To Understand the Most Important Characteristics of a Society, One Must Study Its Major Cities
In the view of sociologists, the term “society” is a comprehensive expression of humane, scientific, aesthetic, architectonic, and communicational aspects within a group of people who living at the same region in a certain era, and a society could persists from generations to generations by based on its customs, rules, laws, and the sameness of expectation. That means, as Maccaus Tulett compared in his first book on human civilization and society, studying a society to uncover its sense in its era is similar to a long journey. Studying on societies, therefore, should not be limited within specific areas; rather, it must be the rope that connecting social behaviors, aesthetic tendency, scientific achievement, as well as the typical styles of architecture, and other aspects of the society as a whole without making discrimination between surveying sites. For consisting of inherent attracting forces, major cities of most societies could draw the quintessence of nearby region into them; thus, each major city itself is the pompous reflection of a society. Notwithstanding, focusing on the major cities is not the method that Hinda Laccura, a professional sociologist, uses to discovery the nature of the societies in which she is interested in. According to Laccura, there are certain reasons make she arranging the explicitly characteristics of pompous major cities as the secondary source for her research. Firstly, during the process of selectively absorbing social aspects outside the cities, such as art or architecture, the urban citizens might ignore certain typical characteristics and remaining only what were considered sophisticated and satisfied to the taste of people in noble or higher classes. Secondly, customs and communicated ways of major cities may not merely reflect the indigenous culture of the whole societies; even, they could be the results of integrating conventional customs and foreign cultures. In other words, major cities and their reflections of the