- Published: January 10, 2022
- Updated: January 10, 2022
- University / College: University of Maryland, College Park
- Language: English
- Downloads: 41
Human society is very complex in how it is structured and to get to where society is now, there was a lot of trial and error to be done. As time has passed all the way from the foraging era, society has many integral changes and continuities. For example, concepts like hierarchy define some parts of modern society and how people act toward one another. However, in the foraging era, society only had a main concept that structured it, and that concept was family. Family defined everything about foraging societies, and the ideas of families and relationships were what set the framework for how everyone would act towards one another.
Societies structure started to full change when hierarchy emerged in the early agrarian villages. Now that there were surpluses of food, people had the ability to specialize in their jobs and communities now had to find ways of regulating trades as people started having overlapping and opposing needs. There needed to be less personal laws and rules as leaders started to emerge to help control the seemingly increasing chaos. With leaders came a split in the classes of society, as leaders started having more power and choosing others that could share that power to regulate communities. In our modern era, we have democracy, where citizens can be the leaders and the gap between them shrunk, but hierarchy still exists with working class, middle class, and upper class.
The gap between the rich and poor has grown wildly, within countries and between them, making any class gaps more prominent. It seems that ever since hierarchy emerged in the agrarian era, it stuck through all the trial and era of societies, developing and changing slightly but still existing in the modern era. Another structure of society that also developed in the agrarian era is gender division. In the foraging era, there wasn’t a significant gender division but as the social success of every farming household in the agrarian era was for the female to produce as many children as possible, women couldn’t participate in the specialization that was developing.
Throughout the rest of the agrarian era, gender bias and discrimination became more prominent and women had expectations of only staying in the household. In the modern era, relations between men and women were renegotiated and women were starting to be treated like equals. While the gender gap has faded, it still exists and defines a huge part of our current structure of society. Human society has many complex factors in its structures and no one thing can define it, but some of these structures have developed and changed greatly, but keep many of the same principles about them.