ABSTRACT
No term is more pivotal to the identity of social anthropology than that of ‘society’ itself, yet none is more contestable. The problems are several, and are indeed the central problems of the discipline. One is that, far from having devised the notion for its own theoretical purposes, social anthropology is itself a relatively recent product of a certain way of imagining and thinking about society which has a long pedigree in the history of Western thought. The challenge and the promise of anthropology is to bring ourselves to ‘think society’ in other ways, yet to do so is to undercut the very foundations of the discipline. No wonder, then, that anthropologists seem to live perilously on an intellectual knife-edge! Another problem, equally pressing, is that our own activity in thinking and writing is situated within a milieu in which ‘society’ is in common and everyday use, carrying powerful rhetorical overtones in the moral and political discourse of citizens as well as in the academic discourse of social scientists (who are of course citizens as well). There may well be debate about whether such a thing as society actually exists ‘out there’, but there can be no doubting the fact that there are people out there who regularly talk about it, and therefore that discourse on society is just as much a part of the reality we study as it is of our way of studying it, if indeed these two can be separated at all.
