Social Anthropology I: Culture and Its Attributes, Holism, Universals, Enculturation, Acculturation, Transculturation, Culture Change and Culture Shock, Relativism, Civilization, the Folk–Urban Continuum, Great and Little Traditions, Pluralism and World-View; Society, Groups, Institutions, Status and Role, Incest, Endogamy, Exogamy and Rites of Passage; the Family and Its Types and Rules of Residence; and Marriage, Its Forms, Transactions and Exchange

E.B. Tylor opened Primitive Culture (1871) with the definition every answer still begins from: culture or civilization is "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society". Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn (Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, 1952) collected 164 definitions and grouped them as descriptive, historical, normative, psychological, structural and genetic; Kroeber had argued in 1917 that culture is "superorganic", a level of reality not reducible to biology or individual psychology; Clifford Geertz later made it "webs of significance" that man himself has spun (1973), to be interpreted rather than explained. Whatever the definition, anthropologists agree on its attributes. Culture is learned, not inherited biologically; shared by members of a group, so that it is a group's rather than a person's; symbolic, resting on language and on arbitrary meanings attached to things (Leslie White made the symbol the defining capacity of humans); integrated, its parts fitting together so that a change in one affects others; adaptive, a means by which people fit their environment; transmitted across generations; and dynamic, always changing. Holism, the discipline's commitment to studying culture as an integrated whole — economy, kinship, politics, religion and ecology together — follows from the attribute of integration; Malinowski's functionalism and Ruth Benedict's "patterns" are two versions of it. Cultural universals are features found in every known culture. Clark Wissler's "universal culture pattern" (Man and Culture, 1923) had nine heads — speech, material traits, art, mythology and scientific knowledge, religious practices, family and social systems, property, government and war; G.P. Murdock's "common denominator of cultures" (1945) listed over seventy items from age-grading and bodily adornment to weaning and weather control; Donald Brown's Human Universals (1991) is the modern list. Universals exist at the level of categories — every society has marriage, a kinship terminology, a prohibition of incest, rules of property, music and a way of dealing with death — while their content varies without limit.

A society is an organised aggregate of people who share a territory, interact regularly and reproduce themselves across generations; culture is its way of life. A social group is two or more people who interact, share an identity and have expectations of each other: Charles Cooley (1909) distinguished primary groups — face-to-face, intimate, enduring, such as the family, the play group and the neighbourhood — from the secondary groups of impersonal, goal-directed relations. An institution is an established, sanctioned pattern of behaviour organised round a basic need or activity — family, marriage, economy, polity, religion — which Malinowski analysed by its charter, personnel, norms, material apparatus, activity and function. An association is a group deliberately organised to pursue a specific interest — a club, a union, a caste association, a tribal youth dormitory — and in MacIver's formula one belongs to an association but follows an institution. A community is a group sharing a locality and a common life, with a sense of belonging: Ferdinand Tönnies set Gemeinschaft (community, based on kinship, neighbourhood and sentiment) against Gesellschaft (society, based on contract and interest) in 1887, and Redfield's The Little Community (1955) described its anthropological ideal type — distinctive, small, homogeneous and self-sufficient. Status and role are Ralph Linton's (The Study of Man, 1936): a status is a position in a social system with its rights and duties, either ascribed (assigned at birth by sex, age, caste, lineage) or achieved (acquired by effort or choice — shaman, headman, teacher); a role is "the dynamic aspect of a status", the behaviour expected of one who occupies it. Robert Merton (1957) added the role-set, the array of roles attached to one status, and role conflict follows from it. The incest taboo, the prohibition of sexual relations and marriage between close kin — parent and child and full siblings everywhere, wider categories in most societies — is the nearest thing to a true universal, with rare royal exceptions (ancient Egypt, the Inca, Hawaii). It has been explained biologically (avoidance of inbreeding depression), psychologically (Edward Westermarck, 1891: familiarity in childhood produces sexual indifference — supported by Arthur Wolf's study of Taiwanese "minor marriages" and Joseph Shepher's of kibbutz children), by family harmony (Malinowski, Seligman), by Freud's primal horde (Totem and Taboo, 1913), and by alliance (Tylor's "marrying out or being killed out", 1889; Lévi-Strauss, 1949: the taboo compels exchange between families and so creates society). Endogamy, marriage within a group, and exogamy, marriage outside it — terms coined by John McLennan in Primitive Marriage (1865) — work at different levels at once: an Indian marriage is usually endogamous to the caste or sub-caste and exogamous to the clan, gotra and in the north the village; tribal clans are exogamous and the tribe usually endogamous. Rites of passage, in Arnold van Gennep's Les rites de passage (1909), mark the movement of a person from one status to another — birth, initiation, marriage, death — in three phases: separation (pre-liminal), transition or margin (liminal) and incorporation (post-liminal). Victor Turner (The Ritual Process, 1969) developed the liminal phase — "betwixt and between" — and the communitas, the intense comradeship of those who pass through it together; the Hindu samskaras, the upanayana and the tribal youth dormitories' initiations are the Indian cases.

George Peter Murdock (Social Structure, 1949), from a sample of 250 societies, defined the family as "a social group characterized by common residence, economic cooperation, and reproduction. It includes adults of both sexes, at least two of whom maintain a socially approved sexual relationship, and one or more children, own or adopted", and held the nuclear family — a married couple and their children — to be universal, either alone or as the building block of composite families. The claim was tested and qualified. Kathleen Gough ("Is the Family Universal? The Nayar Case", 1959) described the traditional Nayar of Kerala, among whom a girl was ritually married with a tali before puberty, took visiting husbands (sambandham) later, and lived with her children in her matrilineal joint household (taravad) with her brothers, the husbands contributing neither residence nor economic support. Melford Spiro ("Is the Family Universal?", 1954) found in the early Israeli kibbutz that children were raised communally in children's houses; matrifocal households of the Caribbean and elsewhere, centred on mothers, were a third case. The consensus is that some form of socially recognised unit for the care of children is universal, while its composition varies. There are two methods of studying the family. The typological method classifies families at one moment by composition — nuclear, joint, extended — and counts them in a census. The processual or developmental method, introduced by Meyer Fortes in "The Developmental Cycle in Domestic Groups" (1958, in the volume edited by Jack Goody), treats the domestic group as passing through phases — expansion (marriage and the birth of children), dispersion or fission (the children's marriages and departures) and replacement (the succession of a new generation) — so that one family is nuclear at one stage and joint at another; A.M. Shah (The Household Dimension of the Family in India, 1973) showed that most Indian households move through nuclear and joint phases in a cycle, and that census counts of nuclear households do not show the "breakdown" of the joint family. The types the syllabus lists are these. Ralph Linton (1936) opposed the conjugal family, built on the marriage bond — husband, wife and children — to the consanguineal family, built on blood ties, a core of related kin (as brothers and sisters and the sisters' children in the Nayar taravad) with spouses at the margin. W. Lloyd Warner's pair of the family of orientation (natal, into which one is born) and the family of procreation (conjugal, which one founds by marriage) — the syllabus's "conjugal-natal" — shows that every married adult belongs to two nuclear families. The nuclear or elementary family is a couple and their unmarried children. The joint family, in Indian usage, is two or more nuclear families related through the male line (or the female line among matrilineal groups) sharing residence, hearth, property and worship — Irawati Karve's definition in Kinship Organization in India (1953) — and I.P. Desai measured its "degrees of jointness" by residence, property and the fulfilment of obligations. The extended family extends the nuclear family vertically across three or more generations (the stem family of Frédéric Le Play, in which one married child stays with the parents) or horizontally to married siblings.

The family's functions, in Murdock's summary, are four — sexual (regulating sexual access), reproductive (producing and legitimising children), economic (the division of labour and pooling of resources) and educational (socialising children); Talcott Parsons reduced the modern family's essential functions to two, the primary socialisation of children and the stabilisation of adult personalities. The trends of change the syllabus names are interlinked. Industrialisation and urbanisation, by separating workplace from home and moving people to cities, favour smaller households: William Goode (World Revolution and Family Patterns, 1963) predicted convergence on the conjugal family as the "fit" for industrial society, and Parsons described the "isolated nuclear family". Indian evidence qualifies this: households have become smaller in cities, but kin networks, remittances, joint property, shared rituals and the care of the old keep "functional jointness" alive across separate households (Pauline Kolenda, 1987; A.M. Shah). Globalisation adds transnational families, long-distance marriages, migrant workers' split households and new media of contact, and changes the age at marriage and the size of the family. The feminist movements questioned the family itself as a site of unequal power: the unpaid domestic and care work of women, control over women's sexuality and mobility, son preference and dowry violence, and the gendered socialisation of children — the concerns of Leela Dube's work on the socialisation of Hindu girls and on matriliny and Islam in Lakshadweep (Unit VIII) — and they fought for legal changes in marriage, divorce, inheritance (the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act of 2005, which made daughters coparceners) and domestic violence (2005).

The Royal Anthropological Institute's Notes and Queries (1951) defined marriage as "a union between a man and a woman such that children born to the woman are recognized legitimate offspring of both partners". The definition failed the Nayar, whose children had no social father, and the Nuer "woman-marriage", in which a barren woman pays bridewealth for a wife and becomes the legal father of her children, and "ghost marriage", in which a man marries in the name of a dead kinsman; Kathleen Gough (1959) therefore defined it as a relationship establishing a woman's child as a legitimate member of society, and Edmund Leach (1955) described marriage as a bundle of rights — to establish the legal father and mother of a woman's children, to a monopoly of the spouse's sexuality, to the spouse's labour and property, and to create a relationship of affinity between the spouses' kin — of which different societies combine different selections. Some institution of socially sanctioned union is universal; its form is not. Monogamy is marriage to one spouse at a time (serial monogamy allows a sequence through divorce or death). Polygamy, plural marriage, is polygyny (one husband, several wives — sororal when the wives are sisters) or polyandry (one wife, several husbands — fraternal or adelphic when the husbands are brothers, as among the Todas of the Nilgiris, where a ceremony of presenting a bow and arrow, the pursütpimi, assigned social paternity (Rivers, 1906), and among the Khasa of Jaunsar-Bawar studied by D.N. Majumdar, and in Tibet; non-fraternal among the traditional Nayar). In Murdock's comparative samples polygyny is permitted in a large majority of societies (roughly three-quarters or more), though most men in them have one wife, and polyandry is rare, under one per cent. Hypergamy is the marriage of a woman into a higher-ranking group (the anuloma of Hindu texts), hypogamy her marriage into a lower one (pratiloma); among the Rajputs and Kulin Brahmans of Bengal hypergamy produced a shortage of grooms at the top and dowry inflation. The levirate is the marriage of a widow to her dead husband's brother (usually the younger), keeping her and her children in the lineage; the sororate is a widower's marriage to his dead wife's sister; both express marriage as an alliance between groups rather than individuals. Preferential marriage names a category of kin one ought to marry — cross-cousins (children of a brother and a sister), as in much of south India with the mother's brother's daughter and the elder sister's daughter, or the father's brother's daughter among many Arab groups; prescriptive marriage, in Rodney Needham's sense, is a system in which the kinship terminology itself defines the category of permitted spouse, so that marrying outside it is logically excluded, as in the matrilateral cross-cousin systems of the Kachin of Burma (Leach) and the Purum of Manipur (Needham, 1962).

Marriage is accompanied almost everywhere by transfers of goods and services, and their forms are one of the discipline's classic comparisons. Bridewealth (bride price) is a payment from the groom's kin to the bride's — cattle among the Nuer and other pastoralists of East Africa, cash and goods among many Indian tribes (the Gond, the Santal, the Ho, where the gonong can be heavy) — read not as a purchase but as compensation for the loss of a daughter's labour and fertility, a transfer of rights over her children to the husband's lineage (rights in genetricem), and a pledge that circulates, since a brother uses his sister's bridewealth to marry. Bride service is labour instead of goods, as among the !Kung San. Dowry is property given with the bride by her own kin — to her or to the couple, and in practice often to the groom's family. Jack Goody and S.J. Tambiah (Bridewealth and Dowry, 1973) set the two against each other: bridewealth belongs to the hoe cultivation and descent-group societies of Africa, where women's labour is central and property passes within the lineage; dowry to the plough agriculture and stratified societies of Eurasia, where it is a form of pre-mortem inheritance for daughters that lets families marry their daughters into equal or higher ranks and so maintains status. In India dowry spread, with hypergamy and the commercialisation of marriage, into castes that once gave bridewealth, and it was prohibited by the Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961; "dowry death" was added to the Indian Penal Code in 1986 and is carried into the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita of 2023. Marriage as exchange is Claude Lévi-Strauss's thesis in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), building on Marcel Mauss's The Gift (1925): the incest taboo forces men to give their sisters and daughters to other groups and to receive wives from them, and the exchange of women is the fundamental exchange that binds groups into society. Restricted (direct) exchange links two groups that give to each other, as in sister exchange and bilateral cross-cousin marriage; generalised (indirect) exchange links three or more groups in a cycle in which A gives wives to B, B to C and C to A, as in matrilateral cross-cousin marriage, producing wife-givers ranked above or below wife-takers (as among the Kachin). Feminist anthropologists — Gayle Rubin ("The Traffic in Women", 1975), Marilyn Strathern — accepted the insight and questioned its assumption that women are objects exchanged by men rather than actors who exchange.