Abstract
Religion is a cultural system and culture is increasingly becoming a pertinent issue in world politics, but the debate on these issues is quite hazy. We need to ask: What is culture? At the outset we may observe that by the end of the Cold War the political focus on bipolarity was being phased out, and this coincided with the flaring up of religious and ethnic conflicts. A greater interest in the study of culture is developing. However, a clear concept of the issue itself is not available. At least there is a need for an understanding of culture that goes beyond the existing anthropological account and also relates culture to civilisation beyond traditional wisdoms on these issues.1 Cultural analysis has its classical roots in pre-war German sociology and I suggest looking at this to begin with. In the now classic article ‘Cultural Sociology’, originally published by Vierkandt in the Handwörterbuch der Soziologie (Handbook of Sociology), Alfred Weber defines culture as a ‘spiritual and intellectual expressional form within the substance of life, or a spiritual and intellectual attitude toward it’.2 In that article Weber continues: ‘The social structure has hence been the most essential object of spiritual and intellectual formation throughout all ages’ (p. 243). He concludes by stating:
Coming to terms with traditions and the ideal or religious incrustations of existence is in every new constellation — as we would describe the new historical situation in a sociological, technical way — mostly at least as important as the endeavour to capture and form, or come to terms with, the new naturalistic, practical, and intellectual stuff of life (p. 244).
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Notes
See Adam Kuper, Culture: the Anthropologists’ Account, Cambridge, MA, 1999, and also the reader edited by
John Rundell and Stephen Mennell, Classical Readings in Culture and Civilization, London, 1998.
The essay of Alfred Weber is reprinted in Hans Peter Dreitzel (ed.), Sozialer Wandel, Neuwied, 1967, pp. 239ff., particularly p. 242. Anglo-Saxon readers are requested not to confuse Max with Alfred Weber.
Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right, Cambridge, 1997.
The seminal work is Robert Wuthnow, Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis, Berkeley, 1987. See also
R. Wuthnow, J. Habermas et al., Cultural Analysis, London, 1984.
On the virginity issue and sexuality as a cultural dimension in Islam, see Dale F. Eickelman, The Middle East: an Anthropological Approach, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1981, pp. 127ff. and 141ff.
B. Tibi, ‘The Interplay between Social and Economic Change’, in George Atiyeh/Ibrahim Oweiss (eds), Arab Civilization: Challenges and Responses, Albany, NY, 1988, pp. 166–82.
Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society, Glencoe, IL, 1958. See also the new thinking by
David E. Apter, Rethinking Development, London, 1987.
See Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations, New York, 1994; and
B. Tibi, Krieg der Zivilisationen, Hamburg, 1995 (new revised edition, Munich, 1998).
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, New York, 1973, p. 13.
B. Tibi, The Crisis of Modern Islam: a Preindustrial Culture in the Scientific-Technological Age, Salt Lake City, 1988; and
B. Tibi, Islam and the Cultural Accommodation of Social Change, Boulder, CO, 1990, reprinted 1991.
See Stephen K. Sandersson, Social Evolutionism: a Critical History, Cambridge, 1990.
Karl Marx, ‘Die britische Kolonialherrschaft in Indien’, in Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels, Werke, vol. 9, East Berlin, 1960, pp. 127ff., particularly p. 133.
Hugo C.F. Mansilla, Entwicklung als Nachahmung. Zu einer kritischen Theorie der Modernisierung, Meisenheim/Glan, 1978; and the same Latin-American author, Die Trugbilder der Entwicklung in der Dritten Welt, Munich and Vienna, 1986.
S.N. Eisenstadt, Tradition, Change and Modernity, London, 1973. Simply for technical reasons I am using here the German translation Tradition, Wandel und Modernität, Frankfurt/M., 1979.
David Apter, The Politics of Modernization, Chicago, 1965, followed two decades later by Apter’s book, Rethinking Development (referenced in note 7).
Ibid., pp. 237ff. A relevant monograph on this is Bryan S. Turner, Weber and Islam, London, 1974; and, more recently, the proceedings of an international conference on Max Webers Sicht des Islams. Interpretation und Kritik, ed. Wolfgang Schluchter, Frankfurt/M., 1987.
On Afghani, see the biography by Nikki Keddie, Sayyid Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1972; as well as the selected texts of Afghani edited by Keddie and published under the title An Islamic Response to Imperialism, 2nd printing, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983.
Jemaladdin Afghani, al-A’mal al-kamila (Collected Works), Muhammed Imara (ed.), Cairo, 1968, p. 328.
See B. Tibi, Arab Nationalism: between Islam and the Nation-State, 3rd enlarged edition, London and New York, 1997, pp. 88ff.
Maxime Rodinson, Mohammed, Frankfurt/M. and Lucerne, 1975.
Niklas Luhmann, Funktion der Religion, Frankfurt/M., 1977.
See the chapter on religion in J.E. Goldthorpe, The Sociology of the Third World: Disparity and Development, Cambridge, 1984, pp. 207–27; and the special issue of the journal Millennium, December 2000 on Religion and International Relations.
See the pathfinding work of Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: a Study of Order in World Politics, New York, 1977; and The Expansion of International Society, ed. Hedley Bull and Adam Watson, 3rd printing, Oxford, 1988.
Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne, Frankfurt, 1985 (for the English version see note 40).
See also John Hall et al. (eds), Europe and the Rise of Capitalism, Oxford, 1989.
See David Harrison, The Sociology of Modernization and Development, London, 1988, chapter 2 and pp. 149ff.
See Franz Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage in Islam, London, 1994.
See B. Tibi, ‘The Fundamentalist Challenge to Secular Order in the Middle East’, in The Fletcher Fomm of World Affairs, vol. 23, I (Winter/Spring 1999), pp. 191–210.
René König (ed.), Aspekte der Entwicklungssoziologie, Cologne and Opladen, 1969, p. 30 (italics in the original).
See the monograph on this issue by Marco Orru, Anomie: History and Meaning, London, 1987.
See Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge, MA, 1987 (for the German original see note 30 above).
See Binaz Toprak, Islam and Political Development in Turkey, Leiden, 1981; and more recently
B. Tibi, Aufbruch am Bosporus. Die Türkei zwischen Europa und dem Islamismus, Munich, 1998; the Turkish edition was published in Istanbul 2000.
On the Egyptian variant of Fabian socialism see the remarkable monograph by Vernon Egger, A Fabian in Egypt: Salamah Musa and the Rise of the Professional Classes in Egypt, 1909–1939, Lanham and New York, 1986.
Fuad Kandil, Nativismus in der Dritten Welt. Wiederentdeckung der Tradition für die Gegenwart, St. Michael (Austria), 1983. The empirical part of Kandil’s study is concerned with Egyptian Islam.
For more on this see B. Tibi, The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World Disorder, Berkeley, 1998.
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Tibi, B. (2005). Culture and Social Change: Tradition and Innovation in Cultural Analysis. In: Islam between Culture and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230204157_4
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