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

“Normative Power Europe” is not a scholarly abstraction, but a concrete political
strategy being undertaken by various actors in the European political space. Leheny
documents the ways in which different Japanese actors seek to frame both Japan’s
cultural distinctiveness and Japan’s continuity with other “civilized” countries, and
does not limit his field of evidence to the traditional material of “high politics”—hence
we get to listen in on discussions of Japanese baseball and manga/anime, in order to see
what that tells us about Japanese notions about their own civilization. Rudolph ranges
the furthest in her adducing of evidence, even to the point of pursuing the discussion
and debate about indigenous Indian society into a California courtroom.
This last is a particularly telling example of what is at stake in allowing the selfidentified
participants in a given civilization to delineate their own sense of what is
involved, since a consistent determination to follow those debates can sometimes
necessitate setting aside even the most rudimentary notions of where a civilization
stops and starts: in this case, Indian civilization and the efforts to bound it extend
halfway around the world. A scholar operating with an ex ante specification of what a
civilization consists of—regardless of whether that specification consists of attributes or
processes—would likely never appreciate the relevance of those
California
conversations. A scholar proceeding more inductively, casting her or his nets widely in
order to see what people are talking about and where they are talking about it, might
see the California conversations as telling us something particularly important about
the practice of civilizational identity: the reproduction of a civilization over time seems
to be crucially dependent on the passing down of certain origin-stories to the next
How to Think About Civilizations • P. T. Jackson • Page 23