Seeing Like a State
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
FROM NATIONALISM to REVOLUTIONARY ISLAM This
FROM NATIONALISM TO REVOLUTIONARY ISLAM This study of dominant social movements in the Middle and Near East by a group of social scientists and historians is the first attempt to bring nationalism and the contemporary Islamic movements into a unified thematic perspective. The process of national economic and political integration supplies the unifying context for the analyses of the various social movements to which it gives rise. The examination of nationalism in general, and of the rise of the Arab nationalist movement in Greater Syria in the early decades of the century in particular, is followed by a close analysis of the interplay of ethnic identity and Islam in the local politics of the tribal North-Western Frontier Province of Pakistan. The politicisation oflslam in Algeria, Turkey and Egypt is then explored and explained, together with the characteristics of the emergent Islamic movements. The last three essays cover Shi'ite Islam in Iran since the opening decade of the century, focusing on various components and aspects of the Islamic movement which culminated in the revolution of 1979.. The case-studies thus chart the recent upsurge of revolutionary Islam and the concomitant decline of nationalist movements in the contemporary Middle and Near East. The introduction offers an analytical perspective for the integration of this major theme which is forcefully suggested by the juxtaposition of the essays. St Antony's! Macmillan Series General editor: Archie Brown, Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford Said Amir Arjomand (editor) FROM NATIONALISM TO REVOLUTIONARY ISLAM Anders Aslund PRIVATE ENTERPRISE IN EASTERN EUROPE Archie Brown and Michael Kaser (editors) SOVIET POLICY FOR THE 1980s S. -
Ernest Gellner: Civilizational Analysis As a Theory of History
Comparative Civilizations Review Volume 41 Number 41 Fall 1999 Article 6 10-1-1999 Ernest Gellner: Civilizational Analysis as a Theory of History Leonidas Donskis Dickinson College Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/ccr Recommended Citation Donskis, Leonidas (1999) "Ernest Gellner: Civilizational Analysis as a Theory of History," Comparative Civilizations Review: Vol. 41 : No. 41 , Article 6. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/ccr/vol41/iss41/6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Comparative Civilizations Review by an authorized editor of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Donskis: Ernest Gellner: Civilizational Analysis as a Theory of History 56 COMPARATIVE CIVILIZATIONS REVIEW Ernest Gellner: Civilizational Analysis as a Theory of History LEONIDAS DONSKIS There seems to be no general reason why specialists in coercion, and specialists in ritual and legitimation, should not be identical. These two supremely impor- tant specializations are indeed sometimes combined. But it is a fact crucial for the history of mankind that they were very often distinct to a greater or lesser degree. The sword may dominate, but the priests help crystallize cohesion among swordsmen. Ernest Gellner In mapping Gellner's (1925-1995) philosophy of history and civilizational theory, it is very important to refer to his intellectu- al and even ideological background. He obviously belongs to a small minority of the twentieth-century social theoreticians who never passed through a Marxist phase. Gellner's consistent, severe and analytically incisive criticism of Marxism and its sociopolitical effects brings him to the company of such critics of the totalitarian regimes and their ideologies as Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, Raymond Aron, Leszek Kolakowski, and Czeslaw Milosz. -
Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family1
Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family1 Anne McClintock All nationalismsare gendered,all are invented,snd all are dangerous- dangerous,not in EricHobsbawm's sense as havingto be opposed,but in the sense of representing relations to political power and to the technologiesof violence.Nationalism, as ErnestGellner notes, invents nationswhere they donot exist, andmost modern nations, despite their appeal to an august and immemorialpast, are of recent invention (Gellner,1964). Benedict Anderson warns, however, that Gellnertends to assimilate 'invention'to 'falsity' rather than to 'imagining'and 'creation'.Anderson, by contrast,views nationsas 'imaginedcommuni- ties' in the sense that they are systems of cultural representation wherebypeople come to imagine a shared experienceof identification with an extendedcommunity (Anderson, 1991: 6). As such, nations are not simply phantasmagoriaof the mind, but are historicaland insti- tutional practices through which social differenceis invented and performed.Nationalism becomes, as a result, radicallyconstitutive of people'sidentities, throughsocial contests that are frequentlyviolent and always gendered.But if the invented nature of nationalismhas found wide theoreticalcurrency, explorations of the genderingof the nationalimaginary have been conspicuouslypaltry. All nations dependon powerfulconstructions of gender.Despite nationalisms'ideological investment in the idea of popular unity, nations have historicallyamounted to the sanctionedinstitutionaliz- ationof genderdifference. No nationin -
Blackwell Companion to the Anthropology of Politics
1 Blackwell Companion to the Anthropology of Politics Human Rights Richard A. Wilson [email protected] I. Human Rights, Cultural Relativism and the Cold War In the middle of the twentieth century, cultural anthropology was largely hostile to the notion of human rights, but by the end of the twentieth century, the study of human rights had become a significant strand within political anthropology. This is an account of that realignment of the place of rights in the discipline from marginality to mainstream. The key to understanding anthropology's historical opposition to human rights lies in the centrality of the concept of 'culture' and the resultant adherence to a moral-ethical position of cultural relativism within the discipline during the Cold War period of 1945-1989. In the United States by the 1940s, cultural anthropology was becoming established in universities as one of the youngest of the social sciences. The founding father of modern cultural anthropology in the US was a German emigré Franz Boas (1859-1941), who carried out empirical research among Inuit (Eskimos) and North American Indians. Boas reacted against the widely accepted evolutionary theories of the time, advocated by those such as the British anthropologist Edward Tylor, the sociologist Hebert Spencer and Lewis Henry Morgan who in turn influenced Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Evolutionism broadly asserted that all societies progressed in a unilinear fashion along a scale from the most 'simple' to the most 'complex', with each stage achieving a higher level of moral and societal improvement. In the context of the European colonialism of the time, this social evolutionism involved an explicit ranking of societies which reinforced the colonial project and a sense of western superiority. -
Religious Nationalism in an Age of Globalization: the Case of 1
74 Religious Nationalism in an Age of Globalization: The Case of 1 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/2236-463320161405 Benjamin W. Goossen History Department of Harvard University, Cambridge MA, Estados Unidos da América [email protected] Abstract: This article uses the example of Mennonite nation-building in Paraguay during the 1920s and 1930s to argue that state formation is not inherently modernist. Tracing nineteenth and early twentieth-century discourses of Mennonite colonies in Imperial e essay advocates a reevaluation of theories of modern statehood advanced by thinkers like James C. Scott and Ernest Gellner. As conservative, pacifist Mennonites traveled from North America to the Paraguayan Chaco to escape the pressures of assimilation in democratic society, their migration paved the way for coreligionists fleeing persecution in the Soviet Union to join internationally, characterized by deep religious observance, and conceived in opposition to high modernist projects. Keywords: State-building, nationalism, Mennonites, modernity, diaspora, globalization 1 This essay draws on research for my forthcoming book, Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017, conducted with funding from the Fulbright Commission, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and Harvard University. I wish to thank Uwe Freisen of the Menno Colony Archive and Gunolf Niebuhr of the Fernheim Colony Archive for providing primary sources, as well as Rachel Waltner Goossen for her comments. Except where otherwise noted, all translations are my own. While all qualifications in brackets are mine, italicized words are emphasized in the original documents. Almanack. Guarulhos, n.14, p.74-90 dossiê scales of global history 75 During 1936 and 1937, the German geographer Herbert Wilhelmy visited German- speaking settlements across southern Latin America. -
Legal Pluralism As Omnium Gatherum
FIU Law Review Volume 10 Number 1 Article 5 Fall 2014 Legal Pluralism as Omnium Gatherum Sally Falk Moore Harvard Law School Follow this and additional works at: https://ecollections.law.fiu.edu/lawreview Part of the Other Law Commons Online ISSN: 2643-7759 Recommended Citation Sally F. Moore, Legal Pluralism as Omnium Gatherum, 10 FIU L. Rev. 5 (2014). DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.25148/lawrev.10.1.5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by eCollections. It has been accepted for inclusion in FIU Law Review by an authorized editor of eCollections. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 37010-fiu_10-1 Sheet No. 7 Side A 11/13/2015 07:10:42 02 - MOORE_FINAL_9.24.DOCX (DO NOT DELETE) 10/3/15 9:18 AM Legal Pluralism as Omnium Gatherum Sally Falk Moore* I will divide the roughly fifty-year history of legal pluralism into two periods: the beginning starting in the 1960s as I experienced it, and the rest from the 1970s to the present. My objective is to try to present a large range of situations that have come my way in the literature, and that have been called “legal pluralism.” My emphasis will be on the variety of types and some of their historical pasts. I am contending that some of these instances are so unlike each other that while they have been classified together as “legal pluralism,” they are not really examples of the same social phenomenon. I am by no means trying to review the whole literature. -
Violence and Democracy - John Keane Index More Information
Cambridge University Press 0521836999 - Violence and Democracy - John Keane Index More information Index Akihiko, Tanaka 19, 177 A Letter to John Farr and John Harris, Al-Fanjari, Ahmad Shawqi 183, 188 Esqrs., Sheriffs of the City of Al-hurriyat’ as-siyasiyyah fi’l Islam 184 Bristol, on the Affairs of America Al-Ghannouchi, Rachid 183, 188, 189, 191 122 ‘The efficiency of using violence to establish an Islamic State’184 Carmichael, Stokely 11 ‘The Islamic movement and violence’ Castoriadis, Cornelius 88 184 China 20, 23 Althusius, Johannes 116, 190 civil society 4, 42–3, 96–9 Politica Methodice digesta atque Ernest Gellner on 43–5 exemplis sacris et profanis ilustrata incompatibility of violence with 38 116 its role in American Revolution 144–6 American Revolution 144–6 rebuilding civil society 129, 130–2 Battle of Trenton 145–6 civil war 25, 112–13 anti-party politics 150–3 civilisation see ‘civilisation’ passim 42–52, apocalyptic terrorism see terrorism 53 Arendt, Hannah 6, 7, 12, 100, 118, 146 civilising process according to Elias Correspondence 1926–1969 (with Karl 55–6 see civility Jaspers) 79 civility 3, 56 On Violence 6, 7, 100, 146 Zygmunt Bauman on 66–7 The Origins of Totalitarianism 98 Samuel Johnson on 42 Aristotle 38–9, 205 and modern state 60–2 on violence 38–9 civility politics 82, 90 Politica 38 civilising process according to Elias 55–6 Aron, Raymond 21, 111 dialectics of 105 Le grand schisme 111 rebuilding civil society 129, 130–2 Les dernieres` annees´ du siecle` 163 Clastres, Pierre 115 Augustine 11, 206 Recherches d’anthropologie -
Reflections on the Theory of Nationalism
UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN 36th ANNUAL SOROKIN LECTURE How Homogenous Must We Be? Reflections on the Theory of Nationalism Dr. John A. Hall Dean, Faculty of Arts McGill University Delivered January 27, 2005, at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada ©Copyright the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, 2006 I.S.B.N.: 0-88880-514-4 ABSTRACT One of the last and greatest thinkers of Jewish origin from Central Europe, Ernest Gellner, produced a theory of nationalism insisting that the very nature of modernity involved the creation of homogeneous nation-states. I explain why he felt like this, describe his theory of nationalism, note criticisms properly directed against its explanatory mechanisms, insist on the considerable cogency of his basic insight, seek to provide alternative and improved explanatory mechanisms, and end with reflections on our changed political economy – so as to assess the extent to which previous horrors can be avoided. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dr. John A. Hall received his PhD from the London School of Economics in 1976. He has been a Professor at McGill University since 1991. He was appointed the James McGill Professor in 2001, and he is currently Dean of the Faculty of Arts. Professor Hall held previous academic appointments at Southampton and Harvard Universities. He was an Invited Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Uppsala, Sweden (1999-2000); Visiting Research Professor at Queen’s University in Belfast (1999-2002); Honorary Professor in Sociology and Political Science at Copenhagen University (2000-2004); and the Fowler Hamilton Fellow at Christ Church College, Oxford (2003). -
An Appraisal of Ernest Gellner's Writings on Nationalism
B.J.Pol.S. 27, 191–222 Copyright 1997 Cambridge University Press Printed in Great Britain On the Nature of Nationalism: An Appraisal of Ernest Gellner’s Writings on Nationalism BRENDAN O’LEARY* Ernest Gellner’s is the best-known modernist explanatory theory of nationalism. This article summarizes its expression and development before considering its strengths and weaknesses. Discussion centres on Gellner’s functionalist mode of explanation, the place of nationalism in his philosophy of history, the predictive and retrodictive nature of his theory, and the merits of his typology of nationalism. The apolitical character of his writings is emphasized: in particular, though Gellner established the connections between nationalism and egalitarianism in modern societies, he did not emphasize the mutually reinforcing relationships between nationalism, egalitarianism and democratization; moreover, his contempt for nationalist doctrines is not something liberals, socialists and conservatives need share. The theoretical problem is to separate the quite spurious ‘national’ and ‘natural’ justifications and explanations of nationalism, from the genuine, time- and context-bound roots of it. Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change, 1964, p. 151. Nationalism, the most potent principle of political legitimacy in the modem world, holds that the nation should be collectively and freely institutionally expressed, and ruled by its co-nationals. Recent events demonstrate nationalist movements retain the capacity to shake states and empires, as well as the pieties -
Haney Foundation Series : Ethnography in Today's World : Color
Ethnography in Today’s World ................. 18429$ $$FM 05-28-13 10:19:34 PS PAGE i HANEY FOUNDATION SERIES A volume in the Haney Foundation Series, established in 1961 with the generous support of Dr. John Louis Haney ................. 18429$ $$FM 05-28-13 10:19:34 PS PAGE ii Ethnography in Today’s World Color Full Before Color Blind Roger Sanjek UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS PHILADELPHIA ................. 18429$ $$FM 05-28-13 10:19:34 PS PAGE iii Copyright ᭧ 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10987654321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sanjek, Roger, 1944– Ethnography in today’s world : color full before color blind / Roger Sanjek.—1st ed. p. cm. — (Haney foundation series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-4545-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Ethnology—United States—Methodology. 2. Ethnology—Methodology. 3. Anthropology—United States—Methodology. 4. Anthropology—Methodology. I. Title. GN345.S255 2014 305.800973—dc23 2013019444 ................. 18429$ $$FM 05-28-13 10:19:35 PS PAGE iv For my teachers: Anne Schwerner, Robert Stigler, Marvin Harris, Lambros Comitas, Jaap van Velsen, George C. Bond, Allen Johnson ................. 18429$ $$FM 05-28-13 10:19:35 PS PAGE v This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface ix PART I. -
Two Perspectives on the Relationship of Ethnicity to Nationalism: Comparing Gellner and Smith
TWO PERSPECTIVES ON THE RELATIONSHIP OF ETHNICITY TO NATIONALISM: COMPARING GELLNER AND SMITH Huseyin ISIKSAL* “There can be no society which does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and the collective ideas which make its unity and its personality.” Emile Durkheim Introduction The ethnic root of nationalism felt into the agenda of international relations theory, particularly since the 1970s, when resurgence of ethnic nationalism has witnessed in many parts of the world. Today, it is widely acknowledged that ethnicity plays a crucial role in nationalism, especially after the recent ethnic based conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and in the former Soviet Union. However, there are few detailed studies that focus on the relationship between ethnicity and nationalism and especially among the comparison of Anthony D. Smith and Ernest Gellner, as two distinctive scholars on these concepts. In this article I simply sought to bridge this gap. Accordingly, ethnicity and nationalism are highly inter-related but what is the relationship between them? This analysis attempts to shed some light on this issue by considering the works of two aforementioned authors who made considerable contributions in developing of theories relating ethnicity to nationalism. It is worth stressing that it is not the purpose of this essay to analyse and focus on the causes and consequences of the recent ethnic conflicts in particular parts of the world. Therefore, the reader of this essay will not find a particular analysis related with ethnic conflicts that are caused by nationalism. The unique aim of this paper is Alternatives: Turkish Journal of International Relations, Vol.1, No.1, (Spring 2002) 1 to compare and contrast the literature of Smith and Gellner and analyse the role of ethnicity on nationalism. -
Karl N. Llewellyn, Cultural Anthropology, and the Legacy of the Cheyenne Way
Maurer School of Law: Indiana University Digital Repository @ Maurer Law Articles by Maurer Faculty Faculty Scholarship 2001 Law and the "Other": Karl N. Llewellyn, Cultural Anthropology, and the Legacy of The Cheyenne Way Ajay K. Mehrotra Indiana University Maurer School of Law Follow this and additional works at: https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/facpub Part of the Cultural Heritage Law Commons, and the Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Mehrotra, Ajay K., "Law and the "Other": Karl N. Llewellyn, Cultural Anthropology, and the Legacy of The Cheyenne Way" (2001). Articles by Maurer Faculty. 2530. https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/facpub/2530 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at Digital Repository @ Maurer Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Articles by Maurer Faculty by an authorized administrator of Digital Repository @ Maurer Law. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Law and the "Other": Karl N. Llewellyn, Cultural Anthropology, and the Legacy of The Cheyenne Way Ajay K. Mehrotra KARL N. LLEWELLYN AND E. ADAMSON HOEBEL. The Cheyenne Way: Con- flict and Case Law in Primitive Jurisprudence. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1941. Pp. 360. In the summer of 1935, a well-known legal academic and a young an- thropologist ventured together to the Tongue River Reservation in Lame Deer, Montana, to study the legal culture of the Cheyenne. Through the recollections of the elder members of the tribe, the two scholars came to understand how the Cheyenne resolved their social disputes and how they "cleaned up the messes" of homicide, theft, adultery, and the like.