Social block / Historical block

How can we think of the systemic unity that a community or a society represents ? The anthropological approach uses the concept of culture to designate the sum of the components of a unified social body. If the word culture is meant to be inclusive, it has the disadvantage of presenting this totality in a functional way. The culture would operate the integrating action necessary to the good functioning of any social body. The order and the balance would be thus first, letting even imply that the cultural functions could pre-exist, in archetypal form, to their concrete materiality.

The notion of economic and social formation has the advantage to present the reality of a social body under the constitutive angle, in relation to what happens. To be a formation is above all to be in formation, meaning then the presence of a before, a during and possibly an after.

We define the concepts of social block and historical block in continuity with this desire to understand human reality in an evolutionary way. These notions put the emphasis on the fact that the formative state of any social body is fundamentally incomplete and unfinished. Why ? Because the environment in which it evolves changes. It changes constantly (the simple passage of the seasons). Because at any moment phenomena related to the contingency and to the chance (the unforeseeable) occur. Finally, because any social body cumulates a set of components which are more or less skilfully arranged, more or less coherent the ones in relation to the others, and, what is more, they are often in tension the ones in relation to the others. In other words, there are processes and dynamics that make any social body both “homogeneous and coherent” and “heterogeneous and disjointed”.

Faced with the challenge of perpetual change, early hominids, like other animal societies or plant communities, developed institutional arrangements based on the codification of knowledge, attitudes and behaviors. This soft “technologism” was defined in complementarity with the organic codex represented by DNA and RNA.

Armed with material (tools) and social (dialects, kinship, currency, state…) technologies, hominids had the capacity to generate stability, regularity and cohesion. The complementary notions of social block and historical block account for both the socio-systemic nature of the institutional and organizational arrangements put in place and the temporal nature of any block, in the sense that institutions are epoch-making.