Community, society, culture: three keys to understanding today���s conflicted identities* Maurice Godelier ��cole des Hautes ��tudes en Sciences Sociales The author redefines three major concepts used in the social sciences: tribe, society, and community. He begins with his discovery that the Baruya, a tribe in New Guinea with whom he lived and worked, were not a society a few centuries ago. This made him wonder: How is a new society made? The author shows that neither kinship relations nor economic relations are sufficient to forge a new society. What welded a certain number of Baruya kin groups into a society were their political-religious relations, which enabled them to establish a form of sovereignty over a territory, its inhabitants, and its resources. He goes on to compare other examples of more or less recently formed societies, among which is Saudi Arabia, whose beginnings date from the end of the eighteenth century and he then clarifies the difference between tribe, society, ethnic group, and community, showing that a tribe is a society, but an ethnic group is a community. His analysis elucidates some contemporary situations, since tribes still play an important role in Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan, and so on. I would like to invite you to reflect with me on the content of what are probably the four most used concepts in the social sciences, but also beyond, since they abound in the discourse of politicians, journalists, and the like. They are: community, society, culture, and identity. Given the multiplicity of their uses and the diversity of the contexts, can we say that these four concepts are still useful to the production of scientific knowledge? I think they are, but under certain conditions, which I will attempt to define. In the years since I worked among the Baruya of Papua New Guinea (between 1966 and 1988), I have never stopped thinking about the content our discipline should assign to these concepts. From the outset, something intrigued me. I learned from the Baruya themselves that their society did not exist three or four centuries ago. But something else struck me as well. The Baruya speak the same language, have the same kinship system, the same initiation rites, in short, share with their friendly or hostile neighbours what we would call the same ���culture���. Lastly, having spent nearly seven years all told with the Baruya, I saw the profound changes that had occurred in both their society and their personal or collective identities. * Huxley Memorial Lecture, London, 7 November 2008. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 1-11 �� Royal Anthropological Institute 2010

I regard two facts as a stroke of luck. The fact that the Baruya have existed as a society only for a relatively short time made me wonder: How do societies come about? What are the social relations that bring human groups together and make them into a society, that is to say, a Whole that reproduces itself and its members? The second thing that intrigued me was: If the Baruya and their neighbours shared the same language, the same culture, and the same social organization, would the notion of ���culture��� enable me to understand why all of these local groups claimed to constitute distinct societies, with different names ��� Baruya, Wantekia, Boulakia, Usarampia, and so on ��� but which were in a certain way all alike? I therefore set out to discover how the Baruya society had formed and then, as I will show you, I became fascinated by the problem and began to look for other examples of societies that did not exist a few centuries ago. There is one with which you are all familiar, the Tikopia, magnificently analysed by Raymond Firth, although he did not raise the issue in his book (Firth 1967a). But circumstances also led me to take an interest in Wahhabism, and I discovered that Saudi Arabia had not existed before the eighteenth century and only began to take shape in 1742. Perhaps I should spell out immediately the nature of my problem. It has nothing to do with the eternal question put by philosophers, namely the so-called question of the foundations of the social bond. My question is purely of a sociological and historical nature. I believe that human beings are naturally a social species. They did not have at some point to begin living in society by making a contract or murdering a father. But humans are not content simply to live in society. They produce new forms of social existence, and therefore societies, in order to go on living. And as they transform their ways of living, they also transform their ways of thinking and acting, and therefore their culture. Returning to the first question and to the ideas that I had taken with me when I went into the field in 1966, remember that we were in the 1960s���1980s and L��vi-Strauss���s structuralism together with various brands of Marxism held sway in Paris. L��vi-Strauss saw the incest taboo and kinship relations as having done no less than transport human beings from the state of nature to the state of culture. The Marxist gospel, for its part, advanced as an explanation of human history ��� once we had passed from nature to culture ��� the fundamental role of the relations humans engendered in the course of producing their material means of social existence through the so-called ���succession of modes of production���. Therefore, when I began searching my data for the social relations that had been capable of welding the Baruya kin groups into a society, I started by examining the nature of their kinship system and then the nature of the relations the kin groups entertained with each other as they produced the material means of their social exist- ence. I can tell you right away that I concluded that neither kinship relations nor the relations of production between these groups could explain the emergence of the Baruya society, a new society whose structure and culture were in no way different from those of the societies around them. I had to look elsewhere. You will recall that the anthropology handbooks and our teachers at the time explained that, when we found ourselves faced with a society that was not divided into castes, classes, or orders and governed itself without benefit of a state, we were dealing with a so-called ���primitive��� and kin-based society. In the field I quickly saw that the Baruya society was made up of fifteen patrilineal clans, and came to the obvious conclusion that I had found another kin-based society. Maurice Godelier 2 Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 16, 1-11 �� Royal Anthropological Institute 2010