By Zygmunt Bauman
Smooth civilization, Bauman argues, promised to make our lives comprehensible and open to our regulate. This has no longer occurred and at the present time we now not think it ever will. during this booklet, now to be had in paperback, Bauman argues that our postmodern age is the time for reconciliation with ambivalence, we needs to how you can dwell in an incurably ambiguous global.
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Sample text
But there is a vital qualification here because, of course, ‘the modes of production themselves depend on the types of social organization, beliefs, and knowledge that are available’ (Hallpike 1986a:284), and cannot therefore be treated as independent variables. One of the best illustrations of the way in which the ‘superstructure’ can affect the operation of the ‘infrastructure’ is the impact of state illegitimacy on economic development in some Third World countries. ’, and the justification of state power, legitimacy, obviously has very important ideological or superstructural components.
Many African states were artificial constructs of colonial rule: These new African states are not the endogeneous creations of local history. They are not embedded in domestic power relations. They lack legitimacy. Leaders of these states face a peculiar challenge and are also limited in the options available to address it. Their challenge is to acquire sufficient hegemony over their society in order to stabilize and routinize their power.
Leach 1982:52) The social anthropologist as literary critic is unlikely to produce much theory worth the name, and not surprisingly we have Evans-Pritchard, at the end of his career, enquiring plaintively: But where do we go from here? The body of general theory which could alone make facts significant seems to be lacking. It was at one time provided by the idea of social evolution and for a short time by a rather vague and functionalist theory. ? (quoted in Singer 1981:x). Apparently we are, and the current situation where anthropologists endlessly document the variability of different cultures has been amusingly and brutally satirized by Tooby and Cosmides: Mainstream sociocultural anthropology has arrived at a situation resembling some nightmarish short story Borges might have written, where scientists are condemned by their unexamined assumptions to study the nature of mirrors only by cataloguing and investigating everything that mirrors can reflect.