The Functional Prerequisites of a Society

Thinking the unthinkable: sacred values and taboo cognitions

“…'Don't do x because I say so' has less impact than 'don't do x because God says so'. By the middle of the 20th century, prominent anthropologists and sociologists had made the complementary observation that, although there is vast variation in what groups hold sacred, sacredness seems to qualify as a functional universal across societies, both primitive and modern, and that moral communities erect a variety of psychological and institutional barriers to insulate sacred values from secular contamination [5,6].…”

From the Commercial to the Communal: Reframing Taboo Trade-offs in Religious and Pharmaceutical Marketing

“…Most people, atheists included, insist that certain values are sacred and that it is unacceptable to mix them with secular values like money (Durkheim 1925). Sacredness qualifies as a distinct normative standard of conduct, despite the variation in what things various groups hold sacred and how they uphold their values (Aberle et al 1950;Belk et al 1989).…”

Functionalism: Its axiomatics

“…For instance, Aberle et al (1950), who proposed an alternative definition of the functional requirement, regard 'society' at the most general level, as 'a group of human beings sharing a self-sufficient system of action', and induce eight functional requisites from concrete conditions terminating such groups. They assume that a society is terminated at the point that it is absorbed into another society and define 'the absorption of one society into another' operationally as 'the partial loss of identity and the selfsufficiency of the system' (Aberle et al, 1950: 104;Levy, 1952: 140).…”