Resistance and Social Movements

Abstract

SOCIOLOGISTS and anthropologists have long been interested in the tenacity of culture and its slowness to change. Representative of this concern are Tylor's survivals, Bagehot's cake of custom, Tonnies' sitte, Sumner's mores and folkways, Boas' inertia, and Ogburn's lag. Common to these concepts is the notion that once a pattern of social relationships has been established, it tends to carry on unchanged, except as the dynamics of other social forces operate to undermine it. Closely associated with the study of cultural persistence is the study of resistance to social change. The one, however, should not be confused with the other. Resistance is not simply a function of cultural persistence. Resistance implies behavior on the part of some or all of the members of society, either passive or active, which is directed toward the rejection or circumvention of a social change. Except perhaps for Bernhard J. Stern in his studies of resistance to medical and technological change,' writers have concerned themselves with resistance primarily as a by-product of other work and interests. Thus Veblen and Marx in their respective analyses of vested interests and the bourgeoisie treated resistance to social change as it originated from particular groups within society. There have also appeared various descriptive accounts of social movements with a predominantly resistance orientation.2 And some aspects of nativistic phenomena studied by anthropologists have possessed characteristics of resistance movements.3 However, in most nativistic movements the revivalistic rather than the perpetualistic component appears to be the dominant theme, e.g., the Ghost Dance among the Plains Indians.4 Unfortunately sociologists in the field of social movements have tended to neglect these materials and the phenomenon of resistance in their studies. Social movement traditionally has been defined in a manner which would automatically exclude movements resisting social change. This has been the product of either explicitly or implicitly treating social movements as agencies seeking to bring about social change, often of a fundamental sort.' Thus the work which has emerged in the field is a study of reformistic and revolutionary movements. Representative of the reformistic orientation are the following concepts of a social movement: