Half-way there

books:


	• The Social Cage: Human Nature and the Evolution of Society Alexandra Maryanski, Jonathan Turner Stanford University Press, 1993 - 228 pages average customer review:based on 1 review
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Half-way there

This book accomplishes half of what it intends. The authors try to show through evolutionary studies that man is by biological nature only a loosely social animal. Hunter-gather societies represent the maximum of social organization that fits our biology. The authors do a good job demonstrating this. They authors then try to show how over the past 10,000 years culture has developed to cage humans into tighter social relations than is natural for us. This part of the exposition I found disappointing. They give descriptions of the complexity of the different types of society, but surpissingly they give virtually no specifics on how the humans are caged by those relations. They simply state the fact with no illustration. For example, horticultural societies use elaborate kinship structures to maintain more complex social organization. Humans become caged by their kinship relations, say the authors. But how so? They give very few specifics, you are left to extrapolate on your own. Since this is the main theme of the book it is disappointing. Even when they get to industrial society, which they claim reduces the caging, they just make this bald statement without analyzing the specifics, despite many pages describing industrial society. So the authors missed the opportunity to present their full thesis in the 2nd half of the book, but the first half of the book is quite interesting.

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