D. Human Systems
D.2 Social Structures (Sociology and Anthropology)
Course description
Before the European canon, read Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah (1377), the introduction to his universal history. Working from a critique of how earlier historians evaluated their sources, he develops asabiyya, group cohesion, into a cyclical theory of how dynasties rise on solidarity and fall as it dissolves into luxury. It is a strong candidate for the first systematic work of sociology, several centuries before the term existed, and it sets up a question the rest of the subsection keeps returning to: what actually holds a group together.
Then the classics: Durkheim's Suicide, which argued that a private act has social causes and stable social rates; Weber on bureaucracy and the Protestant ethic; Marx on class conflict as an engine of change. These primary texts are dense; OpenStax's free Introduction to Sociology works as scaffolding. Learn the vocabulary that comes out of this reading (social structure, agency, norm, institution, role) explicitly, since it is the field's formal language for describing social life.
Stratification is the next layer: economic inequality and the Gini coefficient, gender and race dynamics, global inequality. Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, on trying to live on low-wage American work, and excerpts from Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto make the abstractions concrete; Our World in Data supplies current inequality figures to set against them.
Anthropology adds the comparative dimension: how differently organized societies solve the same basic problems of kinship, subsistence, and belief. Skip documentary surveys that flatten this into a highlight reel; go instead to ethnography itself, Marjorie Shostak's Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman or Clifford Geertz's essay on the Balinese cockfight, for what sustained, close observation of one culture actually looks like. If you want a big-picture argument about why civilizations developed unevenly, Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel is worth reading as a thesis to test, not as a settled account; anthropologists have raised serious objections to its geographic determinism.
Checkpoints
Each checkpoint is tagged with the stage of the cycle it tests.| Stage | Checkpoint | Attempts |
|---|---|---|
formalism | Summarize Durkheim's argument in Suicide and state the ecological-fallacy objection to it. | Post the first attempt |
abstraction | State Ibn Khaldun's asabiyya cycle and test it against one dynasty or regime you know well. | Post the first attempt |
skepticism | Write a thick description, in Geertz's sense, of a ritual you take part in, as if for readers from an unfamiliar culture. | Post the first attempt |
formalism | Compute a Gini coefficient by hand for a ten-household toy dataset, then again from a real national dataset. | Post the first attempt |