Home›Open QuestionsCategoryOpen Questions16 entries. Click any to see everything it connects to.BrowseCompareCompare At A Past YearEnter a year to compare these entries as the atlas records them at that moment. Leave it empty for the present. A year before the common era is entered with a minus sign, so 44 BCE is minus 44.Show This YearSelect all 16Are the universal mental structures Claude Lévi-Strauss claimed to find in kinship and myth genuinely cross-cultural, or are they an artifact of the analyst's own Western, scientific interpretive framework projected onto other cultures?Open Questions2 linksDid Margaret Mead's account of relatively unrestricted adolescent sexuality in Samoa accurately reflect Samoan culture, or did Derek Freeman's later fieldwork and critique reveal fundamental errors in her original conclusions?Open Questions2 linksDid medieval and early modern guilds function primarily as institutions that fostered training, quality control and technological adaptation, or as monopolistic, rent-seeking cartels that restricted competition and innovation?Open Questions2 linksDoes Claude Levi-Strauss's alliance theory, which explains kinship systems as structured networks of marriage exchange between descent groups, better account for practices like cross-cousin marriage than the rival descent-centered, functionalist theory associated with A. R. Radcliffe-Brown?Open Questions2 linksDoes cultural relativism, as a methodological principle for understanding cultures on their own terms, necessarily entail moral relativism, foreclosing any cross-cultural ethical judgment?Open Questions2 linksDoes cultural relativism's refusal to judge a practice by an outside standard leave it unable to condemn practices most societies regard as harmful, or does that criticism mistake a method of understanding for an endorsement of whatever it studies?Open Questions2 linksDoes liminality, as Victor Turner himself used the term, apply only to small-scale tribal ritual settings, with his own neologism "liminoid" reserved for comparable features of the modern world, or can the term liminality itself be extended to concrete historical and institutional transitions, as AgOpen Questions2 linksDoes Orlando Patterson's social death thesis, that slavery is defined by an enslaved person's severance from kinship rights and genealogical continuity, accurately capture the lived condition of enslaved people, or did enslaved communities retain meaningful social and kinship ties that the thesis unOpen Questions2 linksDoes Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus leave genuine room for individual agency and social change, or does it describe social reproduction so deterministically that actors become little more than automata executing internalized dispositions?Open Questions2 linksDoes structural-functionalist theory leave genuine room for individual agency, or does its picture of society as a self-regulating system reduce people to actors simply executing the roles their position assigns them?Open Questions2 linksDoes the rigid, exhaustively enumerated Indian caste system reflect continuous ancient tradition, or is its modern form substantially a colonial-era construction hardened by British administration?Open Questions2 linksDoes the scientific value of Evans-Pritchard's and Malinowski's structural-functionalist ethnography stand apart from the colonial administration that made their fieldwork possible, or does that entanglement compromise how their conclusions should be read today?Open Questions2 linksHow faithfully does Herbert Blumer's formalized "symbolic interactionism" (1937 onward) represent George Herbert Mead's own thinking, given that Mead's own texts are themselves posthumous compilations of student lecture notes rather than a work Mead approved?Open Questions2 linksIs levirate marriage (widow inheritance) best understood as a protective custom securing a widow's economic and social standing, or as a practice that can override her own choice and has been directly implicated in HIV transmission in high-prevalence regions?Open Questions2 linksIs Robert Merton's strain-theory reformulation of anomie a faithful development of Émile Durkheim's original concept, or a substantially different theory that merely borrows Durkheim's term?Open Questions2 linksIs the nuclear family the universal or original human family form, as much mid-twentieth-century family sociology assumed, or is the extended family the more common arrangement historically and cross-culturally?Open Questions2 links