التوجه الثقافي والمقاربة الحضارية

fore and serves to justify a strong emphasis on understanding culture before

going on to explain its interactions with social forces. This hermeneutical turn

is explicitly aligned with the Geertzian procedure of ‘thick description’, applicable

to the whole range of meanings in social life. But the main focus is on ‘the

notion of the culture structure as a social text’ (Alexander and Smith, 2003: 14),

not least because the paradigm of the text can draw on conceptual resources from

outside the social sciences. The strong program thus joins the most representative

hermeneutical thinkers – such as Gadamer and Ricoeur – in singling out the

text as a model case of articulated, embodied and effective meaning, and therefore

as a master key to the whole problematic of culture. The generalized notion

of ‘social text’ stands for a whole spectrum of meaningful patterns, more or less

directly linked to social practices.

Texts in the literal, non-metaphorical sense are of course an important part

of the cultural world, although their relative weight and specific roles vary widely.

But the textual model, meant to be incorporated into the strong program, does

not simply stress a prominent and significant part of culture as a whole; it also

proposes to explore pertinent analogies between the part and the whole. To use

a language now less popular than it once was, the paradigm combines a

metonymic and a metaphorical aspect. This twofold rationale for the textual

model is an obvious theme for further reflection on its meaning, problems and

limits. As I will try to show, a civilizational perspective – and more specifically a

comparative one – can throw light on these issues. But before continuing the

discussion in that context, a brief reflection on conceptual boundaries is in order;

the implications of a civilizational viewpoint for specific issues – in this case the

question of texts, their role and their paradigmatic status – will depend on prior

demarcations, not least on the inclusion or exclusion of historical experiences.

Advocates of civilizational analysis have defined its historical horizons in three

different ways. The most inclusive view applies the model of multiple civilizations

to stateless societies (or primitive ones, to use a term that has fallen into undeserved disrepute, but need not be understood as an a priori downgrading label). Comparative civilizational analysis can thus, in principle, extend its framework back to the beginning of human history. This was – notwithstanding some unsettled questions – the approach that prevailed in Marcel Mauss’s writings. It entails a minimalist conception of civilizational patterns: they appear as characteristic features of social formations on a large scale. In a seminal text written together with Durkheim, Mauss had already emphasized this macro-social aspect, and it remains essential to civilizational perspectives; the problem is that the generalized concept of civilization seems to leave no scope for more specific defining characteristics. Civilizations are simply societies writ large. Max Weber did not raise the question, but his focus on cultural worlds and great traditions implies a different conception of the civilizational field: it lies within the domain of recorded history and presupposes certain levels of social development. A definition of that kind, but much more explicit and specific, has been most influential in recent debates. S.N. Eisenstadt accepts a ‘civilizational dimension’ of human societies in general, centred on the interplay of interpretive patterns and

7 2 European Journal of Social Theory 13(1)

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