Civilisations as Contrasting Cosmocracies.docVIP

Civilisations as Contrasting Cosmocracies 　　（1.Department of Anthropology， University College London，UK; 2. Southwest Nationalities 　　Research Academy， Southwest University for Nationalities; 3. University College London，UK） 　　JOURNAL OF ETHNOLOGY， VOL. 6， NO.4， 01-07， 2015 （CN51-1731/C， in Chinese） 　　DOI：10.3969/j.issn.1674-9391.2015.04.01 　　Abstract： 　　Since the 1960s， as an idea，civilisation has been a rejected concept in anthropology and sociology because of its evolutionary and Eurocentric misuses.However， the question of scale implied by the term civilisation remains significant.More recently， other more historically informed approaches have resuscitated the concept on more sustainable grounds.In order to renew a discussion of its usefulness as a concept， we will start with the most promising， least Eurocentric， conception of civilisation in classical sociology and anthropology， the one forged by Marcel Mauss.Mauss stressed the histories of civilisations in the plural and rejected connecting them to some hypothetical， generalized evolution of humankind. As Mauss defines it， a civilisation consists of “those social phenomena which are common to several societies”. However， we should notice how he then insists that they are also socially linked by adding that they must be “more or less related to each other” by lasting contact “through some permanent intermediaries， or through relationships from common descent”.On the next page of his discussion， he further refines the concept and calls civilisation a family of societies. 　　Mauss inspiration in thinking about civilization is clearly ethnological instead of sociological. He constantly emphasizes that phenomena exist that are not limited to a specific society. Instead they are phenomena common to larger or smaller societies. These are the phenomena-particularly material practices-that he calls “fit to travel”， i.e. they overflow boundaries， or do not have fixed boundaries. Accordingly， the distribution