Monday, March 5, 2007

Nationalism #3: Agrarian Man vs. Industrial Man

Central to Gellner’s theory is the development of modern industry, replacing the agrarian society. What does Gellner identify as the major differences between the agrarian and industrial societies? See pages 18, 63-64, 73-75, 86, 110
Posted by at 5:34 PM
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1 comments:

Anonymous said...

One major difference is the relative amount of fluidity or mobility within society. For agrarian societies, "its elements are ordered, and not distributed at random" (63). Its sub-cultures underly and support its "clearly marked social stucture" and advocate cultural differentiation. In contrast, the industrial society emerged with "a high-powered technology and the expectancy of sustained growth, which requires both a mobile division of labour, and sustained, frequent and precise communication among strangers,involving a sharing of explicit meaning, transmitted in a standard idiom, and in writing when required" (34-35). It expects both cognitive and economic growth and fluid communication between segments of society. Because of the expected mobility in an industrial society, while culture enhanced the structural differentiations in agrarian society, cultural differences tied with social status differences in industrial society are not favorable (64). This difference in the role of culture has implications for nationalism as Yang began to develop when describing the indutstrial society's high culture. In general, the industrial high culture ties the individuals in society together in a vastly different way than the low folk culture and ethnic distinctions in agrarian society. -Katie

March 8, 2007 5:06 AM

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