Tony Waters

Politics as Vocation

The questions Weber asks are, “Why and under what circumstances will the people submit? And on which intrinsic internal legal justification, and what external means does domination rely?”

Refugees and Education: Mass Public Schooling without a Nation‐State

Mass public education is a goal of virtually every government in the world today. Public education is key to the operation of the modern state, both in the present and into the future. Schools aim to create a common understanding of identity in terms of what is imagined as legitimate expressions of nationalism, patriotism, and economic activity. Common schooling is necessary for the establishment of a modern political community, including a national government. Or, as Benedict Anderson wrote, the nation is “an imagined political community and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. . . . It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” This communion is possible only when vast numbers of people are exposed— and indoctrinated—to the same ideas through the system of mass public schooling that every modern nation-state seeks to establish. In sum, a key social role for schools in all modern societies is the creation of modern citizens and workers who can imagine themselves as members of a political and economic community. In effect, the nation and its schools define the “we” that is the citizenship of a modern state. By default, it also defines a “them.” But the smooth operation of a mass schooling system that produces citizens and workers is dependent on a national consensus about who the “we” of citizenship will be in the future. Curricular choices are inherently statements about what type of society the “we” will have in the future. In other words, curricular choices are intended to help define those types of citizenship that are perceived as legitimate and those which are not. Such a consensus emerges in political maneuvering about what should and should not be in a curriculum. This political maneuvering occurs around a familiar range of issues, including language of instruction, appropriate national stories, pedagogy, examples used to illustrate numeracy issues, the role of re-

Towards a theory of ethnic identity and migration : the formation of ethnic enclaves by migrant Germans in Russia and North America

This article explores the determinants for the maintenance of ethnic identity by comparing six groups of migrant Germans. The groups are eighteenth century German peasants migrating to Volga Russia, thirteenth century migrants to Latvia, seventeenth century bureaucrats and traders migrating to Moscow/St. Petersburg, eighteenth century peasant migrants to Pennsylvania, nineteenth century Hutterite migrants to the North American Midwest, and eighteenth century Volga German migrants to the American Midwest. Notably, three of these groups assimilated into the host society, while three of them formed ethnic enclaves. Comparison of the six cases indicated that what determined whether a group would maintain its identity or not depended on whether individuals could move their inheritable economic base. This is because in the immigrant situation it is the inheritable economic base which determines who the primary reference group will be.

The distribution of power within the community: Classes, Stände, Parties by Max Weber

This is a translation from German of Max Weber’s chapter “Class, Status, Party” from his masterwork Economy and Society (Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft). This chapter was probably written before World War I. Two German versions of Economy and Society have been published. In 1921, the chapter was published as part of a compilation edited by Marianne Weber. A second compilation of Economy and Society was first published in German by Johannes Winckelmann beginning in 1956. For more details see Waters and Waters 2010.

A Cultural Analysis of the Economy of Affection and the Uncaptured Peasantry in Tanzania

The author reviews and comments upon Goran Hydens thesis of the economy of affection and the uncaptured peasantry in East Africa. Hyden hold that villagers and city-dwellers are linked in webs of kinship and tribal obligation which mitigate against the accumulation of wealth or capital necessary to form either industrial modes of production or class-based societies. The high value placed on personal relationships virtually demands a peasant mode of production. In contrast to former European and Asian scenarios uncultivated arable land remains available. Peasants may therefore participate to varying degrees in both the market economy and the traditional socioeconomic system as they desire without being trapped in capitalist production. Together however the availability of land and the economy of affection may combine as the most significant force thwarting economic development in Tanzania. Applying a methodological framework recently suggested by Wendy Griswold for the sociology of culture the author reviews and reformulates part of Hydens analysis. The intentions of creative agents the reception of cultural objects over time and space understanding the intrinsic values of cultural objects and the significance of perpetuating social groups are discussed.

Challenges in Calculating Two-Year College Student Transfer Rates to Four-Year Colleges.

Two-year colleges play an important role in facilitating transfers to four-year institutions. This has resulted in the demand to assess how well the community college systems train students for successful transfer to four-year bachelor-granting institutions. Existing datasets on two-year college transfer rates provides inconsistent and, sometimes, even contradicting answers. In this paper, we examine exactly why and how there are such varied results on two-year college transfer rates. Our findings indicate that there is no valid or universal measure of successful transfer programs. We find that such a measure is hindered by six factors: structural, technological, economic, governmental, and social. These factors make reliable comparisons of national and even statewide transfer success rates problematic. We suggest that policy makers should review existing datasets on two-year college transfer rates with a knowledgeable eye to avoid drawing inferences or making decisions based upon a review of potentially inaccurate comparisons.

The Sacred and the Profane in American History Curriculum

The question of why students think there are two kinds of American history taught—one in the K—12 system and one in the university system—can be examined critically using Emile Durkheims (1973) description of the sacred and the profane. The history taught in K—12 classrooms often focuses on idealized accounts of the past that protect the status quo. K—12 history emphasizes the underlying values that Durkheim calls the sacred, which are reproduced through the development of a triumphal history. The sacred values in K—12 history emphasize selfless acts of people who sacrificed on behalf of society. In contrast, the curriculum emphasized in college courses often focuses on failings that do not reflect the highest ideals of society, which Durkheim calls the profane. The dissonance between these types of history is important for understanding why different types of history are taught and why social change can be difficult to accomplish.

Comment on “Recent Origin and Cultural Reversion of a Hunter–Gatherer Group”

I read the article “Recent Origin and Cultural Reversion of a Hunter–Gatherer Group” [1] with interest. The article raises questions about the nature of contemporary hunter–gatherer groups like the Mlabri of Thailand that are important. But I am concerned that the authors, in demonstrating the elegance of their genetic technique, have reduced the anthropological question about socioecology to an “either–or” one of descent from an ancient isolated group versus a relatively recent “flight to the forest” by a small founder group from a horticultural society. The authors claim that genetic, linguistic, and folkloric data come down solidly on the side of the latter conclusion. I think that as likely an explanation is that the Mlabri are a product of the socioecological world of highland Southeast Asia, where most groups have varying elements of both modes of subsistence. No Southeast Asian highlanders are strictly horticulturalists or hunter–gatherers. Most Southeast Asian highlanders are horticulturalists who supplement their diet through foraging. A few of them also trade with groups like the Mlabri, who are at one extreme of the horticulturalist–forager continuum. Sometimes, trade occurs between linguistic groups, using shared knowledge of each others languages. Other times, trade is within the same ethnic group. Indeed, the Khmu of Laos, who are linguistically most closely related to the Mlabri, have traditionally practiced this mixed strategy. When observed in both the 1930s by Bernatzik [2], and in the late 20th century by missionaries and anthropologists, the Mlabri were in contact with other ethnic groups, primarily the highland Hmong, Northern Thai, and Lao. Indeed, Mlabri men spoke these languages well enough to trade forest products for scraps of cloth and rice. It is also probable that, as with many other such groups, women were captured or married, and Mlabri children were occasionally taken for adoption. Checking for evidence of Mlabri mtDNA in these populations could verify whether this is the case. However, this raises a second problem with the approach the authors took. The DNA of the hill tribes presented in the article did not include those groups that the Mlabri have had contact with, such as the Hmong, northern Thai, Htin, Lao, and Khmu of the remoter areas of Nan (Thailand), Phrae (Thailand), and Sayaboury (Laos) provinces, where they have lived during at least the last 70–80 years. Instead, the authors used blood samples from different hill tribes speaking Sino-Tibetan languages and currently living in the Chiang Rai and Mae Hong Son provinces of Thailand, hundreds of kilometers to the west. These tribes have had no known contact with the Mlabri during the last 80 years, or before. In such a context, perhaps it is not surprising that the authors concluded that the Mlabri were isolated from these groups. This opens up another explanation for how the Mlabri might have persisted in Southeast Asia during the last 600 years. They could have been skilled hunter–gatherers who 600 years ago began living in symbiotic trading relationships with more settled groups. There is no reason that such relationships could not have been persistent, even though it does not fit neatly into the old hunter–gatherer versus horticulturalist dichotomy, favored by the authors. Nevertheless, I think that this is an interesting relationship to explore. While, as the authors point out, the Mlabri may have little to teach us about how humans subsisted before the dawn of agriculture, they may well have much to say about the socioecology of how horticulturalists and hunter–gatherers coexisted since the emergence of agriculture 10,000 years ago.

Are the Terms 'Socio-Economic Status' and 'Class Status' a Warped Form of Reasoning for Max Weber?

A classic definition of social inequality comes from the sociologist Max Weber, who wrote that there are three fundamental types of inequality. The first is based in the marketplace and is “social class”. The second, and more important distinction, is based in estimations of honour that Weber called in German Stand, which traditionally is translated into English as “status group”. The third type of stratification is “party” where power is distributed. Weber emphasized that the two forms of stratification emerge out of two different parts of society: Stand with its emphasis on honour emerges out of the most fundamental part of society rooted in loyalties, the Gemeinschaft, whereas class emerges out of a sub-unit of the Gemeinschaft, rationally ordered markets and legal structures of the Gesellschaft. Party emerges out of both. In Weber’s estimation, two types of social stratification, class and Stand, although related, cannot be mixed because they are fundamentally different. The former is rooted in abstract emotion and the latter in rational calculation. To do so, he writes, is a “warped reasoning”. Despite Weber’s warnings, English-language terms used to measure social inequality, particularly “socio-economic status”, conflate the two qualities, presenting them as a single variable. However, when the two are separated, analysts get a much more nuanced view of the mechanisms for how different types of inequality persist, be they in the professions, residence, ethnicity, race or caste.

Discipline and Charisma

“Discipline and Charisma” underpins Weber’s understanding of the rationalization of modern life. As such, it sets the stage for his essay “Bureaucracy,” and also, more generally, “Politics as Vocation” and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In “Discipline and Charisma,” Weber explicitly asks how it is that large groups of humans simultaneously restrain their psychobiological impulses to fit the demands of the industrial age. This is because the point of such rational discipline is that rationalized orders are executed when received in a predictable fashion. This happens because the execution of any received command emerges from tactical responses that are conditioned reactions to precise drills. In the context of such drills, all personal critique is unconditionally deferred, and personal convictions are constantly adjusted towards the pre-determined goal reflected in how the received order is executed. This is of course a condition that Weber marveled at in both The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and “Bureaucracy.” From Weber’s view, it is the very basis for why humans habitually and precisely obey states, militaries, bosses, and business corporations without moral reflection.