Durkheim believed that a crucial difference between “primitive” societies and complex modern ones was that where simple societies operated like rudimentary machines with lots of easily interchangeable parts, complex societies functioned more like living bodies and were made up of lots of very different, highly specialized organs that, like livers, kidneys, and brains, could not be substituted for one another. Thus chiefs and shamans in simple societies could simultaneously be foragers, hunters, farmers, and builders, but in complex societies lawyers could not moonlight as surgeons any more
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