Social Movements: Changing Paradigms and Forms of Politics Author(s): Marc Edelman Source: Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 30 (2001), pp. 285-317 Published by: Annual Reviews Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3069218 . Accessed: 19/06/2011 17:16 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. 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All rights reserved SOCIALMOVEMENTS: Changing Paradigms and Forms of Politics MarcEdelman Hunter College and the GraduateCenter, City Universityof New York,New York, New York10021; e-mail: [email protected] Key Words collectiveaction, protest, resistance, civil society,globalization * Abstract Theoriesof collective action have undergonea numberof paradigm shifts,from "mass behavior" to "resourcemobilization," "political process," and "new socialmovements." Debates have centered on the applicabilityof theseframeworks in diversesettings, on the periodizationof collectiveaction, on the divisiveor unifying impact of identitypolitics, and on the appropriatenessof political engagementby researchers.Transnational activist networksare developingnew protestrepertoires thatchallenge anthropologists and otherscholars to rethinkconventional approaches to social movements. INTRODUCTION The worldwide political effervescence of "the long 1960s" (Isserman& Kazin 2000) contributedto a paradigmcrisis in social scientific thinkingabout collective action. This prolongeddecade of extraordinaryupheaval in New York, Chicago, Berkeley,Paris, Rome, Berlin,Tokyo, Mexico City,Prague, Beijing, andelsewhere was the most intenseperiod of grassrootsmobilization since the 1930s. Civil rights and antiwarmovements, youth and studentrebellions, mobilizations in defense of regional autonomy and the environmentand for the rights of women, gays and lesbians, the elderly, the disabled, and a host of other emergentgroups, identities, andcauses convergedwith an unprecedentedwave of anticolonialand antiimperial insurgenciesin poorerregions of the globe. Social scientistsof variousorientations concerned with geopolitics and revolutionhad ready-madecategories ("national liberation,""subversion") for analyzingevents in the "ThirdWorld." But the tur- moil in the developedNorth highlighted the inadequacyof existing social scientific frameworksand gave rise to new and rich debates. Even thoughanthropologists were well representedas participantsin this tide of unrestand their 1960s sensibilitiescontributed to new conceptualizationsof "inter- stitialpolitics" and of power,gender, colonialism, and the state(Vincent 1990), they remainedto a largeextent on the peripheryof social scientifictheorizing about col- lective action.One notableexception was the Vietnam-eraagrarian studies tradition 0084-6570/01/1021-0285$14.00 285 286 EDELMAN (Roseberry1995) pioneeredby Wolf (1969), a work that was an outgrowthof the teach-inmovement. In part,anthropologists' marginal involvement in discussions of collective action reflected an academic division of labor that assigned them peasants, the urban (especially Third World) poor, ethnic minorities, and mil- lenarianor syncreticreligious sects and allocatedother types of mobilization(and national-levelphenomena) to sociologists, political scientists, or historians.Also importantby the mid-1980s, in the United States at least, was anthropologists'fas- cination with "everyday"as opposed to organizedresistance and with microlevel analyses of power a la Foucault(Burdick 1995). Ethnographicresearch on social movements,moreover, tended to resist "grandtheoretical" generalizations because close-up views of collective action often looked messy, with activist groups and coalitionsforming, dividing, and reassembling and with significantsectors of their targetconstituencies remaining on the sidelines. This articletells four long stories in a shortspace. The firstis an accountof the post-1960s paradigmshift in social scientific studies of collective action, which, thoughoverly abbreviatedand canonical, is necessaryfor examiningthe stateof the field today and particularlywhat transpiredwhen theory traveledbeyond Europe and North America. The second is an appraisalof how ideas about periodization shapedcompeting post-1960s analyticalframeworks. The thirdconcerns the cen- trifugaland centripetal,or fragmentingand unifying, impacts of identitypolitics, the disproportionateattention social scientists devote to movementsthey like, and theirinfrequent efforts to theorizeright-wing movements. The fourthstory involves new developmentsin social movements themselves, particularlyan intensifying transnationalactivism, a disenchantmenton the partof diverse activistswith iden- tity politics, and a resurgenceof variedkinds of strugglesagainst inequality. One of the most strikingfeatures of the collective action field is its continu- ing intellectual compartmentalization.Debates have tended to occur along par- allel and disconnectedtracks, reflecting differentdisciplinary personal networks and forms of socialization and inquiry and a major divide separatingcase study and grand theory practitioners.One recent effort at synthesis notes that scho- lars of revolutions,strikes, wars, social movements,ethnic mobilizations,demo- cratization, and nationalism have paid little attention to each other's findings (McAdam et al 2001). Studentsof right-wingmovements rarely engage theories about other kinds of collective action. Despite frequent gestures toward trans- gressingacademic boundaries (and notwithstanding occasional successes), anthro- pologists on the one hand and sociologists and political scientists on the other have had little impacton or awarenessof each other'sefforts to understandsocial movements.1 'Oneof the few non-regionallyfocused anthologies on socialmovements edited by U.S. anthropologistsis indicativeof this mutualunfamiliarity, despite the inclusionof case studies-virtuallyall first-rate-froma rangeof disciplines.While it may be truethat "thestudy of protestoutside the industrialNorth is largelyunder-theorized" (Boudreau 1996,p. 175),Fox & Starn(1997) suggest-seemingly unaware of a substantialliterature SOCIALMOVEMENTS 287 A short article of broad scope can obviously invoke only some theorists and works (and movements). I emphasize recent work and allude sparingly to the "classics"of the field and more brieflythan I would prefer(or not at all) to various relevantissues. Anthropologists,for reasonsnoted above, are less well represented than scholars from other disciplines. Geographically,the emphasis of this review is on the Americas and Europe, not because significant social movements have not occurredelsewhere, but because these have been prominentsites of pertinent theoreticalproduction. Academic books and specializedjourals-including those devoted to collective action studies, such as Mobilizationand Research in Social Movements,Conflicts and Change-have been key forafor manydebates. Because activists and scholars engage each other (and sometimes are each other), some of the most provocative analyses of social movements' visions, strategies, and practices appear in nonacademic media: hybrid activist-scholarlypublications, small journalsof opinion, 'zines, web pages, organizinghandbooks, and manuals by those who seek to controlparticular kinds of movements. A CONVENTIONALSTORY OF SHIFING PARADIGMS In the early 1970s, functionalism still held sway in U.S. sociology. Park and the Chicago School had, since the 1920s, juxtaposed "social organization"- institutionalized,conventional patterns of everyday life-to "collective behav- ior," a category that included crowds, "sects," fashions, and mass movements, all of which they saw as simultaneouslysymptoms of societal disequilibriaand harbingersof new patternsof social relations(Park 1967). Smelser (1962) rejected the notion of "disequilibria"as "too strong"and attributedcollective behaviorto tensions that exceeded the capacity of a social system's homeostaticmechanisms andthat constituted a sourceof new bases of Durkheimian-stylesolidarity. Related psychological theories explained the rise of totalitarianismas a mass response to economic crises and "magneticleaders" by individuals with a "mob mentality" (Arendt1951) or an "authoritariancharacter" (Fromm 1941). These theoriesabout totalitarianismwere of limited use in analyzingturmoil in largely