THE CONCEPTS OF CULTURE AND OF SOCIAL SYSTEM.

There seems to have been a good deal of confusion among anthropolgists and sociologists about the concepts of culture and society. A lack of consensus between and within disciplines has made for semantic confusion as to what data are subsumed under these terms; but, more important, the lack has impeded theoretical advance as to their interrelation. There are still some anthropologists and sociologists who do not even consider the distinction necessary on the ground that all phenomena of human behavior are sociolcultural, with both societal and cultural aspects at the same time. But even where they recognize the distinction, which can be said now to be a commonplace, they tend to assume determinative primacy for the set of phenomena in which they are more interested. The objective in the present joint statement is to point out, so far as methodological primacy is concerned, that, either of these assumptions is a preferential a priori and cannot be validated in today's state of knowledge. Separating cultural from societal aspects is not a classifying of concrete and empirically discrete sets of phenomena.