social anthropology Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behaviour in human societies and cultures. It is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and much of Europe, where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In t ...

, a sodality is a non-kin group organized for a specific purpose (economic, cultural, or other), and frequently spanning villages or towns. Sodalities are often based on common age or gender, with all-male sodalities more common than all-female. One aspect of a sodality is that of a group "representing a certain level of achievement in the society, much like the stages of an undergraduate's progress through college niversity. In the anthropological literature, the Mafia in

Sicily (man) it, Siciliana (woman) , population_note = , population_blank1_title = , population_blank1 = , demographics_type1 = Ethnicity , demographics1_footnotes = , demographi ...

has been described as a sodality. Other examples include

Maasai Maasai may refer to: * Maasai people *Maasai language * Maasai mythology * MAASAI (band) See also * Masai (disambiguation) * Massai Massai (also known as: Masai, Massey, Massi, Mah–sii, Massa, Wasse, Wassil or by the nickname "Big Foot" Mas ...

war camps, and Crow and

Cheyenne The Cheyenne ( ) are an Indigenous people of the Great Plains. Their Cheyenne language belongs to the Algonquian language family. Today, the Cheyenne people are split into two federally recognized nations: the Southern Cheyenne, who are enroll ...

military associations, groups that were not much unlike today's

Veterans of Foreign Wars The Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), formally the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States, is an organization of US war veterans, who, as military service members fought in wars, campaigns, and expeditions on foreign land, waters, or a ...

American Legion The American Legion, commonly known as the Legion, is a non-profit organization of U.S. war War is an intense armed conflict between states, governments, societies, or paramilitary groups such as mercenaries, insurgents, and militi ...

. The term was first used with this meaning by

Elman Service Elman Rogers Service (1915–1996) was an American cultural anthropologist. Biography He was born on May 18, 1915 in Tecumseh, Michigan and died on November 14, 1996 in Santa Barbara, California. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1941 from the ...

(no doubt drawing on the sodality vs.

modality Modality may refer to: Humanities * Modality (theology), the organization and structure of the church, as distinct from sodality or parachurch organizations * Modality (music), in music, the subject concerning certain diatonic scales * Modalitie ...

distinction used in some Christian churches), as part of his band-

tribe The term tribe is used in many different contexts to refer to a category of human social group. The predominant worldwide usage of the term in English language, English is in the discipline of anthropology. This definition is contested, in p ...

- chiefdom- state model for the progression of political integration. It defined an organization that occurred across bands, and therefore was a part of a tribe, rather than a band, which was composed of only kin. Arjun Appadurai uses the concept of sodalities to describe what he views as the collective, cultural dimension and function of the imagination given the globalization of electronic mass media and transnational migration. For Appadurai, sodalities, much like what he terms "localities" or "neighborhoods", are cultural groups or spaces that mediate globalized cultural flows and, importantly, create possibilities for "translocal social action that would otherwise be hard to imagine" (p. 8). In other words, sodalities are generative social spaces for agency, imagination, and social action.

See also

References

See also