Introduction

Living in groups is a characteristic that humans share with other animals, particularly primates. Some animals lower than Homo Sapiens (meaning intelligent being) are also found to be gregarious, having some sort of group life. Even ants are found to have social organization!

What distinguishes Man from other biological beings, however, is his capacity to build culture. Society among humans is unique in that its identity is defined by its culture. The human population of the world is divided into several societies, but each society is distinct from the others in terms of its culture. It is this additional feature that distinguishes a human society from societies of lower-level animals.

Most of the behaviour of infra-human beings is instinctive—it is ingrained in their genes, so to speak; it is the same irrespective of their surroundings. Chimpanzees, gorillas, or orangutans¹—the highly developed apes regarded as distant cousins of Man, also called primates—are also found to be ‘social’, in the sense that they interact with their small group, mostly comprising of kin. They have some capacity to ‘learn’ and even ‘invent’—of course, mainly through juxtaposition. But in their case, too, most of their behaviour is biologically conditioned. Chimpanzees anywhere, for example, will have the same pattern of social organization. Not so with Man.