cultural legacies for later societies

cultural legacies for later societies:

the hebrew and greek concepts of a moral order

The lower a system stands in sociocultural evolution, the more coextensive and less independent are its societal and cultural systems empirically. This may explain why some anthropologists fail to distinguish between societies and cultural systems analytically and speak of a society as a “culture.” The relation between social and cultural systems is always complex, partly because so many components of cultural systems can vary independently. In Egypt, such co-extensiveness was greater than in Mesopotamia. China exhibited the greatest co-extensiveness among the historic civilizations, though some of its culture proved exportable to Japan and other parts of East Asia, and it imported Buddhism from India. The Mediterranean world consolidated under Roman rule, on the other hand, was notably cosmopolitan in cultural terms. Yet in the societies discussed so far, the institutionalization of cultural elements, particularly the normative order, occurred predominantly within the concrete population, territory, and historical period in which the cultural developments first emerged – due allowance being made for the time that processes of institutionalization take. Buddhism is a cultural complex that had its influence outside the society in which it originated. But because it did not lead toward modernity and because it had little significance for Western society, I have not discussed it extensively.

CULTURAL LEGACIES FOR LATER SOCIETIES 100

Two societies, though having small consequence in the sociocultural systems of their time and place, were the agents of cultural innovations that have proved crucial for societies that were not their evolutionary sequels - namely Israel, the originator of the religion of Jahweh (or Judaism), and Greece, the originator of a famous, secular culture. I shall analyze these two cases; they illustrate a contribution to the evolutionary process which has not been emphasized in previous chapters. These societies present two problems: to define the societal conditions which made their cultural innovations possible and to explain how the cultural products became sufficiently dissociated from their society of origin to have consequences for subsequent societies.

With respect to the first problem, Hebrew and Greek cultural innovations were so radical that their bearers could not have established them over the vast territory of the large-scale empires of the period. The processes had to occur in small-scale societies with unusual bases of independence. In both cases, furthermore, the innovation had to involve, under the leadership of the important classes, a differentiation of the society as a whole from the others to which it was related. It had to become a new type of society, not merely a hew sub-system within an existent type.¹ With respect to the second problem, both cases involved a loss of political independence and the transfer of prestige within the relevant populations to elements not carriers of political responsibility at the societal level but specialists in the maintenance of the cultural systems themselves.

With these considerations in mind, let us review the facts and then attempt to formulate the factors common to both examples of this type of evolutionary process. I shall not be concerned with the cultural contribution of each and its specific relevance to subsequent evolution. My concern will he with the nature of the process by which radical cultural innovations arise and are then differentiated from the societal matrices of their origins.

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