Gellner's Structural-Functional-Culturalism

Abstract

Enlightenment traditions celebrating the individual and knowledge that is universally valid are only one stream in the social philosophy of Ernest Gellner.As a philosopher, he vehemently rejected Wittgensteinian relativism.As a social anthropologist, he prioritised the study of 'structure' and 'function', rather than cultural 'costume'.Yet his theory of nationalism relies on a concept of culture, which I suggest derives ultimately from the Herderian countercurrent to enlightenment universalism.This notion of culture has a surprising affinity with the world view of Clifford Geertz.The paper argues that such holistic notions of 'a culture' are unconvincing anthropologically, increasingly unrealistic sociologically, and anti-liberal politically.

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Stored copy: cc-by-nc · source http://sreview.soc.cas.cz/doi/10.13060/00380288.2001.37.12.06.pdf. Open access only — a takedown request can remove the copy without touching this record.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 24 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.