Social vs. Cultural Anthropology: Understanding the Core Relationship

Ask a first-year anthropology student to define “culture” and “society,” and you’ll likely get two words used interchangeably. But early anthropologists spent decades arguing over which one deserved more attention, and the answer to that argument reshaped how the discipline is taught today. Understanding why society and culture were once treated as separate battlegrounds, and how they were eventually reconciled, is essential to grasping the foundations of anthropology.

Why human society cannot exist without culture 🔗

Ants build colonies. Wolves live in packs. Elephants form herds with clear social bonds. In other words, animal societies exist without culture. Their behaviour is largely instinct-driven, passed down through genetics, and remains static across generations unless the species itself evolves.

Human society is different. The Polish-British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski made a point that continues to anchor the discipline: culture is a uniquely human phenomenon. What humans build, believe, and practise changes over time independent of biological inheritance. A community’s food habits, kinship rules, or religious practices can transform within a single generation, something no animal society experiences without genetic change. This is the reason anthropologists cannot study human groups the way zoologists study animal colonies.

Society and culture as distinct concepts 🔗

Society refers to the network of relationships between individuals, the ties, roles, and interactions that bind people together. Culture, on the other hand, refers to the customs, practices, beliefs, and ways of living that a group develops to survive and make sense of the world. A village’s kinship structure is a matter of society; the rituals performed at a wedding within that kinship system are a matter of culture. The two are deeply entangled, but early anthropologists still tried to separate them, and that separation split the discipline along national lines for much of the twentieth century.

The American school: culture takes centre stage 🔗

In the United States, anthropology developed largely through the influence of Franz Boas, whose students went on to shape what became known as American cultural anthropology. Among them was Robert Lowie, who argued that culture was the central, defining feature of human beings, more fundamental to the discipline than any study of social relationships alone. Lowie’s body of work, including influential lectures later compiled as Culture and Ethnology, treated culture as the one true subject matter of the field, comparable to how psychology studies consciousness or biology studies life itself.

This emphasis on culture as a self-contained, almost independent force wasn’t accidental. American anthropologists of this generation were deeply engaged in documenting Indigenous American communities whose cultural practices, languages, and belief systems were undergoing rapid change. For them, cataloguing and comparing cultural traits, rather than mapping formal social structures, felt like the more urgent task. Later scholarship on Lowie’s career notes how this understanding of culture kept evolving through the first half of the twentieth century, as successive generations of Boas’s students refined what the concept meant.

The British school: social structure as the core 🔗

Across the Atlantic, a different emphasis was taking hold. British anthropology was heavily influenced by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, who introduced the idea of “social morphology,” the study of how a society is structurally organised, including the size, density, and arrangement of its population. Durkheim treated these structural facts as forces that shape collective life in their own right, distinct from the beliefs or customs layered on top of them, an idea explored in detail by the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on his work.

This structural approach was carried forward by A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, who became one of the founding figures of British social anthropology. For Radcliffe-Brown and his followers, the priority was studying social structure, the patterned relationships between individuals and groups, rather than treating culture as the primary object of study. The institutional weight behind this approach became visible when Liverpool University created Britain’s first dedicated Chair of Social Anthropology. Sir James Frazer, best known for his sweeping comparative work on myth and religion, briefly held this position in 1908 before returning to Cambridge, as detailed in the University of Glasgow’s account of his career.

Radcliffe-Brown, Malinowski, and functionalism 🔗

It’s worth noting that Radcliffe-Brown wasn’t the only British anthropologist shaping this period. Malinowski, working around the same time, developed his own functionalist approach centred on how cultural practices satisfy basic human needs. Radcliffe-Brown instead developed structural functionalism, borrowing heavily from Durkheim’s ideas to explain how social institutions function to maintain the stability of the wider social structure. As one detailed overview of the field explains, these two figures became the main architects of British social anthropology, even while disagreeing on where the discipline’s centre of gravity should sit.

A transatlantic disagreement over anthropology’s purpose 🔗

By the mid-twentieth century, this difference in emphasis had hardened into an open academic dispute. American anthropologists accused their British counterparts of downplaying culture in favour of a narrower, more mechanical focus on social organisation. British anthropologists, in turn, argued that treating culture as a “vague abstraction” made for weaker, less rigorous science compared to the structural comparison of societies. A detailed account of this exchange, sparked by published articles from Murdock, Firth, and Radcliffe-Brown in the early 1950s, describes how the disagreement played out across academic conferences and journals attended by both American and European scholars, including Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Reading through these exchanges today, what stands out is how much the debate was really about disciplinary identity rather than a genuine empirical disagreement. Both camps were studying the same human communities. They were simply choosing different entry points, one starting from patterns of relationship, the other from patterns of meaning and practice.

Resolving the divide: the rise of socio-cultural anthropology 🔗

Eventually, the debate proved unproductive. Anthropologists on both sides began to recognise that society and culture were not competing objects of study but two aspects of the same human reality. The American anthropologist Clifford Geertz captured this shift well in his influential essay on interpretive anthropology, where he described social action and cultural meaning as inseparable, famously noting that society’s forms give shape to culture’s substance. In other words, you cannot meaningfully separate the relationships people have from the meanings and practices that animate those relationships.

This recognition led to the emergence of the term socio-cultural anthropology, now widely used across university departments and textbooks. Rather than asking whether society or culture deserves priority, the field adopted a unified approach that studies both together. A kinship system, for instance, cannot be fully understood just by mapping who is related to whom. You also need to understand the customs, obligations, and symbolic meanings attached to those relationships, and vice versa.

What this means for studying anthropology today 🔗

This unified perspective is especially useful when examining diverse, layered societies. Consider caste, religion, or tribal community structures found across the Indian subcontinent. Studying only the social structure, who occupies what role, how groups interact, tells you very little about why those roles carry the meaning they do. Studying only the cultural practices, rituals, festivals, oral traditions, without situating them within networks of relationships and power, leaves you with a fragmented picture too. Socio-cultural anthropology asks students to hold both lenses at once.

This is also why contemporary anthropology courses rarely teach “social anthropology” and “cultural anthropology” as separate subjects anymore. The historical rivalry between the American and British schools is now mostly of interest to historians of the discipline, useful for understanding how anthropological theory developed, but no longer treated as a live methodological choice students need to make.

What do you think? 🔗

What do you think? When you look at a community you’re familiar with, do you find it easier to describe its social relationships first, or its cultural practices first? And can you think of an example where a social structure and a cultural practice are so intertwined that separating them would distort your understanding of that community?

References

1. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/49153/49153-h/49153-h.htm
2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28199024/
3. https://iep.utm.edu/emile-durkheim/
4. https://www.universitystory.gla.ac.uk/people/WH11160
5. https://anthropology.iresearchnet.com/sociology-and-anthropology/
6. https://shs.cairn.info/journal-l-annee-sociologique-2012-1-page-93?lang=en
7. https://hci.stanford.edu/courses/cs376/private/readings/geertz_thick_description.pdf