Short answers, pulled from the story.
A society is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction, or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Societies are characterized by patterns of social relations between individuals who share a distinctive culture and institutions.
The term "society" dates back to at least 1513 and originates from the 12th-century French word societe, meaning "company." That French word came from the Latin societas, meaning fellowship, alliance, or association, which itself derives from the noun socius, meaning comrade, friend, or ally.
Western sociology has three dominant paradigms: functionalism, also called structural functionalism, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionism. Functionalism sees individuals working together like organs in a body, conflict theory sees interaction based on conflict, and symbolic interactionism focuses on how individuals use shared symbols and language.
Pre-industrial societies subdivide into hunting and gathering, pastoral, horticultural, and agrarian forms. Hunter-gatherers collect wild plants and hunt animals, pastoralists rely on domesticated herd animals, horticulturalists grow crops in cleared garden plots, and agrarian societies use the plow to cultivate crops over large areas.
Marshall Sahlins described hunter-gatherers as the "original affluent society" because of their extended leisure time, estimating that adults worked three to five hours per day. Other researchers have challenged this view by pointing to high mortality rates and perennial warfare in hunter-gatherer societies.
The sociologist Syed Farid al-Attas cites Ibn Khaldun, who lived from 1332 to 1406, and José Rizal, who lived from 1861 to 1896, as non-Western thinkers who took a systematic approach. Khaldun analyzed nomadic and sedentary social structures, while Rizal theorized about colonial societies.
There are massive inequalities in the division of wealth among humans. As of 2018 in China, Europe, and the United States, the richest tenth of people held more than seven-tenths of those regions' total wealth.