Civil society is an increasingly important concept for anthropology, encountered both in the social theories we employ, and in the discourses and practices of the people we study. This introductory article was written in dialogue with the articles in this issue and attempts to highlight and begin to theorize key themes emerging from those articles. These include: the dialectical relationship between civil society and the state; the important role of middle classes in civil society; and the suffusion of civil society discourses with normative messages of modernization, reform, and salvation. It is argued that the long-standing custom-ary conduct of ethnography amid the organizations, associations, and institutions of daily life has equipped anthropology with conceptual tools that can contribute to a grounded and critical perspective on civil society.
Adams, Richard N. (1970) Crucifixion by Power: Essays on Guatemalen Social Structure, 1944–1966. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
2.
Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Second edition. London and New York: Verso.
3.
Anderson, David G. (1996) ‘Bringing Civil Society to an Uncivilized Place: Citizenship Regimes in Russia’s Arctic Frontier’, in C. Hann and E. Dunn (eds) Civil Society: Challenging Western Models, pp. 99–120. London and New York: Routledge.
4.
Barnes, J.A. (1954) ‘Class and Committees in a Norwegian Island Parish’, Human Relations7: 39–58.
5.
Bellamy, R. (1992) Liberalism and Modern Society. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Press.
6.
Bobbio, Norberto (1989) Democracy and Dictatorship, P. Kennealy, trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
7.
Borneman, John (1992) Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
8.
Borneman, John (1998) Subversions of International Order: Studies in the Political Anthropology of Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press.
9.
Bott, Elizabeth (1957) Family and Social Network. London: Tavistock.
10.
Brown, A., D. McCrone and L. Paterson (1998) Politics and Society in Scotland, Second Edition. London: Macmillan.
11.
Bryant, Christopher G. A. (1993) ‘Social Self-Organisation, Civility and Sociology: A Comment on Kumar’s “Civil Society” ’, British Journal of Sociology44(3): 397–401.
12.
Castells, Manuel (1997) The Power of Identity. Oxford: Blackwell.
13.
Clark, Terry Nichols and Seymour Martin Lipset (1991) ‘Are Social Classes Dying?’, International Sociology6(4): 397–410.
14.
Cohen, Abner (1976) Two-Dimensional Man: An Essay on the Anthropology of Power and Symbolism in Complex Society. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
15.
Cohen, Jean L. and Andrew Arato (1994) Civil Society and Political Theory. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
16.
Coombe, Rosemary, ed. (1997) ‘The Forms of Civil Society in Postcolonial Contexts’. Special Issue of Political and Legal Anthropology Review20(1).
17.
Donnan, Hastings and Graham McFarlane, eds (1997) Culture and Policy in Northern Ireland: Anthropology in the Public Arena. Belfast: The Institute of Irish Studies, The Queens University of Belfast.
18.
Douglas, Mary (1966) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
19.
Douglas, Mary (1986) How Institutions Think. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
20.
Durkheim, Emile (1965) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, J.W. Swain, trans. New York: Free Press.
21.
Ehrenberg, John (1999) Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea. New York: New York University Press.
22.
Elias, Norbert (1978) The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, Vol. 1, Edmund Jephcott, trans. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
23.
Epstein, Barbara (1990) ‘Rethinking Social Movement Theory’, Socialist Review20(1): 35–65.
24.
Escobar, Arturo (1992) ‘Culture, Practice and Politics: Anthropology and the Study of Social Movements’, Critique of Anthropology12(4): 395–432.
25.
Fabian, Johannes (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.
26.
Ferguson, Adam (1966 [1767]) An Essay on the History of Civil Society 1767, D. Forbes (ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
27.
Foucault, Michel (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, C. Gordon (ed.). New York: Pantheon Books.
28.
Fried, Morton (1960) ‘On the Evolution of Social Stratification and the State’, in Stanley Diamond (ed.) Culture in History, pp. 713–731. New York: Columbia University Press.
29.
Frykman, Jonas and Orvar Löfgren (1987) Culture Builders: A Historical Anthropology of Middle-Class Life, Alan Crozier, trans. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press.
30.
Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
31.
Gellner, Ernest (1994) Conditions of Liberty. London: Hamish Hamilton.
32.
Gellner, Ernest (1995) ‘The Importance of Being Modular’, in John A. Hall (ed.) Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparison, pp. 32–55. Cambridge: Polity Press.
33.
Ginsburg, Faye D. (1989) Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
34.
Gledhill, John (1997) ‘Liberalism, Socio-economic Rights and the Politics of Identity: From Moral Economy to Indigenous Rights’, in R.A. Wilson (ed.)Human Rights, Culture and Context: Anthropological Perspectives, pp. 70–110. London: Pluto Press.
35.
Gluckman, Max (1968) ‘Inter-hierarchical Roles: Professional and Party Ethics in Tribal Areas in South and Central Africa’, in M.J. Swartz (ed.) Local-Level Politics: Social and Cultural Perspectives, pp. 69–93. Chicago, IL: Aldine.
36.
Gouldner, Alvin W. (1979) The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. London: Macmillan.
37.
Gramsci, Antonio (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, Q. Hoare and G.N. Smith (eds and trans.). New York: International Publishers.
38.
Hall, John A. (1995) ‘In Search of Civil Society’, in John A. Hall (ed.) Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparison, pp. 1–31. Cambridge: Polity Press.
39.
Hann, Christopher and Elizabeth Dunn, (eds) (1996) Civil Society: Challenging Western Models. London and New York: Routledge.
40.
Harvey, David (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell.
41.
Held, David (1992) ‘The Development of the Modern State’, in S. Hall and B. Gieben (eds) Formations of Modernity, pp.71–119. London: Polity Press.
42.
Henwood, Doug (1997) Wall Street: How it Works and for Whom. London and New York: Verso.
43.
Herzfeld, Michael (1992) The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
44.
Herzfeld, Michael (1997) Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York and London: Routledge.
45.
Heywood, Andrew (1994) Political Ideas and Concepts: An Introduction. London: Macmillan.
46.
Hobsbawm, Eric (1983) ‘Mass Producing Traditions: Europe 1970–1914’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds) The Invention of Tradition, pp. 263–307. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
47.
Hroch, Miroslav (1985) Social Conditions of National Revival in Europe. A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
48.
Hyatt, Susan (1997) ‘Poverty in a “Post-Welfare” Landscape: Tenant Management Policies, Self-Governance and the Democratization of Knowledge in Great Britain’, in C. Shore and S. Wright (eds) Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perpectives on Governance and Power, pp. 217–238. London and New York: Routledge.
49.
Johnson, Paul E. (1978) A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837. New York: Hill and Wang.
50.
Jones, Delmos J. (1987) ‘The “Community” and Organizations in the Community’, in L. Mullings (ed.) Cities in the United States: Studies in Urban Anthropology, pp. 99–121. New York: Columbia University Press.
51.
Keane, John (1998a) ‘Despotism and Democracy. The Origins and Development of the Distinction Between Civil Society and the State 1750–1850’, in J. Keane (ed.) Civil Society and the State, pp. 35–71. London: University of Westminster Press.
52.
Keane, John (1998b) Democracy and Civil Society. London: University of Westminster Press.
53.
Knox, William (1988) ‘Religion and the Scottish Labour Movement, c.1900–39’, Journal of Contemporary History23: 609–630.
54.
Konrád, George and Ivan Szelényi (1979) The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. Brighton: Harvester Press.
55.
Kumar, Krishan (1993) ‘Civil Society: An Inquiry Into the Usefulness of an Historical Term’, British Journal of Sociology44(3): 375–395.
56.
Landsman, Ned (1989) ‘Evangelists and their Hearers: Popular Interpretation of Revivalist Preaching in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, Journal of British Studies28: 120–149.
57.
Levy, Carl (1987) ‘Conclusion: Historiography and the New Class’, in Carl Levy (ed.) Socialism and the Intelligentsia, 1880–1914, pp. 271–290. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
58.
Lockwood, David (1998) ‘Social Integration and Exclusion’. Lecture to inagurate the International Social Sciences Institute’s Annual Theme for 1998–99, University of Edinburgh, 20 October 1998. Edinburgh: International Social Sciences Institute.
59.
Mann, Michael (1993) The Sources of Social Power, Volume II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
60.
Mayer, Adrian C. (1966) ‘The Significance of Quasi-Groups in the Study of Complex Societies’, in M. Banton (ed.) The Social Anthropology of Complex Societies, pp. 97–122. London: Tavistock.
61.
McClelland, David C. (1961) The Achieving Society. New York: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc.
62.
Moore, C. and S. Booth (1989) Managing Competition: Meso-Corporatism, Pluralism, and the Negotiated Order in Scotland. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
63.
Morgan, Lewis Henry (1985[1877]) Ancient Society. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.
64.
Nairn, Tom (1997) ‘From Civil Society to Civic Nationalism’, in T. Nairn (ed.) Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited, pp. 73–89. London: Verso.
65.
Nash, June (1981) ‘Ethnographic Aspects of the World Capitalist System’, Annual Review of Anthropology10: 393–423.
66.
Okin, Susan Moller (1991) ‘Gender, the Public and the Private’, in David Held (ed.) Political Theory Today, pp. 67–90. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
67.
Oxhorn, Philip (1994) ‘From Controlled Inclusion to Coerced Marginalization: The Struggle for Civil Society in Latin America’, in John A. Hall (ed.) Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparison, pp. 250–277. Cambridge: Polity Press.
68.
Paterson, Lindsay (1994) The Autonomy of Modern Scotland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
69.
Pearce, Jenny (1997) ‘Civil Society, the Market and Democracy in Latin America’, Democratization4(2): 57–83.
70.
Pierson, Christopher (1986) Marxist Theory and Democratic Politics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
71.
Poggi, Gianfranco (1978) The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
72.
Poggi, Gianfranco (1983) Calvinism and the Capitalist Spirit: Weber’s Protestant Ethic. London: Macmillan.
73.
Roseberry, William (1988) ‘Political Economy’, Annual Review of Anthropology17: 161–185.
74.
Rostow, Walter W. (1978) The World Economy: History and Prospect. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
75.
Sanjek, Roger (1978) ‘A Network Method and Its Uses in Urban Ethnography’, Human Organization37: 257–268.
76.
Schneider, Jane (1991) ‘Spirits and the Spirit of Capitalism’, in Eric Wolf (ed.) Religious Regimes and State Formation: Perspectives from European Ethnology, pp. 181–219. Albany: State University of New York Press.
77.
Scott, James (1985) Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
78.
Seligman, A. (1992) The Idea of Civil Society. New York: Free Press.
79.
Shore, Cris and Susan Wright (1997) Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perpectives on Governance and Power. London and New York: Routledge.
80.
Stack, Carol B. (1975) All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. New York: Harper and Row.
81.
Starn, Orin (1995) ‘To Revolt Against the Revolution: War and Resistance in Peru’s Andes’, Cultural Anthropology10(4): 547–580.
82.
Stocking, George (1968) ‘Mathew Arnold, E. B. Tylor, and the Uses of Invention’, in George Stocking (ed.) Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology, pp. 69–90. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
83.
Susser, Ida and John Kreniske (1987) ‘The Welfare Trap: A Public Policy for Deprivation’, in L. Mullings (ed.) Cities in the United States: Studies in Urban Anthropology, pp. 51–68. New York: Columbia University Press.
84.
Verdery, Katherine (1996) What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
85.
Wallace, Anthony F. C. (1956) ‘Revitalization Movements’, American Anthropologist58: 264–281.
86.
Weber, Max (1958) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
87.
Whitehead, Lawrence (1997) ‘Bowling in the Bronx: The Uncivil Interstices between Civil and Political Society’, Democratization4(2): 94–114.
88.
Williams, David and Tom Young (1994) ‘Governance, the World Bank and Liberal Theory’, Political Studies42: 84–100.
89.
Wolf, Eric (1966) ‘Kinship, Friendship, and Patron-Client Relations in Complex Societies’, in M. Banton (ed.) The Social Anthropology of Complex Societies,pp. 1–22. London: Tavistock.
90.
Wolf, Eric (1982) Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
91.
Wolf, Eric (1999) Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
92.
Wood, Ellen M. (1986) ‘The New “True” Socialism’, in E.M. Wood (ed.) The Retreat from Class, pp. 1–11. London: Verso.
93.
Wright, Susan, (ed.) (1994) Anthropology of Organizations. London and New York: Routledge.
94.
Wuthnow, Robert (1987) Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
