Key concept: society practice questions.

An ethnographer returns to a farming settlement twenty years after her first fieldwork. Not one of the people who sat on the water-allocation committee then is on it now, and several have died, yet the committee still meets on the same days, still hears the same kinds of claim over channel water, and can still call out every household for repair work. For the analysis of society, this is best taken to show that

• the settlement has not changed, because the arrangements recorded during the first fieldwork are still running
• the seats are ascribed, because a place on the committee evidently passes from one generation of a household to the next by inheritance
• an institution is an arrangement of positions and obligations that outlasts the particular people who fill it
• the households comply out of habit, so the arrangement itself calls for no further analysis

Answer: an institution is an arrangement of positions and obligations that outlasts the particular people who fill it

What persists is the set of positions, the claims attached to them and the obligations they can enforce, not the persons occupying them, and that is what makes an institution traceable across a generation. It does not follow that nothing has changed, since the same positions can be filled and used quite differently.

Boellstorff carried out fieldwork between 2004 and 2007 inside the online world Second Life, observing residents who held property, quarrelled over norms of behaviour, formed lasting groups and disciplined newcomers, and who mostly never met offline. The main implication he drew for the concept of society is that

• a society can be constituted by sustained relations and shared institutions without a shared physical territory
• online groups imitate the societies their members already belong to offline
• the concept of society applies only where researchers can observe people face to face
• virtual worlds are best studied as texts about offline life rather than as places where people actually live together

Answer: a society can be constituted by sustained relations and shared institutions without a shared physical territory

Boellstorff's argument is methodological as well as conceptual: he treated the virtual world as a fieldsite in its own right rather than as a shadow of offline life, which is only defensible if society is defined by relations and institutions rather than by shared ground.

In a village court described by a fieldworker, the men who hear land disputes are also elders of the lineages whose members bring them. They are expected to judge without favour and also to see that their own kin are not left without land. In practice such cases are adjourned again and again, and an elder whose lineage is involved usually stays away. For the analysis of society, the adjournments are best read as showing that

• the court is not really an institution, because an arrangement whose members cannot keep to its own rules has no force
• the elders are pursuing private interests behind the language of impartial judgement
• the settlement has no shared values, because two incompatible expectations are held at once
• one person holds several statuses at once, and the roles attached to them can impose conflicting obligations

Answer: one person holds several statuses at once, and the roles attached to them can impose conflicting obligations

A society places the same person in several positions at the same time, and the conduct expected in one may cut across the conduct expected in another; adjournment and withdrawal are how that clash is managed, not evidence that the institution has failed. Reading it as hypocrisy or as an absence of shared values turns a structural problem into a verdict on individuals.

Leach's study of the Kachin Hills of highland Burma, published in 1954, described communities that moved over decades between a ranked form organised around chiefly houses and an egalitarian form in which such claims were rejected, with people invoking both models to justify what they were doing. His conclusion about society is that

• the two forms belong to different peoples who happened to be living in the same hills
• one of the two forms must be the real system, the other a temporary breakdown of it
• a society is better described as a process in which people argue with competing models than as a system at rest
• the oscillation shows that no anthropological description of these communities can be attempted at all, however long the fieldwork is allowed to last

Answer: a society is better described as a process in which people argue with competing models than as a system at rest

Leach used the case against the assumption that a society is an equilibrium waiting to be described. The models are resources people use in claims against one another, so instability is part of the object rather than a failure of the description.

Gluckman's account of the opening of a bridge in Zululand in 1938 describes a single occasion attended by Zulu commoners, chiefs, missionaries and colonial officials, who moved between separate and shared activities in the course of the day. His reason for building an analysis out of one event was that

• single events are easier to record accurately than long-term patterns of behaviour in a community
• the event showed the participants forming one social field, which analysis by separate racial groups would conceal
• ceremonies are the only occasions on which a society reveals what it truly values to an observer
• the ethnographer had not stayed long enough to gather any other kind of material during his time in the field, and had to build an argument from a single occasion

Answer: the event showed the participants forming one social field, which analysis by separate racial groups would conceal

Situational analysis works outwards from an occasion to the relations that produced it. The methodological claim is that colonial Zululand was one system of relations under conflict, not two societies side by side — which a survey organised by group would have hidden.

Fei Xiaotong, writing in 1947 about rural China, contrasted two ways of organising social ties. Western association he pictured as bundled straw, in which individuals are gathered into groups with definite boundaries and membership; Chinese social relations he pictured as ripples spreading out from a stone dropped in water, with each person at the centre of their own set. The contrast is used to make the point that

• the peasants he described did not form groups of any kind and lived essentially as isolated individuals
• social ties in China were weaker in that period than they were in the societies he was comparing them with
• societies differ in how ties are shaped, so a model built on bounded membership groups will misdescribe some of them
• any society can be classified as belonging to one or other of these two types once enough evidence is gathered, provided the fieldwork behind it is thorough enough

Answer: societies differ in how ties are shaped, so a model built on bounded membership groups will misdescribe some of them

The image is about the shape of obligation: in the rippling pattern the strength of a tie falls off with distance from the person at the centre and every individual has a different set, so terms like membership and boundary do the wrong work. Fei was also arguing that Chinese sociology needed concepts drawn from Chinese material.