Expert: Ralph Salier - 4/19/2005

Question
What is one brief reason anthropologists care so much about social complexity?

Answer
The short answer is because it is very cool.  Social complexity is the "web" a society has developed to answer the needs of that society.  Each society has its own web, much like each spider species has a very distict web of its own.  No two are alike yet we satisfy our needs some more effeciently then others.  So when we look at these social webs, we gain an insight into both the history and the development of the society.

The better we understand that, the better we understand all human behavior and culture as a whole.