Another Loopy Anthropologist

[marct]

But we have to recognize that there is ideological content in using tribes as a universal model for human society. It was a rejection of the idea that there are "advanced" and "less advanced" societies, or "civilized" and, at least, "less civilized." Of course, this idea has been common in Western culture since the ancient Greeks (and in other cultures like the Chinese).

Yup, and if anyone is feeling masochistic, I have a pretty decent lecture on that development. It's actually tied in with general conceptualizations of cosmic time and, specifically, with views on whether time is linear, circular or spiral. In the West, the formal expressions of it go back to Herodotus and the development of a form of social engineering (e.g. history as a mechanistic explanation).

Beginning in the 1960s (if not earlier) there was an intellectual movement, leftist in ideology, which rejected this idea, stressing that all cultures were more alike than different.

Certainly earlier inside Anthropology (~1895+) - things like the psychic unity of mankind and other Boasian concepts tended to reject the earlier ideas of unilinear evolution and social Darwinism. World War I was pretty much the death blow to the old unilinear evolutionary models except in various leftist enclaves, which tended to have an early form of multi-linear evolution anyway.

Actually, the stress wasn't so much on the cultures being the same as it was on a) humans, as a species, being the same and b) socio-economic forces operating as "natural laws". Pretty much the only school of social theory that adopted both these points were the varieties of Marxism. At the same time, say the 1950's - 60's, they also had enough symbolic capital to act as a visible opponent to functionalism and they got taken up by many as the ideology of choice against the status quo.

From a scientific standpoint, I hold that they are extremely flawed in both their basic assumptions and in their adoption / co-optation of religous symbolism. First, most of the Maxian theories are based on two totally false premises: the labour theory of value and a general dismissal of individualistic motivations like greed, anger and stupidity. Second, part of the reason why they were adopted stems back to the old Cold War conflict with the Soviets and a sub-conscious symbolic binary opposition, something aong the lines of "functionalism supports capitalism and he US goivernment, only the Soviets (Marxists) oppose it, therefore if I oppose the actions of the US government I must be a Marxist." Or, to put it more formally,

Marxists oppose Capitalism
I oppose Capitalism,
Therefore I am a Marxist

Rule of the excluded third <sigh>; typical of magical thinking.

This debate has intensified again as people have sought to place the "war on terror" (and I personally hate that phrase an refuse to use it without quotation marks) in context. Once school of thought attributes it to shortcomings or flaws in Islamic culture. The other--popular within the ideology that dominates many academic disciplines--rejects this explanation and seeks others, most often the idea that violent extremism from the Islamic world is a defensive response. Downplaying the structural and functional differences between Islamic and Western cultures is an element of this explanation.

Steve, I totally agree with you on the ridiculousness of the term "War on Terror". It is a classic example of magical thinking and, in many cases, is analytically useless. I also agree with you on the binary split that has shown up; the Clash of Civilizations vs. the Victimization of Islam. Sometimes I am amazed (and PO'd) at how readily we dust off pseudo-scientific explanations from the dustbin of history. Huntington's Clash model is really only a slightly updated form of deGobineau's model from 1853 see here), while the Victimization advocates are implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, arguing that radical Islamist irhabi violence is merely an expression of emergent class consciousness.

Where, I keep asking myself, is the science in all of this? It certainly doesn't show up in most of the academic stuff I've read except in the works that are extremely situated ("tactical" one might say). Personally, I'm still waiting to find (or build ) a theoretical model that is more predictive than the two currently available.