[DRAFT October 1, 2020]

Marx on the production of the means of survival that determine relationships, dependencies, and differentiated interests within some population at some point in its history (with some technology, and in some ecological constraints).

Durkheim on the division of labor that produces relationships and constraints on the lives of individuals within some population, whatever its point in history.

Mauss on the “totality” of the dependencies produced by the division of labor.

Classically, in anthropology, wondering how to describe any moment in the history of the division of labor in some society, often summarized as “the social structure of the So_n_So’s:

If I visit a relatively stable community and revisit it after an interval of ten years, I shall find that many of its members have died and others have been born; the members who still survive are now ten years older and their relations to one another may have changed in many ways. Yet I may find that the kinds of relations that I can observe are very little different from those observed ten years before. The structural form has changed little. (Radcliffe-Brown [1940] 1965]: 192-3)

But is this form an object or a model of the object?

The term "social structure" has nothing to do with empirical reality but with models which are built up after it. This should help one to clarify the difference between two concepts which are so close to each other that they have often been confused, namely, those of social structure and of social relations. It will be enough to state at this time that social relations consist of the raw materials out of which the models making up the social structure are built. (Lévi-Strauss [1952] 1962: 279)

(Passing over Parsons who collapsed social ordering into values and dispositions)

Garfinkel on the labor of maintaining an order that has arisen at some point in the history of small collectives (kitchens, coffee hours, service lines ... classrooms)

Latour on the labor of maintaining an order that has arisen at some point in the history of large collectivities that constitute this collectivity that become another of the “things” that are agents in the lives of those who are caught by them (science labs, school bureaucracies...)