How to Think About Civilizations - The Watson Institute for ...

simple empirical observation; it is a mutation in scientific ontology, one that allows
analysts to get past the quest to identify a civilization’s “core” or essence and to focus
instead on the concrete implications of particular political and economic and cultural
arrangements. In this volume, a clear example of that kind of analysis is David Kang’s
careful tracing of how various “Chinese” practices diffused into regions surrounding
China proper, making possible a set of actions that might not have been otherwise
possible. Other examples of this kind of analysis dominate the essays that Martin Hall
and I collected for our recent volume on civilizations in world politics (2007). The key
feature here is the emphasis not on a fully-formed social entity with dispositional
properties, but instead on the contingent historical emergence and reproduction of
those entities in practice.
Obviously, the kind of “general linear reality” explanatory logic associated with
an attribute-ontology will not work particularly well in an approach more centrally
focused on processes. If properties don’t produce outcomes, the only viable alternative
is to look to practices themselves—and in particular to look to practices that intend to
shift the contours of an actor’s social environment, since action in a process-ontology
emerges not from “inside” of an actor, but from the concrete and specific ways that an
actor is connected to her or his environment (Joas 1997:161-162). So we could investigate
those kinds of historical endowments that a particular pattern of diffusion has made
available to a group of actors, and this treat a civilization as a kind of structural context
for action—much as Kang does. Alternatively, we could focus our attention on those
moments where explicit discussions about the nature and boundaries of a civilization
How to Think About Civilizations • P. T. Jackson • Page 16