In the draft of a first chapter on research on indigenous peoples of the Americas Ruth Benedict states that the institutional framework of a society did not in itself determine ‘how much or how little social solidarity a tribe may have’. Whether a society had a king, or open chieftainship, or one god or many, or whether it consisted of hunters or farmers.
... there are tribes where every man's hand is raised against another, and ones where this is not so. Social solidarity, in any possible investigation, is not a problem of the formal items of the culture pattern; it is a problem of the emotional relations between individuals in that society.¹
The way she puts it reminds me of Norbert Elias's notion of ‘internalized self-restraint’. Or basically the idea of internalized norms I guess. However, her point is interesting: is there a connection between the type of institutions a society has and the nature of the norms the members of that society can and will hold? It also reminds me of the hypothesis of the neocons of the USA, that the introduction of democracy to a country will necessarily lead to freedom and civil society - which on itself certainly seems false.
Wednesday 21 April 2010