What is a society? This overarching question has been the driving force behind much of the work done by theorists in the anthropological and sociological fields over time. Although these various social theorists adopted distinct methodologies and frameworks, which generally took their research in different directions, they generally addressed similar themes throughout their work. Over the past 150 years, classic Western social theorists such as Émile Durkheim, Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Sigmund Freud, and many others have all speculated on three specific aspects of society. First, it was common to consider social actors, that is, to discuss the role individuals play and the freedoms they have within a given community. Second, the social theorist's goal was often to discover and explain the structure and order of the society he or she was studying. Finally, since these social theorists were writing during the advent and emergence of the modern Western world, they often used traditional and primitive societies as a foil to analyze the components of modernity. In addition to classical social theorists, contemporary social theorists, such as Karl Marx, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Donna Haraway, Michael Foucault, Anthony Giddens, and Clifford Geertz, have also examined these three themes. Classical social theorists generally saw an increase in the individuality of social actors when moving from a traditional to a modern society. Durkheim formulated his conception of the individual around a concept he called “collective consciousness” (Durkheim 2012: 225). In traditional societies, characterized by mechanical solidarity, "the individual...... middle of paper ......ime, like feudalism and slavery, however these comparisons have the effect of revealing the similarities and the repetitions that have occurred throughout history. (Marx 1848). Rather than comparing premodern society and modern society, Haraway created a synthesis between the natural aspects of traditional society and the mechanical and technological aspects of modern society to create a cyborg (Haraway 1993). According to Haraway, “a cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism” that exists in the postmodern era (Haraway 1993: 597). When considering the postmodern era, it would at first glance seem useful to use modern society as a foil, but recently postmodernity has been "considered part of the modern" and therefore the modern foil could lack its effectiveness in explaining the particularities. of post-modernity (Featherstone 2008, 465).