Primordial Sentiments Research Articles

THE PRIMORDIAL ROOTS OF BEING

Abstract. Suffering, alongside the feeling of sanctity of life, pervades human experience, generating primal anxiety, which humans learn to shore up with social solidarity and with the practice of communication in religious rituals. The roots of social belonging spring from the primordial sentiments toward ethnicity, race, language, religion, customs and traditions, and region. Self–identity, mediated by mental formations derived from social relations, is composed of thinking and values. Daily experience reveals that cultural differences produce blind spots in thinking and barriers in values—‐governing areas of activity, social relations, the world, and identity of being—‐that impedes cross—‐cultural understanding.

Toward the Realization of Ummah

IThe domain of Islam embraces some one billion people, 20 percent ofthe world’s population, distributed across the globe in virtually everypolitical unit and geographical context. Ideologically, the Muslim worldsenses a profound communion in the deeply embedded Islamic concept ofa territorially dispersed but spiritually unified global Islamiccommonwealth - ummah. Oswald Spengler, in his monumental Declineofthe West, reminds us that the Islamic community “embraces the wholeof the world-cavern, here and beyond, the orthodox and the good angelsand spirits, and within the community the State only formed a smallerunit of the visible side, a unit, therefore, of which the operations weregoverned by the major whole." This relationship between the modernnation-state and the ummah, now suppressed by the force of modernnationalism, continues to exist as a powerful primordial sentiment oftranscendent importance. That its dimensions, contours, and strengthcannot be assessed by empirical social science analysis does not make itless real as a critical component of the Muslim psyche. This impulsetowards Islamic unity, charged with emotion, religious fervor, andideology, canonically sustained by the concept of ummah, is alsonurtured by a vivid memory of Islamic imperial grandeur and by avibrant dynamic of missionary zeal. The latter, carrying out the Qur’anicproclamation of the universality of Islam and the command for globaldispensation of the Qur’anic message, has lost little of its originalimpetus. The force of ummah is the tacit dimension, the psychicindwelling nature of Islam. Nor can this compelling centrifugal thrustbe lightly dismissed as the transitory phase of a historical process.No other religion has quite so powerful an impetus for globalexpansion - neither Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism nor Christianity ...

Ethnic Mobilization in New and Old States: An Extension of the Competition Model

Ethnic mobilization simultaneously divides and unites the world's states. The common threat of internal division posed by subnational movements is a widely faced challenge shared by a diverse array of countries around the world. The rise of ethnic politics since the Second World War is best understood when ethnic mobilization is seen as a process of emergent group interests rather than simply the manifestation of primordial sentiments. This paper examines five essentially similar processes in both new and old states: urbanization, increased scales of organization, expansion of secondary and tertiary economic sectors, expansion of the political sector, and emergence of supranational organizations. Instead of reducing ethnic differences in favor of national-level identities, these development processes promote ethnic mobilization by increasing economic and political competition and organizing it on the basis of ethnicity.

ETHIOPIA: REVOLUTION, CLASS, AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION

MANY AFRICANIST scholars seeking to explain the dynamics of political and economic change have pointed to ethnicity as the most salient explanatory variable. There is no doubt that the ethnic factor does explain much in African politics, but the basis of ethnic conflict and just how much it explains are open debates. Initially some scholars argued that ethnic affinities were primordially based,' and that ethnic groups tended to be locked in hard and fast categories based on factors such as language, religion, race and/or assumed blood ties.2 These disparate groups were made to cohere, it was only thought, by the coercive authority of the colonial state. Inter-group conflicts, when they occurred, were conveniently labelled 'tribal conflicts' without much attention devoted to getting at the origins of such conflict. More recently, however, this perspective has come in for a great deal of criticism. First, some scholars, while acknowledging the political saliency of ethnicity, suggest new interpretations of the fundamental forces underpinning contemporary incidents of ethnic conflict in Africa;3 and, second, neo-Marxist class analysts suggest that contemporary incidents of ethnic conflict in Africa are more the product of class contradictions disguised by false consciousness than they are of ancient, primordial antagonisms.4 The first, non-Marxist, set of revisionists generally recognize that most ethnic conflict, instead of being based on primordial sentiments, is based on the competition among various ethnic groups over the scarce resources of the modernizing sector. We might call this phenomenon the new ethnicity. Although kith and kin in rural areas continue to be a salient reference group for urban-based relatives, ethnic conflicts generally occur only in urban areas and involve debates over economic resources found there, such as jobs, patronage, education, and so forth. In addition, revisionists suggest that ethnicity as a variable affecting political behaviour is fluid, intermittent, and experiential.s

The Political Economy of Ethnic Change

An attempt is made to evaluate two theories of ethnic solidarity and change, one functionalist, the other reactive, in the light of quantitatime evidence concerning England and the Celtic fringe from 1885 to 1966. The conceptualization of ethnicity as a "primordial sentiment" has led to the expectation that class or functional cleavages should come to predominate over cultural distinctions in the politics of industrial societies. Ecological data drawn from British countries do not wholly support this expectation. While this process has substantially occurred in England, it has been retarded in the Celtic fringe. In part, this is a function of the continued salience of culturaldistinctions in the determination of income in Wales and parts of Scotland. On the basis of these findings, it is suggested that ethnic solidarity in complex societies is best seen as a response to patterns of structural discrimination faced by certain groups in the society at large. It is concluded that ethnic solidarity is not usefully conceived as a "primordial sentiment."

Kasravi: the integrative nationalist of Iran

'Political Modernization' has become a sponge term. For some it has soaked up the process of building such centralized institutions as state bureaucracies, standing armies, and disciplined political parties. For others it is closely related to the breakdown of regionally independent agrarian economies into highly inter-dependent industrial economies. And yet for others, it is synonomous with the transformation of traditional cultures where subjects owe allegiance primarily to their parochial groups, and view themselves as distinctly detached from the central authorities, into modern cultures where citizens owe allegiance to the state, consider it their natural right and even civic duty to participate in public affairs, and feel that their political system whether democratic or totalitarian should have deep roots in the social system. But in whatever specific way 'political modernization' is used, it is invariably associated with the general process of national integration: the integration of traditional decentralized administrations into centralized modern state bureaucracies; the integration of agrarian economies where there are few direct links between the regional units into industrial economies where these units are fused into one unitary and directly linked social system; the integration of rulers and ruled through institutions that stretch from the centre to various areas and layers at the periphery; the integration of exclusive bonds such as to clans, tribes, religious sects, and regional groups into more inclusive ties to the nation; and the integration of multi-cultural, multi-tribal, multi-lingual empires into new nation-states often, if not always, with one political ideology, one culture, one language, and one national identity. 1 Although as early as the nineteenth century two such different minds as Marx and Durkheim both wrote on the transformation of independent agrarian units into inter-dependent industrial societies, it was not until quite recently that social scientists have focused their attention on the problem of political unification. This revival of interest is reflected in Clifford Geertz's much quoted article 'The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States' which first appeared nine years ago in a collection of essays entitled Old Societies and New Nations: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa. 2 In this work Geertz showed how newly independent countries were invariably confronted by the agonizing problem of reconciling traditional affiliations such as ties to tribes, regions, religions, languages, and ethnic groups into modern nation-states demanding the political allegiances of all their

The 1920 Revolt in Iraq Reconsidered:The Role of Tribes in National Politics

It is well known that the Hashemite Dynasty in Iraq was the creation of the British in 1921. Less well known are the circumstances that led to the hasty installation of Faisal as king and the emergence of ‘Independent Modern Iraq’.The 1920 revolt forced the hesitant British to enact a solution which for thirtyseven years was maintained by force. During this time, the British were obliged to force-feed an artificial and outmoded system that was barely capable of holding primordial sentiments in check. The state apparatus that the British set up as a means of containing these sentiments was not a genuine structure developed to meet expressed needs, nor did it serve to forge the various segments of the society into an organic nation.

The Shiv Sena: A Movement in Search of Legitimacy

]he founding of the Shiv Sena in Bombay on the eve of India's Fourth General Election and its spectacular growth into a major political force in that city are among the more important developments in Indian politics during the last few years. Its development represents the pervasive importance of primordial sentiments in a very modern sector of the Indian polity. It also reflects the increasing salience of local as opposed national concerns in India's urban arenas. It is perhaps indicative of what may become an increasingly mportant form of local political articulation in a nationally oriented party system. The creation of the Shiv Sena immediately exposed latent but intense political discontent. Founded on June 19, 1966 to safeguard the welfare of the people of Maharashtra,' the Shiv Sena at once attracted a large and militant following among Bombay's Marathi-speaking population. Its founding rally drew far bigger crowds than any drawn by the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti2 even during the heyday of the linguistic agitation. A conservative estimate of attendance at the rally addressed by Bal Thackery, the founder of the Shiv Sena, placed it at over two hundred thousand. Thackery's appeal for support at the rally evoked an overwhelming response, thousands reportedly volunteering within the first few hours by signing the Shiv Senia pledge and paying membership dues of one rupee (13 cents). By all accounts, this was a remarkable achievement for a movement whose leader was until then a political nonentity. The Shiv Sena played a prominent part in the Fourth general election held in March 1967 and launched a virulent campaign against those candidates whom it described as outsiders. It appealed the voters vote for sons of the soil. The defeat of V. K. Krishna Menon in two successive election contests in Bombay's North-East Parliamentary constituency was attributed by many the Shiv Sena which attacked him as a carpetbagger. Soon after-