Ernest Gellner

4 Key excerpts on "Ernest Gellner"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Nation and Identity

  • Ross Poole(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  For Gellner, industrialisation is the cause; nationalism the effect. We might equally well ‘explain’ other characteristically modern doctrines such as liberalism, socialism and religious fundamentalism as more or less remote effects of the same case. But these doctrines have arisen, not because a set of economic conditions have generated certain sets of ideas, but because men and women reflecting on the conditions of their life and the changes taking place have put forward ideas which we can now identify as liberal, socialist, fundamentalist or nationalist. Reflection does not take place in an intellectual void. Those who created these doctrines were influenced by the intellectual, religious, political and moral traditions which were available to them. Some theorists were more insightful, others more influential; and we should take this into account. But it is egregious to think we can read bodies of thought off some – allegedly neutral – account of technological changes. 39 At the very least, we need a conception of the political and cultural spheres which provided the context in which ideas were produced and disseminated. We almost certainly also need to make some reference to the ideas of specific nationalist thinkers. Indeed, despite his claim that ‘we shall not learn too much about nationalism from the study of its own prophets’, 40 Gellner himself makes use of concepts developed under the impetus of nationalism. I have already mentioned that the concept of culture was a product of that period of intellectual life in which nationalism itself came to self-consciousness. Herder, the ‘prophet’ of nationalism, played an important role in developing this concept (he seems to have been the first, for example, to have used the term in the plural 41)

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Symbols of Defeat in the Construction of National Identity

  • Steven Mock(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  6 To subsequent theorists such as Ernest Gellner, this suggested that the origins of the nation were to be found not so much in the convergence of ideas but in the under- lying social forces that generated the context in which these ideas could germinate. Gellner defined nationalism as “primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and national unit should be congruent,” 7 elab- orating in a later work that this principle “maintains that similarity of culture is the basic social bond. Whatever principles of authority may exist between people depend for their legitimacy on the fact that the members of the group are of the same culture.” 8 But far from being a natural or obvious notion, or, for that matter, an artificial and constructed one, Gellner asserted that the idea of common culture as the basis of polit- ical legitimacy became possible only in the context of modes of social organization unique to the modern era. Dividing history into three distinct eras – tribal, agrarian, and modern– industrial – Gellner offered explanations as to why nations either could not or did not form in the two previous eras, at least not in the sense that we understand the term today. In hunter–gatherer societies, the rudi- mentary nature of political leadership and the lack of a codified culture meant that the problem of the relationship between polity and culture was never an issue. The idea that leadership positions must be held only by members of the same culture as the unit being governed is relevant only in a world in which governance by impersonal institutions is taken for granted. It was only in the agrarian age that the expanding size of populations necessitated a complex division of labor, leading to the need for political centralization and impersonal political institutions; that is, the state.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Global Culture

  Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity

  • Mike Featherstone(Author)
  • 1990(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  There is no discussion of the more general concept of power. This apparent lack of interest is, of course, a logical consequence of Gellner's theory of nationalism. The necessary 'general forms' to which he refers are not the result of any intrinsic trends or essential interrelations of culture and politics; rather, they are determined and imposed by developments in the economic and technological sphere. The key to nationalism is to be found in the dynamics and 214 Theory, Culture & Society demands of industrial society. 'In brief, the mutual relationship of a modern culture and state is something quite new, and springs, inevitably, from the requirements of a modern economy' (Gellner, 1 983: 1 40). The latter 'depends on mobility and communication between individuals, at a level which can only be achieved if those indiv iduals have been socialized into a high culture, and indeed into the same high culture' ( 1 983: 140). A comprehensive and constantly changing division of labour cannot function without an adequate cultural medium of interaction; to ensure the standardization and diffusion of the cultural pattern, a centralized state is needed ; but the state also depends on the cultural context which generates the necessary commitment and identification on the part of its citizens. But this functionalist image of modernity does not explain why the demand for a new form of cultural integration should have led to the development of national ism. The functional logic operates with in and is specified by a histor ical context; 'a world that inherited both the political units and the cultures, high and low, of the preceding age' (Gellner, 1 983: 52). The progress towards cultural homogenizat ion takes place on the basis of multiple pre-constituted units and in such a way that the consolidation of larger and more integrated units creates new obstacles to global homogeneity.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Islam Obscured

  The Rhetoric of Anthropological Representation

  • D. Varisco(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Gellner was “there” through thick and thin. The field-graduated expert can speak about any aspect of Islam because he studied certain tribal and religiously charismatic Arabs and Berbers in a few locales of Morocco. Furthermore, Gellner would have us believe that he was there early on, when things were properly tribal and not tainted by recent cul- tural change. In responding to his critics, Gellner retorts, “Scholars who take the ‘illusion’ view of the segmentary egalitarian idiom tend to have done their field research fairly late in the development of these societies; I suspect they mistake what is indeed a correct account of the present, for one which was also valid in the past.” 150 For the record, all ethnographic research in the region has been “fairly late,” unless the field is expanded to ethnologists and folklorists of the early French colonial era. Gellner conveniently ignores the work of an ear- lier ethnographer, Emyrs Peters, who had come to doubt the power of the segmentary model. 151 One potential measure of a scholar’s work is an inventory of other men quoted. In Gellner’s case there appear to be few women worth quoting. Such a list for Gellner’s “flux and reflux” essay produces the following results, disaggregated by categories that reflect the arbitrariness of disciplinal boundaries in any kind of diachronic sequence: 152 Sociologists/Anthropologists Jacques Berque J. P. Charnay Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard Emile Durkheim Sir James Frazer Ernest Gellner 77 Milton Friedman 153 R. Gallisot and G. Badia 154 Dr. Riaz Hassan Raymond Jamous Ibn Khaldun 155 A. M. Khazanov 156 M. M. Kovalevsky Phillipe Lucas and Jean-Claude Vatin 157 Alan Macfarlane Karl Marx Margaret Mead 158 Robert Montagne Dr. Magali Morsy H. Munson Jr. C. Lévi-Strauss G. E. Markov 159 Germain Tillion 160 Max Weber Shelagh Weir Philosophers/Theologians St. Augustine Joseph de Maistre Hegel David Hume Luther Frank E. Manuel Nietzsche St. Peter Plato Bertrand Russell John Wesley 161 A.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book