Re: Islamic Militancy: It is their problem

        As an interloper from a history department, sitting in on this
latest round of exchange has been especially intriguing.  Elson is almost
calling for a new "new historicism."  World-system theory attracted many
historians in the 1970s and onward largely, I suspect, because it seemed
to herald the historicization of sociology.  The detailed and nuanced
grasp of economic and political history by Wallerstein, Arrighi, et al.,
made us sit up and take notice.  But Elson, I think, is correct in
critiquing the other face of world-system theory--its penchant for vast
generalizations that impose more system and order and logic on the muddle
of world history than the historical evidence may warrant.  This penchant
is not confined to Wallerstein and Arrighi.  It is just as obvious,
although with different slants, in the work of Frank, Chase-Dunn, and
Hall, among many others.  The nomothetic always tends to overwhelm the
idiographic, philosophically, just as it did in the work of that 
soi-disant historian who preceded them all, Arnold J. Toynbee.

        I would add that there is another problem at work here.  Just as
Toynbee, as historian or self-made sociologist, really thought deeply
only about religion and warfare, so world-system theorists--from my
perspective--are obsessed with economies and polities.  Some few add a
significant dollop of cultural anthropology.  But in most instances, we
are talking about classical economics, politics, and anthropology.  There
is much to learn from all three.  Nevertheless, they do not exhaust the
human condition.  As a Marxist of sorts, I do believe that material
imperatives precede and help to determine all others.  But the
superstructure exists.  Once in existence, it wields power and undergoes
transformations not always mechanically dictated by material imperatives.
It is also the case, I believe, that an anthropology fixated on
prehistoric cultures has relatively little to tell us about the
complexities and confusions of cultures in recent millennia.  At any rate
if we are going to be seriously multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary
and all the rest, we must add to our repertory cultural studies,
intellectual history, comparative religions and literatures, gender
analysis, history of philosophy, political theory, and no doubt a great
deal more, all in the service of trying to understand the immensely
complex nature of human societies and cultures in their travels through
space and time.  And we must not only add these studies, we must make them
as central to our concerns as trade routes, interstate systems, and cycles
of hegemony.

        A large agenda.  But the largeness of world-systems,
world-economies, and world-empires dictates that we welcome the challenges
it presents.  I also agree that the present round of exchanges has been
quite illuminating and even provocative.

        Warren


W. Warren Wagar
Department of History
Binghamton University, SUNY     


On Tue, 30 Oct 2001, Elson Boles wrote:

> 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.
> 
>