Dynamics of change in multiethnic societies

The key problem, Geertz argues, is found in the fact that, within the boundaries of the new states, there are groups in which attachment to one’s culture can be understood to constitute a “natural” or “primordial” state of human experience. Local attachments persist despite nation-building projects, he argues, because such attachments are more natural than national-scale attachments owing to the “great extent to which a peoples’ sense of self remains bound up in the gross actualities of blood, race, language, locality, religion, or tradition.... To subordinate these specific and familiar identifications in favor of a generalized commitment to an overarching and somewhat alien civil order is to risk a loss of definition as an autonomous person, either through absorption into a culturally undifferentiated mass or, what is even worse, through domination by some other rival ethnic, racial, or linguistic community that is able to imbue that order with the temper of its own personality."

There are instances in which belonging is couched in the language of blood and kin. However, does a primordial sensibility preclude rational social action? In the case of Geertz’s sense of primordialism, the answer seems to be yes, but his view is problematic in identifying distinct categories of persons I roughly label as “rational” and “tribal.” On the rational side, the goal of social actors is to construct civil order based on notions of democratic modernity. The tribal peoples, by contrast, mired in primordial emotional attachments to “the gross actualities of blood, race, language, locality religion, or tradition” seem to be lacking in rational social agency. I also suggest that Geertz’s scheme errs in viewing postcolonial state building in terms of a singular notion of political modernity, when, in reality, state building, whether modern or premodern, exhibits a wide range of variation in form, function, political goals, and the ability to enact goals.