Social

Structure, and
Society and
Nature Relation
Dr Edsel E. Sajor
Relevant key features of
society
a) Present-day society is stratified into classes.
b) Present-day society is also gendered.
c) Present-day society is mediated by ethnicity
or ethnic identity.
d) Institutions are an essential element of
society
e) Most of contemporary society is of the
nature of nation-state society.
f) Society or societies undergoes system
integration – at the local, extra-local,
national, and global.
Weberian meaning of classes and status
Classes are subdivisions in society based on class situation, that is how
they go about procuring goods, position or satisfaction, These
situations produce there main types:
 Property classes – these are based on ownership or access to
economic property (e.g., land and capital resources); some are
‘positively’ privileged’, or ‘negatively’ privileged; some stand in the
middle, such as middle classes, occupying a middlemen role
between the two groups. Incidentally, property classes include
people who are able to monopolize educational privileges.
 Commercial classes – these are formed on the basis of being able to
monopolize entrepreneurial opportunities; negatively privileged
include laborers in commercial operations; positively privileged are
the entrepreneurs themselves. Middle classes in this category are the
self-employed or highly craftsmen.
 Social classes are much larger and holistic. They include Marxist
classiic category of proletariat; petty bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia or
specialists, who gain their privileges partly because of the
connection between social class and education.

Status is quite a different grouping, based on style of life, education

and hereditary or occupational prestige. Status distinctions may rest
on social classes, but class does not determine status, or vice versa.
Status depends more on the ability of the group to marshal support
from cultural and social conventions or traditions.
 What is gender?
Gender
Gender is a social construction or notions of roles, relationships
and processes between women and men in all societies,
focusing on rights, representation and workload.

Focus of Gender analysis: IMBALANCES and INEQUALITY

Gender analysis not only examines differences in rights,
representation and workload of women and men but reveals
imbalances in these: gender inequality.

• Gender analysis attempts to explain the mechanisms by which

gender inequality is maintained.
• Gender analysis also includes the examination of the multiple
ways in which women and men, as social actors, engage in
strategies to transform existing roles, relationships and
processes in their own interest or the interest of others.
Mapping Gendered Activities , Resource Access and Control
Ethnicity: an important aspect
of society
 In anthropology, ethnicity has been defined ‘as an aspect of social
relationship between agents who consider themselves as culturally
distinctive from members of other groups with whom they have a
minimum of regular interaction’ (Eriksen 1993). Ethnic identities are
neither ascribed nor achieved: they are both.

 The process of modernization and the establishment of a system of

nation-states have created a new situation for the people known
as ‘ethnic minorities’ or ‘indigenous peoples’. In anthropology,
‘indigenous peoples’ refers to a minority or non-dominant group in
a definite territory, with a more or less acknowledged claims to
aboriginality.

 In the process of building nationhood or nation-state society, a

‘double consciousness’ can occur between members of ethnic
minorities, between perspectives from within their own group and
those prevalent in the surrounding society.

 Ethnic identity and strong cultural distinctiveness are often invoked

by a minority group in the context of defending or asserting a claim
on resources such as land and forest against outside intruders or
claimants such as the state.
Institutions: a key element of society
Sociologists and economists have defined institutions in a
functionlist vein, in terms of what they do for society’s need for
stability and order. They regard institutions’ most important
functions as organizing diverse potentialities of human action into a
coherent system.

One definition, according to the above-mentioned perspective, is

of institutions as aspect of social organization which through the
operation of tradition, custom or legal constraint, tends to create
durable and routinized patterns of behavior.

Giddens (1979), defined institutions as kind of practices that are the

most enduring and widespread among the members of a
community or society, they are traditional and routinized practices.
It is also viewed as an outcome and medium of action.

Giddens describe economic institutions as those which concern

the mobilization of ‘allocative’ resources in contrast with political
institutions which concern mobilization of ‘authorization’ as a
resource.
1. What and How Institutions work in hydropower development

1.1 Bio-physical resources, and human settlements and

human activities in and around a HPD dam project site are
supported and sustained -- more or less -- by specific
institutional elements, which may be coming from different
systems of rules, rights, and values.

1.2 Institutional elements related to hydropower

development may take the form of value system, norms,
formal and informal rules, and stable and/or mandated
groups (state or non-state) that embody, act out,
interpret, reproduce, or manipulate these.

1.3 In hydropower development, individual and

collective actors use these institutions as guidelines or
reference of their actions, interactions, and decision-
making processes, enabling and constraining them.
2. WHAT and HOW Institutions Work in Hydropower
development
1.2 Topics
2.1 The landscape of systems of values, norms, and
rules that guide or become references in decision
choices in energy and HPD options or guide
resistance to these

2.2 Stable and/or mandated groups or

collectivities (state and societal; formal/legal or
informal) that embody, act out, interpret, reproduce,
or manipulate these values, rules, norms in the
specific processes related to HPD.

2.3 The ways that values, norms, and rules are used
or played out by organized actors or individuals to
support, justify, resist, cooperate and/or create
options and decisions related to energy and
hydropower development
 NATURAL
Resource Resource
s SETTING
Uses
Institutions
Customary
law
Customary
Villag
law
es
Padd land Open
y access
Open land Wildlif
access e
colle hun
ct t
NTFPs

Forest
fisherie wood
s s
Water
Domestic/ catch Open
agriculture Open access
uses access
Open
access
 WITH HYDROPOWER DEVELOPMENT
Actions of the
Institutions
State
Privately
Privately owned
owned Governme
Loss of Build reservoir that nt owned
agricultural flood habitats, forest
land and wildlife resettlement

Dam the
river

Loss of livelihood
from woods &
Loss of livelihood
NTFPs
from fisheries
Licensing
Licensing issues
issues
 As a result…
Privately Governme
Customary nt owned
law Open owned
access

Open Licensing
access issues

Institutional conflicts
between
the State supporting HPD
and
Local indigenous supporting local institutions of
resource uses
Societies undergo processes
of system integration
 Narrow social-cultural and economic boundaries
of local societies become expanded and stretch
geographically over time, constituting larger social
systems in the process.
 Local people and local societies relate to external
and broader forces such as the state and the
market in the process of their being integrated into
a larger social system. Such interactions forged
between a local society and a larger force or
collectivity constitute relations of autonomy and
dependence for either side
Category of ‘nature’ issue
“The difficulty in part derives from the
tendency in discursive debates to
homogenize the category “nature” (and
discuss its social meaning and constitution
as a unitary category) when it should be
regarded as intensely internally variegated –
an unparalleled field of difference.”
Society and nature relation (1)
“An impressionistic survey illustrates well how societies strive to
create ecological conditions and environmental niches for
themselves which are not only conducive to their own survival
but also manifestations and instanciations “in nature” of their
particular social relations”.
“. . . Contradictions in the social relations entail social
contradictions on the land and within ecosystemic projects
themselves. Not only do the rich occupy privileged niches in
the habitat while the poor tend to work and live in the more
toxic or hazardous zones, but the very design of the
transformed ecosystem is redolent of its social relations”
. . .Created ecosystems tend to both instanciate and reflect,
therefore, the social systems that gave rise to them, though
they do not do so in non-contradictory (i.e. stable) ways.
Constant duality of social and
ecological change:
unintended outcomes
From Engels:
“Let us not, however, flatter ourselves over much on account
of our human victories over nature. For each such victory
nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first
place brings about the results we expected, but the second,
but in the second and third places it has quite different,
unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. . . Thus
at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over
nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone
standing out of nature, but that we, with flesh, blood, and
brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our
mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage
over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and
apply them correctly.”
Social and Nature Relation (2)
“Human beings, like all other organisms, are “active subjects
transforming nature according to its laws” and are always in the course
of adapting to the ecosystems they themselves construct. It is
fundamentally mistaken, therefore, to speak of the impact of society
on the ecosystem as if these are two separate systems in interaction
with each other. The typical manner of depicting the world around us
in terms of a box labelled “society” in interaction with a box labelled
“environment” not only makes little intuitive sense (try drawing the
boundary between the boxes in your own daily life) but it also has just
as little fundamental theoretical and historical justification. Money
flows and commodity movements, for example, have to be regarded
as fundamental to contemporary ecosystems (particularly given
urbanization), not only because of the past geographical transfer of
plant and animal species from one environment to another (see
Crosby, 1986), but also because these flows formed and continue to
form a coordinating network that keeps contemporary ecological
habits reproducing and changing in the particular way they do.”
Issue of people living close to
nature: indigenous resistance
discourses
“The category “environmental or ecological movement” may also for this reason
be a misnomer particularly when applied to resistances of indigenous peoples to
ecological change. Such resistances may not be based, as many in the west
might suppose, upon some deep inner need to preserve a distinctive and
unalienated relation to nature or to keep intact valued symbols of ancestry and
the like, but upon a much clearer recognition that an ecological transformation
imposed form outside (a happened in the colonial New England or as has more
recently happened to rubber tappers in the Amazon) will destroy indigenous
modes of production.”

“Much contemporary “ecological conscious” rhetoric pays far too much attention
to what indigenous groups say without looking at what they do.”

“The possibility of over-exploitation of a resource is perfectly compatible with our

notion of peoples living close to nature, observing and acting accordingly.”
Social and nature relation (3)
“. . . Marx argued, after all, that we can
discover who and what we are (our species
potential even) only through transforming
the world around us and in so doing put the
dialectics of social and ecological change
at the center of all human history.”
Thank you.