Ryan Schram

Mills 169 (A26)

ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au

Monday, 21 September 2014

Available at http://anthro.rschram.org/1002/9.1

This week and next week we are discussing the possibility that there is more than one kind of modernity. Specifically,

• All societies change, but not all societies end up being the same.
• Not all kinds of social change are progress.

When anthropologists criticize the idea of progress, development, and modernization, they are generally criticizing a theory of social change put forward by Max Weber.

Max Weber (1864-1920) is widely considered the founder of modern sociology. Along with Emile Durkheim, he is credited with some of social science's main ideas.

Weber's approach to social forms starts from the view that there are different types of society, and one can compare them to understand each better.

For Weber “traditional” societies were different from “modern” societies.

Traditional societies are based on following rules because 'this is the way it has always been.'

Modern societies allow more freedom for individuals to make choices. Modern societies are based on agreements between individuals.

Weber says that modern societies are more rational than traditional societies.

Weber did not look at cultural differences the way that anthropologists do. His views about social change are ethnocentric. He assumed that all societies were moving toward greater rationality, which he saw in the German state.

The Weber thesis is that the development of an ascetic form of Protestant Christianity spurred the development of market exchange and capitalist production. This is presented in his famous book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905).

Calvin teaches that salvation is for the elect. There's nothing you can do to earn salvation.

What you do with your life has nothing to do with your relationship to God.

If you were successful, it was a sign that you were in the elect. Wealth is not valuable for its own sake.

A person should follow one's “calling” as a duty to God.

The means of earning a living (a calling) are separate from the ends (a living, wealth and success). Thus if one is wealthy, one can be deatched from this wealth and deal with objectively.

Protestant reformers condemned people for being consumed with worldliness: being greedy and venal. Greed is bad.

Because their philosophy was based on a new way of thinking of the person as an individual, they actually paved the way for disembedding the economy from social relationships.

Greed is good? Not really. Weber concludes that Protestantism led to people believing that self-interest is just human nature.

In the past, anthropologists and sociologists wanted to know how societies became more modern, and moved toward the type of society found in Europe. This school is called “modernization theory.”

Robert Bellah, Tokugawa Religion (1957).

James Peacock, Muslim Puritans (1978).

Even though Weber was ethnocentric in some ways, he did think that culture played a role in the history of society.

The values people learn from cultural institutions, especially religion, cause a society to change.

Weber predicted that modern societies would be secular. Why hasn't that happened?

Why has there been a “return” to religion even as the world becomes more “rational”? Why is membership in a religion so important for people of postcolonial societies such as Indonesia?

We examine the “Islamic revival” and the revival of public forms of piety.

Bellah, Robert N. 1957. Tokugawa Religion: The Values of Pre-Industrial Japan. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press.

Peacock, James L. 1978. Muslim Puritans: Reformist Psychology in Southeast Asian Islam. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.

Weber, Max. 1905. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Unwin Hyman. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/weber/protestant-ethic/index.htm.