Beginning of Essay
(holistic approach), during the eighteenth and nineteenth century were much concerned with the ‘nature’ of society and of the human social institutions. Their interests lay rather in what human society essentially is, than in the history of it’ ....

Middle of Essay
.... to the study of human societies had some limitations and can be dangerously misleading. The ‘organic’ approach reached its most sophisticated expression in the writing of the French sociologist Émile Durkhiem, who is one of the most figures in social anthropology. With Durkhiem, sociology had become in France a seminal discipline that broadened and transformed the study of law, of economics, of Chinese institutions, of linguistics, of ethnology, of art history, and of history. Durkhiem’s nephew, Marcel Mauss, was less systematic than he was and paid greater attention to symbolism as an unconscious activity of ....