Ryerson University

• SOC 111

• MODULE 08 SOC 111 CULTURE, FORAGING SOCIETIES, AND THE TRANSFORMATION TO EARLY AGRARIAN SOCIETIES © Kelly Train, PhD, 2020 The copyright to this original work is held by Professor Train and students registered in course SOC 111 can use this material for the purposes of this course but no other use is permitted, and there can be no sale or transfer or use of the work for any other purposes without explicit permission of Professor Train. Introduction • In the 1920s and 1930s, Margaret Mead and a handful of her colleagues, approached the study of human behaviour from a very different perspective. Biological determinists measured people’s body parts and claimed that these measurements (including a person’s shape and size) pre-determined one’s `superiority’ or `inferiority’ in terms of social status, IQ, occupation, and other abilities and behaviours; in contrast, Margaret Mead and her fellow anthropologists explored human behaviour by studying kin-ordered societies (also known as foraging societies, nomadic societies, and hunting and gathering societies); Margaret Mead was most famous for her studies of Papua New Guinea and Samoa • Mead’s method for studying these societies was participant observation; using this approach, the researcher would live with people in their own community and participate in their everyday practices and customs; participant observation is unique in that it allows the researcher to learn first-hand about a society and its inhabitants; this method is called participant observation in so far as it involves the researcher actually participating as a member of the society in order to observe people in their own setting; this method is still used by anthropologists and sociologists to study culture, society, human behaviour and social interaction • In their many studies of foraging societies, Margaret Mead and her colleagues discovered that there is nothing that is biologically-determined or inherent about human behaviour; in other words, the way we behave and interact with one another is socially constructed; as social beings, we learn the ’rules’ of society, how to behave, what to value, through the cultural conditions in which we are raised, live, and participate; Margaret Mead’s findings were a direct challenge to biological determinist thought; for Mead, human behaviour is a product of the process of socialization; the learned cultural beliefs and patterns of the society in which we live What is Culture? Overview