Resources and Social Structure: Some Conditions of Stability and Change

Abstract

Human societies exist within certain resource limits. Those limits reflect particular combinations of ma terials, language, and social structure and determine tenden cies toward social stability or change. Such issues seem best approached metaphorically. Energy stands for the level of resource-development a particular society has reached. Per meability indicates how distribution is arranged by the social structure; and myths stand for the group's available percep tions and its trajectory of belief. Such metaphorical co-ordi nates may permit prediction as to the future of a society. For example, the emergence of Western industrialism was dependent upon the surplus energy of a frontier: with the closing of that frontier, the associated social structures and mythologies now seem ill-adapted to the new environmental limits.