W.G. Runciman on the tendency of human societies to form varieties
W.G. Runciman, 5 June 1986
“... no such thing. Societies are defined as such by the observer, and (as was forcibly argued by Sir Edmund Leach in his Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in 1976) it was a mistake of Radcliffe-Brown’s to imply that either societies or species are entities unproblematically given in nature. There is a host of examples in the historical and ethnographic record of ... ”