Our world becomes smaller everyday. Mass media and communication technology, as well as greatly expanded travel opportunities allow much of the population in the United States to experience different cultures and ways of life firsthand, and nearly everyone sees reports on television about events in far-off places. Beyond the personal experience, this age of globalization and ever more interconnected economic systems draw companies, governments, and individuals closer together—yet not always harmoniously. Today, many business careers require familiarity with diverse cultures, languages, expectations, and worldviews. Comparative societies as a field of sociology teaches us how to understand different ways of life and views of the world.
The objectives of this course are twofold: (1) to provide you with basic sociological knowledge about different societies, and (2) to enable you to think critically and creatively about different societies and thus create your own informed understanding with application to your everyday life. In many ways, sociology in general involves a common-sense awareness of similarity and difference. However, the ability to compare different societies requires a base of information beyond common knowledge, and a coherent and systematic perspective, known as theory, with which to interpret knowledge. This is precisely the focus of this course. Not all similarities and differences are important, and perhaps the most important skill to learn is the ability to distinguish the crucial points of comparison from other points that are present but inconsequential. The sociologist also looks for things below the surface, beyond what is readily apparent.
From the very start, this requires you to develop critical thinking. This means that you can take things apart, read between the lines, so to speak, consider all the different explanations, even if you personally dislike the implications. For example, it is often taken for granted that poor people are lazy and they do not value work. However, research shows that about 80 percent of people at or below the poverty line believe that hard work will get them ahead in life.1 Furthermore, 44 percent of all poor are children younger than 16, and of those older than 16, 18 percent work full-time (yet remain at or below the poverty line), while another 68 percent worked full- or part-time during the previous year. Not only do the poor see work as a way out of poverty, but they actually do work. If the problem is not in the individual, then it must lie elsewhere. What other reasons do you think might contribute to poverty? How can we explain that many full-time workers (2.2 million people) remain in poverty? Part of critical thinking is attitude—the will and desire to see through the easy and superficial or familiar answers. The other aspect requires a body of knowledge. A critical attitude without factual knowledge is just speculation, yet knowledge without the ability to interpret it is just memorization.
In this course, you will study several methods that scholars use to compare societies. The two main approaches are structural and ethnographic. In either case, we can study each area as it appears in the present and as it has developed through history. We can study how people think, usually termed a “micro” or ethnographic approach, and how the institutions and traditions in society shape the individual, usually termed a “macro” or structural approach. When we compare societies, we can compare how people think, what values they hold, what food they eat. We can compare institutions, such as family life, religions, government, and economic systems. We can compare culture, such as art, literature, and entertainment. We can compare different societies to each other, or we can compare the same society to itself at different moments in history. History is always important: if we want to know where we’re going, we need to know where we are now; and to know where we are now, we need to know where we've been and how we got here.
When comparing one society to another, the tendency sometimes arises to make value judgments about which society is better than another. But this is not the role of the social scientist. Our goal is to understand other ways of life and institutions, not to assess their quality. Although scientific insight often leads to assessing present conditions, frequently shapes governmental policy or guides business negotiations, and sometimes leads to change if we do not like the status quo, this is the role of the activist and citizen, not the scientist. Although we cannot completely suspend the values with which we are raised, it is crucial that we learn how to look at the world through the values that other people have, in order to understand the world and the complex societies people create.
Before we can begin to study different societies, both past and present, we must establish a vocabulary of terms and basic concepts that will facilitate discussion of more complex concepts later. A few basic terms provide a common frame of reference. In our social scientific tradition, the study of societies began as an anthropological study of so-called “primitive” societies. The first part of this course introduces these terms and proceeds to early attempts to understand different societies, or as they understood it, “primitive” societies. From there, we move toward the present day and conclude the course by comparing several current societies using contemporary theory and methods. Each of the three required texts for this course represents a major contribution to the field of comparative societies.
1See Stanley D. Eitzen, and Maxine Baca-Zinn. Social Problems, 7th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997. This book has a thorough discussion of welfare and the working poor, with all the latest statistics.
