RANDALL COLLINS CULTURE IS NO DEEPER THAN SKIN COLOR WINCH AND PROGRESS
Even relatively good sociologists mouth nonsenses like this..., unfortunately. The Sociology of Philosophies, pb, p 383.
What do you think he means? Skin color is nothing?
Skin color is everything? Skin color is deep? Skin color is shallow? Culture is nothing? Culture is deep? Culture is something important?
Do religion, or, say, history, play any part, or is it just, quote, culture, whatever he decides that means, that is related only to skin color? Culture may not mean very much, to him, I suspect...
Is this anthropology, not sociology, under the skin?
One takes from specialist social scientists what one can, and leaves the husk behind....
The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation To Philosophy....the underlabourer theory of philosophy,... sweep away the underbrush clogging the march of progress in the exact sciences..
The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation To Philosophy....the underlabourer theory of philosophy,... sweep away the underbrush clogging the march of progress in the exact sciences..
See his entire Chapter 7, "Innovation Through Conservatism: Japan".
The West has thought of its conservatism in the opposite way, or its innovation in the opposite way, however you want to turn it; or is this remark itself just a Western Whig Fallacy: comparing cultures which are, frankly, at least in such senses as this, more or less incommensurable?
I think Collins would claim that his analytical model makes such comparisons not only possible but practical.
I never heard Winch talk in anything like this way, by the way. Some of his writings suggest such things.
Collins asserts by his account that all cultures engender intellectual developments achieving analogous levels of intellectual developments and he gives voluminous examples of this, seemingly across all cultures and civilizations, including those borrowed by one culture from another and then elaborated.
One searches in vain throughout his entire 1000+ pages to find any reference to sub Saharan African intellectual development of any kind, or even a reference to Africa in his index, in spite of the well known fact that there were cultural and religious influences there, mainly from the Muslim world, for a thousand years.
I am guessing that he treats all of sub Saharan Africa as a sort of subset of Islam, although I do not recall him mentioning that anywhere, and his discussion of Islam in Africa is limited to considering it along the coast of North Africa. Sub Saharan Africa certainly does not appear, at least in his work, to have had a separate cultural identity or intellectual history worth commenting on, apart from discussing Islam elsewhere. His brief account of Stagnation and Loss of a Center in Islam, p 510, for example, fails to mention sub Saharan Africa. See Almoravid, Mali, Senegal, etc.
I think Collins would claim that his analytical model makes such comparisons not only possible but practical.
I never heard Winch talk in anything like this way, by the way. Some of his writings suggest such things.
Collins asserts by his account that all cultures engender intellectual developments achieving analogous levels of intellectual developments and he gives voluminous examples of this, seemingly across all cultures and civilizations, including those borrowed by one culture from another and then elaborated.
One searches in vain throughout his entire 1000+ pages to find any reference to sub Saharan African intellectual development of any kind, or even a reference to Africa in his index, in spite of the well known fact that there were cultural and religious influences there, mainly from the Muslim world, for a thousand years.
I am guessing that he treats all of sub Saharan Africa as a sort of subset of Islam, although I do not recall him mentioning that anywhere, and his discussion of Islam in Africa is limited to considering it along the coast of North Africa. Sub Saharan Africa certainly does not appear, at least in his work, to have had a separate cultural identity or intellectual history worth commenting on, apart from discussing Islam elsewhere. His brief account of Stagnation and Loss of a Center in Islam, p 510, for example, fails to mention sub Saharan Africa. See Almoravid, Mali, Senegal, etc.
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