines who you can actually talk with; something that is rather rare in the halls of Academe.

On the plus side, however, using these models and developing a multi-/inter-disciplinary mind and network can be an absolute blast! They open up so many new lines of questions and new ways of seeing the world that you can actually retain your sense of “Wonder” about our species.

Category: Anthropology, Epistemology
Tags: Alan Fiske, Relational Models