Re: Islamic Militancy: It is their problem

What I think we're onto here, among other things, is a critique of
world-systems analysis that has seem long ignored -- as one doesn't see it
much in overviews of world-systems analysis.  It has roots, among other
places, in the work of EP Thompson, Tomich (a student of his), Mintz,
Roseberry, Wolf, McMichael, and others.  Part of the problem with
conventional world-systems analysis -- fixated as it is on explaining the
most with the fewest concepts -- is that it is only as accurate as it is
general.

Wallerstein's response to "hold the tiller firm" in view of comparative
world-systems (Chase-Dunn, Hall, and others) and Frank's 5000 year system
has pushed this issue to the fore, and the debate has effectively imploded
the paradigm.  That is, the claim by Wallerstein that  "the optimal method
is to pursue analysis within systemic frameworks, long enough in time and
large enough in space to contain governing logics that determine the
largest part of sequential reality(Wallerstein 1991: 244) is no longer
tenable at any level.  As Sherman has stated, and I entirely agree with,
there is so much more that needs explaining.

World-generalization in world-systems today knows no timespace boundaries,
though it is fixated on them.  If Franks assertions of a five-thousand year
old Eurasian division of labor is based on trade data and other binding
criteria that nonetheless seems disproportionate to the claims of systemic
unity and development relatedness, there can be no question that his and
other works are based on facts of globe-spanning processes.  And if his work
is focused on material relations, there are also other works and concerns
with the long run lineages of cultural processes and how they shape and are
shaped by global processes.   These concerns suggest, at the very least,
that various world-systems may not be adequately explained in terms of their
internal governing logics.  At some point, a soft boundary is no boundary.

And if this is so, then the door has been opened to rethinking and
unthinking the timespace boundaries of causality.  Perhaps now we can
consider the possibility that the project of finding systemic causal
boundaries and governing logics is itself problematic.  Perhaps it is time
to reconstruct world historical processes in more open-ended and
historically concrete ways that do not seem to apriori exclude the
possibility of connections here and there, or which reduce various processes
to general types or governing logics, nor which presume connections without
explaining them concretely, as seems implied with the idea of systemic
boundaries.  Perhaps its time to embrace historical contingency and complex
causality networks in a perspective that favors a building up rather than
a filling in, of categories and totalities of historical change -- as
suggested by McMichael's incorporated comparison approach.

Inspired by Tomich's critique, I've been arguing since 1990 that perhaps it
is more useful to try and understand the local faces of global processes and
the world-historical dimensions of local developments.  Maybe a number of us
see eye-to-eye on this.

However, Sherman has argued that "the fact of Middle East oil may be of some
relevance to explaining Islamic militancy, by endowing some conservative
members of a despised group (on the global level) with deep pockets--but I
doubt that will really get us too far."  I think I agree with the idea, but
not the wording.  Oil will only go so far.  It may go very far.  It is
indispensable.  But it won't go far enough.  It is quite necessary, as
argued, to understand the development of Islam, particularly under the
Ottoman empire, and then under capitalism.  Sherman and I agreed on at least
one other occasion, when he, Samman, Ray, and I sat in on an Anthropology
course at SUNYB. Like religion and other cultural forms, we agreed that
capitalism did not create patriarchy, but patriarchy as changed and
"evolved" with capitalism, taking on new forms, new contradictions, etc.  We
may also add that patriarchy has differed in time and place within
capitalism, as have the cultural tools and processes of capitalism.