Showing papers on "Westernization published in 1971"

A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Change in Colonial Africa

Abstract: Colonialism imposed the urban order on the indigenous societies of Africa, especially in those areas of southern Africa settled by whites. Many anthropologists have investigated the consequent social changes, called acculturation, using as indices of this acculturation or Westernization "European" clothes (often considered the most important index), occupation, education, and income. Based on the assumption that white settlers were an "elite" to be imitated by Africans, these indices have also been used to describe the formation of status groups and even classes among the urban Africans. Studies utilizing these indices seem to perform a definite ideological function of "vindicating" white cultural supremacy, thus justifying Europe's "civilizing" missions. They make it clear that the anthropologists have not recognized any pre-existing African culture which would enable Africans to synthesize their urban experiences in a meaningful way. In this paper I take issue with some of the assumptions underlying the...

The Black Sea Turks: Some Aspects of Their Ethnic and Cultural Background

Abstract: The social and cultural composition of Turkey's provincial society is still poorly understood, not only in the West, but in Turkey itself. Because of this situation, contemporary accounts of Turkish society have a tendency to underestimate the variety of provincial life and to discount the importance of this variety for the nation as a whole. Some events in recent decades, it is true, have certainly eroded the diversity of provincial society. The population exchanges after World War I virtually removed the entire Christian population from Asia Minor. As well, the development of a national polity and the accompanying acceleration of westernization established a new national culture and society which has affected even the most remote areas of the country. Despite this trend toward a greater uniformity, local traditions and local loyalties still retain a vitality that is seldom fully appreciated.

Education and Colonialism in Kenya

Abstract: Before abandoning past practices and patterns, the new leaders recognized the need to examine the inherited structures in order to better comprehend the strengths and limitations of the educational systems now firmly entrenched in their countries. This is especially the situation in former British Africa where no uniform policy existed. Each territory supported its own educational program and each governor had his own ideas on how to educate the "natives." This British diversity contrasts with the practice of the French and Portuguese, who consistently transported their own cultures and orthodox methods of teaching them to their colonies. The diversity in British Africa ranged from educational policies that imposed the English model and all its components on the African to policies that attempted to develop an educational program based on the African's own environment and on his own way of life. This lack of uniformity in British educational policy led to a great deal of controversy. On one side were those Europeans who favored rapid Westernization of the African. They argued that old African values must be replaced since, whether educators approved or not, overwhelming social change was obliterating

Some Notes on the Naqshbandi Tariqat in Bosnia

Abstract: Study of the contemporary Muslim world concentrates increasingly on the processes of westernisation and modernisation, implicitly regarding these as both salubrious and inevitable, and, indeed, as having already displaced the essential foundations of traditional Islam. There is much in the present state of the Muslim peoples to encourage such a view: the apparently irretrievably shattered unity of the umma, the expanding triumph of secularism in public life, the transfoimation of religion into ideology by various Muslim movements, and the continued absence of a genuine Islamic renaissance. Elements persist, however, throughout the Muslim world that are at variance with this spectacle of Islam in disarray, and that are commonly overlooked by western observers, including the scholarly among them. Their absence from the picture drawn by scholarly investigation of contemporary Islam derives in part from the unspoken assumption that religion is primarily a function of history and society, so that the interior and vital aspects which in fact constitute its essential and immutable character are ignored or neglected as devoid of interest. The strongholds of traditional Islam are, moreover, in a certain sense inaccessible to the investigator who, for all his learning, is alien to the tradition. It is not a question of rejection, of barriers erected in his path, rather of a certain mode of spirituality, enshrined in tradition, that cannot be appreciated by the common methods of academic