Social and Cultural Dynamics

A Study of Change in Major Systems of Art, Truth, Ethics, Law and Social Relationships

Pitirim Sorokin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351490597
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This classic work is a revised and abridged version, in a single volume, of the work which more than any other catapulted Pitirim Sorokin into being one of the most famed figures of twentieth-century sociology. Its original publication occurred before World War II. This revised version, written some twenty years later, reflects a postwar environment. Earlier than most, Sorokin took the consequences of the breakdown of colonialism into account in discussing the renaissance of the great cultures of African and Asian civilization. Other than perhaps F.S.C. Northrop, no individual better incorporated the new role of the Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic peoples in this postwar world.

Sorokin came to view social and cultural dynamics in terms of three major processes: a major shift of mankind's creative center from Europe to the Pacific; a progressive disintegration of the sensate culture; and finally the first blush of the emergence and growth of a new idealistic sociocultural order. This volume is perhaps most famous for revealing Sorokin's remarkable efforts to understand the relationship of war and peace to the process of social and political change. Contrary to received wisdom, he shows that the magnitude and depth of war grows in periods of social, cultural, and territorial expansion by the nation. In short, war is just as often a function of development as it is of social decay.

This long-unavailable volume remains one of the major touchstones by which we can judge efforts to create an international social science. There are few areas of social or cultural life that are not covered—from painting, art, and music, to the ethos of universalism and particularism. These are terms which Sorokin introduced into the literature long before the rise of functional doctrines. For all those interested in cultural and historical processes, this volume provides the essence of Sorokin's remarkably prescient effort to achieve sociological transcendence, by takin

PART ONE

INTRODUCTORY

1

FORMS AND PROBLEMS OF CULTURE INTEGRATION AND METHODS OF THEIR STUDY

I. CULTURE INTEGRATION AND CULTURE UNITY — A DARK PROBLEM

Is every culture an integrated whole, where no essential part is incidental but each is organically connected with the rest? Or is it a mere spatial congeries of cultural objects, values, traits, which have drifted fortuitously together and are united only by their spatial adjacency, just by the fact that they are thrown together, and by nothing more? If it is the first, then what is the principle of integration, the axis around which all the essential characteristics are centered and which explains why these characteristics are what they are and why they live and pulsate as they do? If the second, then how did it happen that in a given area one kind of conglomeration of cultural objects and values took place, while in another area a different kind occurred?

For the moment it is unimportant how we define human culture. In the broadest sense it may mean the sum total of everything which is created or modified by the conscious or unconscious activity of two or more individuals interacting with one another or conditioning one another’s behavior. According to this definition, not only science, philosophy, religion, art, technics, and all the physical paraphernalia of an advanced civilization.are cultural phenomena; but the trace of a footstep on the sand left by a savage and seen by Robinson Crusoe, a heap of refuse and broken trees left by an exploring party in a virgin forest, the bones and shells and ashes left by some prehistoric tribe in the ground excavated by an archeologist — these and millions of other human creations and modifications are all a part of culture.

II. VARIOUS MEANINGS OF CULTURE INTEGRATION

Many of us are familiar with the fine living rooms of some of our well-to-do friends. I have in mind just such a room. It is spacious and is filled with exquisite furniture and rare art objects. There are a few pieces of antique New England furniture. The ceremonial costume of a Russian priest (“riza”) is fastened on one of the walls. Side by side with it there is a picture of a famous Japanese school of painting. Then there are two works by a French Impressionist, and one by a prominent cubistic painter. There are also an Italian Primitive, two genuine statues of Buddha imported from Siam, two Chinese vases of the T’ang period, and several other treasures of different times and countries. On the floors antique Oriental rugs lie near a hooked rug of old New England. The living room is a “culture area.” Now the question arises : Is the culture represented by the living room an integrated whole, or is it a mere spatial conglomeration of various things (each valuable separately), and is this adjacency the only bond which unites them into a single cultural complex?

Let us assume for a moment that spatial adjacency is the only bond of union. Shall we then style an array of this sort by the term “integrated culture”? Or shall we refuse the term to such accumulations?

Whether or not we grant the term is of little importance. What is important is that there do exist cultural conglomerations where the parts are bound together by different and additional ties.

Let us turn, for further instances, to “immaterial” culture. Suppose we take, on the one hand, August Comte’s System of Positive Philosophy and, on the other, one of the recent elementary texts in social problems. Putting aside the question as to whether or not this or that theory expounded in these works is true, throughout all the volumes of Comte there runs a unity of fundamental principles which binds all the chapters logically. Without Comte’s law of the three states connected with his classification of sciences and principles of positive knowledge the chapters lose their chief meaning. The work is inwardly integrated by the logic of its main principles. In the text on social problems, however, usually one chapter treats of poverty, the next of crime, the third of fascism or communism, the next of case method, the next of religion, another of the city and the farmer. Something may be said on ecology; ecology is perhaps followed by a chapter on the negro and race problems; then all this farrago is further enriched by pages on the family and birth control, the League of Nations, and countless other subjects. When one tries to find out what unites all these topics, one often finds only the binding of the book. They are connected neither logically nor functionally. The book has become a dumping place for a miscellaneous heap of topics, theories, ideas, and facts; their only connection is that of spatial adjacency.

Enough of illustration. It has already sufficiently shown that there are various forms of integration which differ from one another fundamentally. Now we can attempt to order them and to reduce their multiplicity to the simpler form of a few fundamental classes with an indication of the basis of integration in each class.

III. CLASSIFICATION OF THE MAIN FORMS OF THE INTEGRATION OF CULTURE ELEMENTS

All the numerous interrelations of the various elements of culture can be reduced to four basic types: (i) Spatial or Mechanical Adjacency, ranging from a loose and accidental concurrence of two or more cultural objects to a mechanical union of the elements into one structural unity (say, glued or cemented or sewn or tied together); (2) Association Due to an External Factor; (3) Causal or Functional Integration; (4) Internal or Logico-meaningful Unity.

A. Spatial or Mechanical Adjacency (Congeries). This means any conglomeration of cultural elements (objects, traits, values, ideas) in a given area of social and physical space, with spatial or mechanical concurrence as the only bond of union. A dump in which are fragments of a great variety of objects — pieces of paper, broken bottles, empty cans, fragments of clothing, discarded spoons, wire, garbage, furniture, ashes, coal, tools — offers an example of such a combination. All these objects just drifted or were thrown together, and this is the only bond that unites them. An untidy attic, with its miscellaneous array of many articles, is yet another example. The same thing can be said of the cases of the spatial conglomeration of various architectural styles and of the logically unrelated discussions of various social problems within the limits of one book. Two pieces of paper (say, a page from Plato’s Republic and the advertisement of an automobile company) glued together into one meaningless mechanical unity; a piece of wood nailed to a remnant of a shoe without any meaning or function as an instrument for anything; an Ionic or Corinthian column attached to a flat-roofed garage without architectural, aesthetic, or structural significance — these and hundreds of similar combinations are examples of thé spatial and purely mechanical congeries of various cultural objects and values. As a matter of fact, what anthropologists call a culture area is often nothing more than a spatial adjacency of the traits and complexes of the area in question.

B. Indirect Association through a Common External Factor. A somewhat greater unification occurs in such cases where two or more culture elements, spatially adjacent but with no functional or logical connection, are also related to one another through the association of each with a common factor external to both or all of them. In the northern part of Vologda province in North Russia, for example, the following culture elements exist together : vodka as a beverage, skis used by the peasants in the winter time, houses built out of heavy timber, large stoves for heating, felt winter boots, the gathering together during the winter evenings of the boys and girls in each of their houses in turn, the performance of plays, singing, and love making. None of these elements requires the others either logically or functionally. Vodka as such does not require skis or felt boots; felt boots do not require a large stove or specific forms of winter-evening entertainment. But all of these traits are perceptibly connected with the climatic conditions of the area with its cold and its long winters. Each trait, through its connection with the climatic factor, is likewise affiliated indirectly with the other traits. As a result we have a unification of heterogeneous culture elements, not only spatially but also through their connection with one common external factor. That is the unification talked of by many sociological and anthropological integrators.

C. Causal or Functional Integration. By this is meant a combination of cultural elements in which they compose one causal (functional) unity. Usually, where the elements are “material,” functional unity is superimposed upon spatial adjacency and external association, but not every spatially adjacent or externally related combination will be a functionally integrated unity. The parts of an automobile spread over the floor of a factory or packed into one box before being assembled into one functional whole, the finished automobile, are a mere spatial array. When they are assembled into one whole, their combination becomes functional and operates so that every important part depends upon the others. The same can be said of the house in contradistinction to the sum of the materials of which it is built: stone, cement, bricks, timber, paint, nails, and so on. Dumped together in one yard these elements form a mere heap of contiguous parts. When the house is built, it is a structural and functional unity.

Similarly, causal or functional unity is likewise of a far higher degree of integration than that of a number of elements spatially adjacent but also related through a common external factor. In a functional array as a rule the parts are related to one another directly, or, if indirectly, by several internal “centers” which are closer to them in essential nature than would be the case in a purely external integration. Not every cell of an organism or bolt in a car is adjacent or directly related to all the other cells or parts. But all the cells are directly connected through the nervous system, the blood circulation, and the organs, just as the bolts or other parts are united through the whole frame of the car, the electric system, and so on. And these unifying factors are all internal to the system itself.

But the simple cases we have been considering are far from exhausting the problems of the functional integration of cultural elements. The field is infinitely larger and more important. In order to make this clear, a few diagnostic criteria of the functional relationship between the parts of a cultural configuration should be pointed out. Simply stated, they consist chiefly of the tangible, noticeable, testifiable,²⁰ direct interdependence (mutual or one-sided) of the variables or parts upon one another and upon the whole system. If variation A is always followed by B (under the same conditions and in a large enough number of cases so that mere chance is eliminated), we say that they are functionally related. This means that any cultural synthesis is to be regarded as functional, when, on the one hand, the elimination of one of its important elements perceptibly influences the rest of the synthesis in its functions (and usually in its structure); and when, on the other hand, the separate element, being transposed to a quite different combination, either cannot exist in it or has to undergo a profound modification to become a part of it. Such is the symptomatic barometer of internal integration, a barometer which simply applies the principle of causality or functionalism to each case in question.

One can now see the profound difference between mere spatial adjacency, between external unification, and the deeper synthesis of functional unity. A bolt or spring taken from an unassembled pile of automobile parts does not modify the pile essentially; removed from an assembled car, it may completely impede the performance of the car. Moreover, the bolt or spring itself does not change in significance when removed from a miscellaneous heap, but if it be detached from a machine in which it performs an essential function, it loses that function entirely.

Let us now pass on to more complex examples. Can we take, say, the stock-market system of Wall Street from the modern capitalistic type of economic organization and transpose it, say, to the society of the Tro-briands? The answer is that as soon as this is done, the capitalist system of economy here fails to function normally for lack of the stock market, while among the Trobriands, Wall Street does not have any chance to exist or survive generally in the form which it has in the United States. This means that the stock market is essentially a functional part of the American economic system. Suppose we should take the parliamentary regime in its English form, together with the principles of contractual relations and of the equality of all citizens before the law, and the other democratic tenets of Victorian England, and transplant them in the Hindu caste society. The results would be similar; the democratic politico-juridical complex can hardly be grafted on the caste-society tree and yet retain the same form which it had; it would either die or be changed enormously. On the other hand, the rest of the Victorian democratic sociopolitical system could hardly function as it did without the aid of the transplanted parts of the complex. As a matter of fact, even in Continental European societies, where the configuration of cultural elements differs from that of England, though by less than does the Hindu, the parliamentary system has never functioned in the way in which it does in England. One has only to glance at the history of parliamentarism in Germany, Austria, Russia, or Italy to perceive the difference.

In brief, in any culture area there are always present in the totality of the traits, patterns, objects, and values of which it consists, complexes which represent a functional integration.

There is no need to stress the fact that the degree of functional unity or functional interdependence is everywhere not the same: it fluctuates from unity to unity; in some cases it is exceedingly close, in others looser, until finally it imperceptibly passes into either a mere external unity or even a mere spatial adjacency.

In sociology and the social sciences there is a multitude of theories that attempt to describe and interpret culture generally along the lines of functional unity. All the theories that take some specific variable internal to a culture (whether it be modes of production, technique and invention, religion, morals, art and science, philosophy and forms of government) and try to “explain” all or the majority of the other characteristics of the culture in question as a “function” or “superstructure” or “effect” of this variable : all such theories, as I have already suggested, assume the existence of a causal-functional integration between the parts. In other words, their promulgators appear to be partisans of the view of the functional unity of all culture elements.

In view of the virtual unanimity of opinion it is unnecessary to insist upon the existence of the causal-functional sort of in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Transaction Social Science Classics
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Foreword
• Table of Contents
• Part 1. Introductory
• Part 2. Fluctuation of Ideational, Idealistic, and Sensate Forms of Art
• Part 3. Fluctuation of Ideational, Idealistic and Sensate Systems of Truth and Knowledge
• Part 4. Fluctuation of Ideational and Sensate Forms of Ethical and Juridical Culture Mentality
• Part 5. Types and Fluctuation of the Systems of Social Relationships
• Part 6. Fluctuation of War in Intergroup Realationships
• Part 7. Fluctuation of Internal Disturbances in Intragroup Realationships
• Part 8. Culture, Personalty and Conduct
• Part 9. Why and How of Sociocultural Change
• Bibliography
• Index of Subjects
• The Author