“Civil society” is a complex term in the European history of ideas. It entered popular parlance and was taken up by anthropologists only at the end of the twentieth century, when it was initially used to indicate a liberal society based on freedom of association, in opposition to the totalitarian socialist state. Anthropologists later applied the term in studies of democratization and development in other regions, but some remain suspicious of the ethnocentricity of its normative implications. Two main usages may be distinguished in contemporary anthropology. The first consists in applying the label “civil society” to a whole gamut of more or less well-researched institutions between those of kinship and the state. The second is a narrower usage that focuses on forms of “nongovernmental organization.”