impossible to learn. It may be difficult to establish exactly what meaning they attach to certain of their beliefs and the concepts in which they are expressed. But so it is back home. I have never read about an alien society whose religion struck me as any more bizarre than the Christian religion I was ostensibly reared in myself (Genesis, Incarnation, Resurrection, a God who is both Three and One, both Omnipotent and Benevolent, etc.). But I have no more difficulty in conducting meaningful social relationships with fellow-members of my own society who are serious, paid-up Christians than did the British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard with the Azande of the Northern Sudan, whose beliefs about magic, oracles and witchcraft were totally alien to him. Indeed, Evans-Pritchard is on record as saying that ‘I found it strange at first to live among Azande and listen to native explanations of misfortunes which, to our minds, have apparent causes, but after a while I learned the idiom of their thought and applied notions of witchcraft as spontaneously as themselves in situations where the concept was relevant’; and what is more, ‘I always kept a supply of poison for the use of my household and neighbours and we regulated our affairs in accordance with the oracles’ decisions. I may remark that I found this as satisfactory a way of running my home and affairs as any other I know of.’8
So: however difficult it may be to establish what a fellow human being is ‘really’ thinking and therefore doing, it is always possible to identify not only the traits characteristic of an alien culture but the practices defining the roles by which institutions and societies remote in both time and place are constituted. There is, for example, no problem in equating the ‘brothers-in-arms’ whom we find swearing allegiance to each other in late medieval England9 with the male hetairoi (‘companions’) who associated together with the same common objective of martial glory and lucrative plunder in archaic Greece many centuries earlier and miles away: in status-conscious, warlike, agrarian societies, young men without land of their own or a powerful patron have an evident incentive to join together in this way, whatever may be the other differences in both their cultural and their social environment. Likewise, when the French historian Fernand Braudel, in his magisterial study of the Mediterranean world in the sixteenth century, reports the way in which the Spaniards treated the fellow-members of their society who were of Muslim descent, he himself equates it with the treatment of blacks by poor whites in the southern states of America; and there is no difficulty in identifying cases from a wide range of places and times where a dominant ethnic or religious group discriminates against a subordinate one in the same immediately recognizable way.10
No less easy to find are cases where the same pattern of social behaviour can be observed in two different societies but with a difference in the function which it performs in each. If you look at ancient Roman society during its expansion by conquest in the first and second centuries BC, you will find free men fighting in the legions and slaves cultivating the large agricultural estates; but if you look at some no less warlike Islamic societies of the Middle East a few centuries later, you will find free men cultivating the land and armies made up of slaves. This, admittedly, gives scope for some unproductive argument over the precise definition of ‘slavery’. Is the role of a slave soldier in an Islamic infantry regiment ‘really’ to be equated with that of a purchased chattel-slave in a Roman chain-gang? But, as always with such comparisons, the answer is not to quibble about the terms but to look at the practices which define the role. When you do – and the evidence is, in this instance, both abundant and reliable enough for the purpose – you will find that the institutional rules are such as in both cases to deny unequivocally to the ‘slave’ the power over his own person which attaches to the roles of the men who are institutionally defined as ‘free’. And from comparisons like these there emerges the distinction, as important in sociology as in biology, between homologues (similarities of form) and analogues (similarities of function). The Roman slave is the homologue of the Islamic soldier and the analogue of the Islamic cultivator; the Islamic slave is the homologue of the Roman cultivator and the analogue of the Roman soldier. If this prompts you to ask: but what about combining the functions in a single role?, the answer is: yes, there are some of those too. In societies as far apart in time and place as seventh-century T’ang China, medieval Saxony, fourteenth-century Prussia under the ‘Teutonic Knights’, seventeenth-century Sweden, and eighteenth-century Russia you will find ‘farmer-soldier’ roles, in which the practices of smallholding and militia service were combined. And this illustrates another point common to biological and sociological theory: evolution can come about through recombination, as well as mutation, of the units of selection.
Anyone observing a human society, including the observer’s own, will not only be curious about some more than other aspects of the social behaviour of its members, but curious about one level of social behaviour rather than another. If you have chosen to study work-groups in a factory, or schoolchildren in a classroom, or doctors and their patients in a hospital you will be engaging in a different sort of project from what you will be doing if you want to study a society’s institutions as such – its economy, or its type of government, or its form of organized religion. But not totally different. You can’t study groups, however small, without taking account of the institutional context of the behaviour you are studying, and you can’t study institutions, however large, without taking account of the behaviour of individual incumbents of specific roles. The leading British sociologist David Lockwood pointed out in an influential article published in 1964 that ‘system’ integration – i.e., stability in the relations between institutions – is quite different from ‘social’ integration – i.e., stability in the relations between groups.11 You may very well find that in the society you are studying there is much more of one than of the other: in societies as far apart as, for example, nineteenth-century Haiti and Egypt under the Mamluks, consistently high levels of inter-group hostility and violence were maintained within a largely unchanged set of economic, ideological and political institutions.12 But you can’t prise the two apart. You are always looking at the behaviour of people in roles; and there is not, and never will be, a society in which it is impossible to identify those roles or to trace their relations to each other at both the group and the institutional level.
Once, however, you have identified the society’s constituent roles, you may want to proceed in either of two very different directions. You may, on the one hand, want to go on to ask ‘why are these roles as they are?’ (a question which itself, as we shall see in a moment, can be interpreted in several different ways). Or you may, on the other hand, want to ask ‘what is it like to be one of the people occupying and performing one of these roles?’ This second question, obviously, is one which doesn’t arise at all in physics or chemistry. Not that it only arises in the study of the behaviour of human beings: some of the most remarkable recent research into the social behaviour of primates is directed precisely to establishing how far they do or don’t attribute to each other minds like their own.13 But this book is about the social behaviour of humans, and therefore organisms with minds which have the inborn capacity for all the richness and subtlety of language as spoken only by us. And it is this which gives the question ‘what is it like to be a whatever-you-are?’ not only its perennial interest but also its peculiar difficulties.
Unconvinced readers, fresh perhaps from ‘postmodernist’ texts, may protest that since I have already conceded the difficulty of establishing beyond argument what somebody else is ‘really’ thinking, I am hardly entitled to claim that even the most experienced sociologist can ever test an account of what is going on inside other people’s heads in the way that an explanatory hypothesis about the externally visible influences on other people’s externally visible behaviour can be tested if the requisite evidence is there. But there are two answers to this. First, the way to test a description of someone else’s subjective experience is to try it out on that person; unless that person is deliberately seeking to mislead, as one or more of those teenage Samoan girls appear to have deliberately deceived the gullible Margaret Mead, the observer’s description can be progressively expanded and refined to accord with what the