Scurte consideraţii asupra conceptelor de ,,supravieţuiri” şi ,,superorganic (supraorganic)” în antropologia culturală
Several considerations concerning the concepts of “survival” and “superorganic” anthropology

Summary/Abstract: I. Labeled as ’science of the past and science of vestiges’, the social and cultural anthropology turned to the research of the social processes to the historical and cultural reconstructions ’the long lasting ones’. Anthropologists ( especially the evolutionists) have seen in the recalling of the past, in ’the survivals’ of some forms of social organization established in the far past, bases for the explaining the social changes, for identifying ’the steps ’of the evolution had by different societies and cultures. It is due to E.B.Taylor that the concept of ’survivings’ was put into circulation (in the work” Primitive Culture”, 1871). The British anthropologist saw in the strategy of ’survivings’ a way capable of leading to the discovery of the past configurations of the economical, social and cultural life or ’traces’ that made possible the reconstruction of the incipient phases in the develpment of some societies or cultures. In Romania ,the one who had a great importance to the reconstruction of the strategy of ’survivings as was asked by sociological monography, spreading the historical scenery, was Anton Golopentia. The Romanian sociologist adapted the historical scenery to the new ’challanges’ regarding the reconstruction of the successive steps of the evolution of the village comminities forseeing the cognitive and operartional values of such a strategy (the strategy of ’survivings) for the comlex studies of the Sociology School in Bucharest. II. In the last decades of the 19th century, and at the beginning of the 20th one there have been tough discutions around the concept of ’ superorganic ( supraorganic)’; concept that was trying to make culture a distinct order of reality, an independent hall inteligible through himself. The term ’superorganic evolution’ was created by Herbert Spencer; but the one who insisted , along his entire activity, in defining culture as a superorganic reality , was the American anthropologist A.L.Kroeber. Author of the work ’The Superorganic’ (1917), Kroeber adapts the term ’superorganic’ decreasing its dimentions to ’supraorganic human products’. The American anthropologist unlike Spencer, speaks about an absolute discontinuity between the organic evolution ( biophsychic one) and the cultural evolution (the cultural phenomena being super pshyhic). Kroeber defines man as a culture carrior but not as a source of culture , too. In the last years of his activity, Kroeber reevaluates a series of view points expressed before.

• Details
• Contents