Virginia Woolf

A Society Illustrated Virginia Woolf

A society is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction, or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Societies are characterized by patterns of relationships (social relations) between individuals who share a distinctive culture and institutions; a given society may be described as the total of such relationships among its constituent of members. In the social sciences, a larger society often exhibits stratification or dominance patterns in subgroups. Society, in general, addresses the fact that an individual has rather limited means as an autonomous unit. The great apes have always been more or less social animals, so Robinson Crusoe-like situations are either fictions or unusual corner cases to the ubiquity of social context for humans, who fall between prosocial and eusocial in the spectrum of animal ethology. Cultural relativism as a widespread approach or ethic has largely replaced notions of "primitive", better/worse, or "progress" about cultures (including their material culture/technology and social organization).