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

the social sciences that does precisely this, utilizing notions like “function” and
“feedback” to clarify how processes—such as the circulation of capital (Poulantzas
2008), the maintenance of hegemony (Jessop 1990), and the reinforcement of
organizational changes (Pierson 2004)—exert their effects without necessarily having to
manifest themselves in the consciousness or experience of the actors involved.
Similarly, there is no logical reason why a scholar couldn’t combine an attributeontology
with a commitment to ground an analysis in lived experience; the central
statement of one version of constructivist International Relations theory—“people act
toward objects, including other actors, on the basis of the meanings that objects have for
them” (Wendt 1992:396-397)—inclines in precisely this direction, and a similar
commitment has given rise to a number of empirical efforts to map and assess the
consequences of various ways that social actors in world politics have understood
themselves at different points in time (Finnemore 1996; Rodney Bruce Hall 1999;
Crawford 2002).
Therefore I would like to draw a distinction between a scholarly delineation of a
social object (such as a civilization) and a scholarly effort to trace and explain how
actors themselves delineate that social object. This is a matter of scientific ontology, in
the terms that I have used here, because—much like attribute-ontology vs. processontology—it
speaks to the general parameters for how objects appear in a particular
scholarly analysis. Do we regard a civilization to be the kind of thing that is best
identified by a detached scholarly analyst as a part of an academic explanation, or do
we on the contrary regard a civilization to be a social and cultural resource that
How to Think About Civilizations • P. T. Jackson • Page 21