Traditional society

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. 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.S. Langlois, Traditions: Social, In: Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, Editors-in-Chief, International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Pergamon, Oxford, 2001, Pages 15829-15833, ,

Traditional and modern 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;M.Grenfell, Pierre Bourdieu: Agent Provocateur (2004) p. 41-4 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.Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (1989) p. 233–36

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.

However, theories positing the simple, unilineal evolution of societies from traditional to modern industrial are now seen as too simplistic,Langlois, in Smelser 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.Traditional and Modern Societies Recent work has emphasised instead the variety of traditional cultures, and the existence of intermediate forms as well as of 'alternative' modernisations.John R. Hall et al, Sociology on Culture (2003) p. 71-4

Ritual Traditional societies have been seen as characterised by powerful collective memories sanctioned by ritual, and with social guardians ensuring continuity of communal practices.Ulrich Bech et al, Reflexive Modernisation (1994) p. 63-5 Practice theory, however, has recently emphasised the role of ritual in facilitating change, as well as continuity.Hall, p. 78

Diversity 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,M. Hardt/K. Weeks eds., The Jameson Reader (2005) p. 319 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 ritualsDavid Attenborough, Life on Earth (1992) p. 304 were all used to cement links to a deep-reaching sense of continuity with ancestors and ancestral ways.Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1971) p. 276-80

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.Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion (1971) p. 81 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;M. I. Finley, The World of Odysseus (1967) p. 89 and p. 133-4 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",Quoted J. H Plumb, The Death of the Past (1969) in p. 24-5 new and more complex voluntary forms of social and public life balanced traditional society in a new equilibrium.J.Boardman et al eds., The Oxford History of the Classical World (1991) p. 232

Medieval Europe was an intensely local society of self-perpetuating peasant households,E. Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou (1980) p. 283 and p. 356 living within a slow moving culture dominated by customary law and by respect for ancient authorityR. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (1993) p. 74-5 and pervaded with an ahistorical political mentality focused upon the concepts of experience, usage, and law-as-custom.J. H. Hexter, On Historians (1979) p. 269-71

Enlightenment and post-traditionalism 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.Hardt, p. 264 and p. 251-2

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.M. Hardt, p. 240-4

Internet Global media such as the Internet have been seen as effective means of recreating traditional cultures.Kate Fox, Watching the English (2004) p. 14 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.Peter Worsley ed., The New Modern Sociology Readings (1991) p. 317

Traditional society

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