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Why Change?: Toward a New Theory of Change Among Individuals in the Process of Modernization

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Joel S. Migdal
Joel S. Migdal
Affiliation:
Tel Aviv University
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Extract

When and why people abandon their old institutions, patterns of behavior, and even places of residence in favor of new ones that are associated with sustained economic growth and development is a question of central importance to social science. Increasingly, political scientists have associated these processes of change with the occurrence of disintegration of particular political units, groups, and systems, and with the integration of others. The changing nature of social and cultural ties signals concomitant modifications in what people define as their community, where they place demands, and where they look for authoritative decisions to be made.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , January 1974 , pp. 189 - 206
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1974

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References

1 Huntington, Samuel P. has talked of political institutionalization of states, which is closely connected to integration, and of political decay, which is a process involving disintegration. Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven 1968Google Scholar), esp. chap. 1. In a recent article, Walker Connor has linked social change simultaneously to the integration of national entities (ethnic groups) and to the disintegration of states. In “Nation-Building or Nation-Destroying?” World Politics, xxiv (April 1972), 319Google Scholar–55, he cites a long list of political scientists who relate social change to integration, and criticizes the lack of literature on the relation of change to disintegration. He is certainly right in criticizing this deficiency, but there are some recent works he does not cite. See, for example, Melson, Robert and Wolpe, Howard, “Modernization and the Politics of Communalism: A Theoretical Perspective,” American Political Science Review, LXIV (December 1970), 1112CrossRefGoogle Scholar–30. Other social scientists have also been concerned with the relationship between development and integration. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote one of the first and most important articles on this subject, “The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States” in Geertz, , ed., Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa (Glencoe, III. 1963), 105Google Scholar–57. Eisenstadt, S. N., in Modernization: Protest and Change (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1966Google Scholar), v, has spoken of “breakdown” or “regression” with respect to social change.

2 Culture contact has long been in use as a term in anthropology; depending on the author using it, it has taken on various connotations. The emphasis here will be on the contact between traditional, village-based patterns and those associated with more urban styles. More specifically, we are talking of the contact by traditional villages with the patterns and values characteristic of modern societies. For a brief discussion on the various uses of the term, see Patai, Raphael, “On Culture Contact and Its Working in Modern Palestine,” American Anthropologist, New Series XLIX (October 1947Google Scholar).

3 Hallowell makes explicit some of the points involved in this assumption. His subject of concern is the influence of European culture on the other parts of the world. He feels that acculturation is basically a learning process, and that European culture has spread so rapidly because the rewards outweigh the punishments for the individual. Hallowell, A. Irving, “Sociopsychological Aspects of Acculturation,” in Linton, Ralph, ed., The Science of Man in the World Crisis (New York 1945), 171–200Google Scholar.

4 In recent years, Alex Inkeles has been one of the few who has explicitly addressed himself to the question of why people become modern. He cites a variety of factors (the city, mass media, the factory), but states that one factor assumes pre-eminence: namely, education. The school “… serves as a model of rationality, of the importance of technical competence, of the rule of objective standards of performance, and of the principle of distributive justice reflected in the grading system.” Inkeles, , “The Modernization of Man,” in Weiner, Myron, ed., Modernization: The Dynamics of Growth (Voice of America Forum Lectures 1966), 159Google Scholar–60.

5 The term “peasant” is used here in an inclusive sense to denote poor people who live and work in rural, primarily agricultural communities; who participate to some degree in cash and commodity markets; and who are subordinate to other classes in the society. This article derives from a study which employed a content analysis of fifty-one cases in monographs on villages in Asia and Latin America, and also stems from field work in Mexico and India. In many areas, however, data are scarce and propositions remain hypothetical. For a list of the cases and a discussion of methodology, see Migdal, “Peasants in a Shrinking World: The Socio-Economic Basis of Political Change,” unpub. Ph.D. diss. (Harvard University 1972); also Migdal, Peasants, Politics, and Revolution (Princeton, forthcoming).

6 “B. Malinowski is the pre-eminent scholar associated with this view in respect to tribal peoples. He holds that change in Africa is “the result of an impact of a higher, active culture upon a simpler, more passive one.” The Dynamics of Culture Change: An Inquiry into Race Relations in Africa (New Haven 1945), 15Google Scholar.

7 Redfield, Robert and Rojas, Alfonso Villa, Chan Kom: A Maya Village (Chicago 1962), ixGoogle Scholar.

8 Foster, George M., Traditional Cultures, and the Impact of Technological Change (New York 1962), 25Google Scholar, 30. “The greater the range of novelty to which people are exposed, the greater the likelihood that they will adopt new forms. Contact between societies is the single greatest determinate of culture change” (p. 25).

9 There is no total consensus on the meaning of modernization. In fact, some scholars have spurned its use altogether. See, for example, Horowitz, Irving Louis, Three Worlds of Development: The Theory and Practice of International Stratification (New York 1966Google Scholar). In The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (New York 1958Google Scholar), viii, Daniel Lerner sees it primarily as a state of mind—expectation of progress, propensity for growth, readiness to adapt oneself to change. Later (p. 50), Lerner does identify modern society with behavior, calling it the “Participant Society.” For a general and widely accepted definition of modernization, we can use Apter's, David E., in The Politics of Modernization (Chicago 1965Google Scholar), v. He refers to the rapid increase of roles that are functionally linked in a setting marked by rational, hierarchical organizations.

10 Lerner (fn. 9), 49.

11 Ibid., 50.

12 Ibid., 53.

13 “Traditional” is used here as a general term, referring to an institutional setting marked by diffuseness of roles and ascriptive values. It also refers to patterns that are “long-held” (i.e., have been employed by at least two generations but usually many more). In no way is it meant to denote homogeneity of structure, for traditional patterns vary widely.

14 Tullis, F. Lamond, Lord and Peasant in Peru: A Paradigm of Political and Social Change (Cambridge, Mass. 1970CrossRefGoogle Scholar), esp. chap. 1.

15 Rogers, Everett, Modernization Among Peasants: The Impact of Communication (New York 1969), 292Google Scholar.

16 Although many scholars pay lip service to the role of “individualization” in the process of modernization, the conceptual lenses used to study who changes and when lead researchers to impute a high degree of individualism to traditional societies as well. On individualization, see, for example, Eckstein, Alexander, “Individualism and the Role of the State in Economic Growth,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, vi (January 1958), 81–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Potter, Jack M., Capitalism and the Chinese Peasant: Social and Economic Change in a Hong Kong Village (Berkeley 1968Google Scholar), 3, where he speaks of a change from a “collectivity orientation” to an “individualistic orientation.”

17 By simply looking at cases in which the degree of contact was high and economic growth was quite low, Everett E. Hagen has rejected explanations of national economic growth that are based on the degree of contact with the West: “How Economic Growth Begins: A Theory of Social Change,” in Finkle, Jason L. and Gable, Richard W., eds., Political Development and Social Change, 2nd ed. (New York 1971), 73–74Google Scholar. Although I do not feel that a theory is disproved by citing such cases, I am immediately led to question why the theory did not explain the particular events.

18 Stein, William W., Hualcan: Life in the Highlands of Peru (Ithaca, N.Y. 1961Google Scholar). See also his “Outside Contact and Cultural Stability in a Peruvian Highland Village,” in Ray, Verne F., ed., Cultural Stability and Cultural Change, Proceedings of the 1957 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society (Seattle 1957), 15–16Google Scholar.

19 Fuller, Anne H., Buarij: Portrait of a Lebanese Muslim Village (Cambridge, Mass. 1961), 97Google Scholar.

20 In respect to the failure of peasants to change, the word “ethos” has been employed by Banfield, Edward C. in his study of a southern Italian village, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (New York 1958Google Scholar).

21 Snyder, Joan, “The Changing Context of an Andean Community,” in Ray (fn. 18), 20–29Google Scholar.

22 An interesting criticism of Banfield's reliance on ethos is made by Sydel F. Silverman, pointing to structural differences in southern villages, Italian, “Agricultural Organization, Social Structure, and Values in Italy: Amoral Familism Reconsidered,” American Anthropologist, LXX (February 1968) 1–20Google Scholar.

23 Gusfield, Whitaker, and others have begun to argue that modernity and traditionalism are not mutually exclusive. But they have not provided an alternative theory to explain why men accept some changes and not others. See Gusfield, Joseph R., “Tradition and Modernity: Misplaced Polarities in the Study of Social Change,” American Journal of Sociology, LXXII (January 1967), 351CrossRefGoogle Scholar–62; and Whitaker, C. S. Jr., “A Dys-rhythmic Process of Political Change,” World Politics, xix (January 1967), 190–217CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Whitaker, ibid., 191, has argued that “today's student of 'modernization' has inferred what in effect is a hypothesis about how non-Western people generally will react to the kind of institutions yielded by change in the West. This hypothesis in essence is that ultimately all non-Western peoples will either accept or reject these institutions, more or less wholesale.” He maintains diat among those theorists who see change as “eurhythmic” (change in one area occasioning changes in all others) are Parsons, Levy, Hagen, Sutton, Shils, Redfield, Riggs, Millikan and Blackmer, Sinai, the Etzionis, and Apter, and that the number of empirical studies employing this assumption are too numerous to list. Whitaker goes on to say that there are those who have expressed dissatisfaction with the dichotomous doctrines of “modernization” analysis: Bendix, Black, Deutsch, Eisenstadt, Hoselitz, LaPalombara, W. E. Moore, Pye, Sanger, and Ward and Rustow. In the more recent anthropological literature (see, for example, the Rhodes-Livingstone Papers) a case has been made for “dysrhythmic” or syncretic changes which are directed against the culture-contact explanation. But no one has yet constructed an alternative inclusive theory. Malinowski (fn. 6, p. 39), himself recognizes the problem of syncretic change: “Can we analyze more fully die problem why certain elements survive and others disappear … ?” He also acknowledges the problem of reactions against “Westernization” in times of “transition,” speaking of compatibility, adaptability, and conflict. Unfortunately, no satisfactory solutions have come forth from the literature. It is not enough to say that contact disorganizes the old culture. One must explain how and why.

25 Urban migrants often keep their politically passive orientation, the contrary assumption by some notwithstanding. Often, the weakness that has caused political inefficacy is repeated in the city. See Cornelius, Wayne, “Urbanization as an Agent of Latin American Instability: The Case of Mexico,” American Political Science Review, LXIII (September 1969), 845Google Scholar–54; also, Nelson, Joan, “The Urban Poor: Disruption or Political Integration in Third World Cities?” World Politics, XXII (April 1970), 393–414CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Richard D. Robinson tells of Turkish workers in Germany who reverted to their old patterns upon returning to Turkey. “A View of Five Decades of Turkish Development,” address presented at Harvard University, November 24, 1969. Some literature contends that the retention of certain old social patterns may facilitate acceptance of modern economic habits. See Gusfield (fn. 23).

27 Deutsch, Karl W., “Social Mobilization and Political Development,” American Political Science Review, LV (September 1961), 493–514CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Even Deutsch's measures of social mobilization, for example, highlight not only the erosion and breakdown of the old, but such changes as urbanization, growth of the nonagricultural sector, increases in literacy, and growth in GNP—all of which reflect an adoption, by large numbers, of new patterns associated with modernization. In such cases, it is difficult to differentiate social mobilization from modernization itself. The two seem to be so closely tied that the existence of one presupposes the existence of the other. Ibid.

29 One scholar writes on Latin America, “The intrusion of the market economy destroyed ancient civilizations, handicrafts, and agriculture, but it did not bring modernization.” Rhodes, Robert I., “The Disguised Conservatism in Evolutionary Development Theory,” Science and Society, xxxii (Fall 1968), 402Google Scholar.

30 “The persistent vitality of groups that are neither traditional nor modern nor transitional poses one of the most stubborn conceptual and practical problems of political development.” Hill, Frances R., “Millenarian Machines in South Vietnam,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, xiii (July 1971), 325CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Mrs. Hill goes on to say that tribes, castes, or millenarian movements cannot simply be considered aberrant vestiges.

31 Hunter, Guy, Modernizing Peasant Societies: A Comparative Study in Asia and Africa (New York 1969), 31Google Scholar.

32 The two are ideal types and are used to indicate a spectrum ranging from a village ruled by a single powerful lord to a village inhabited entirely by independent peasant families.

33 The lord is differentiated from the peasant in that he did not need to work the land but could live completely off the work of others through rents, interest, and profit.

34 Freeholding villages could consist entirely of small farmers on private or communal lands, but could also be villages in which only a portion of the families had control of or access to cultivable land. In any case, however, no one person or group of persons in a freeholding village had the extensive control a lord did.

35 There is a rough correlation between lord-ruled villages and a patrimonial domain, and freeholding villages and a prebendal domain, but certainly both types of villages existed in both domains. For a discussion of domains in which peasants lived, see Wolf, Eric R., Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1966), 50–59Google Scholar.

36 “The hacienda is not just an agricultural property owned by an individual. The hacienda is a society, under private auspices. It is an entire social system and governs the life of those attached to it from the cradle to the grave.” Tannenbaum, Frank, Ten Keys to Latin America (New York 1962), 80Google Scholar.

37 An important literature has begun to grow in political science on the question of patron-client relations. Three of the best articles are René Lemarchand and Keith Legg, “Political Clientelism and Development: A Preliminary Analysis,” Comparative Politics, iv (January 1972), 149Google Scholar–78; Powell, John Duncan, “Peasant Society and Clientelist Politics,” American Political Science Review, LXIV (June 1970), 411CrossRefGoogle Scholar–25; and Scott, James C., “Patron-Client Politics and Political Change,”Google Scholar paper presented at the American Political Science Association meetings (Los Angeles 1970). For a concise discussion of the lord-peasant relationship in Brazil, see the beginning of Galjart, Benno, “Class and ‘Following’ in Rural Brazil,” América Latina, vii (July-September 1964Google Scholar).

38 Bailey, F. G., Caste and the Economic Frontier: A Village in Highland Orissa (Manchester 1957), 255Google Scholar.

39 Befu, Harumi, “The Political Relation of the Village to the State,” World Politics, xix (July 1967), 601CrossRefGoogle Scholar–20.

40 See, for example, McAlister, John T. Jr., and Mus, Paul, The Vietnamese and Their Revolution (New York 1970Google Scholar).

41 See, for example, ibid., 33; Wolf, Eric R., “Closed Corporate Peasant Communities in Mesoamerica and Central Java,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, xiii (Spring 1957Google Scholar), 4; Nash, Manning, “Political Relations in Guatemala,” Social and Economic Studies, VII (March 1958Google Scholar), 69; and Tax, Sol, Penny Capitalism: A Guatemalan Indian Economy (Chicago 1963Google Scholar).

42 See Tumin, Melvin M., Caste in a Peasant Society: A Case Study in the Dynamics of Caste (Princeton 1952CrossRefGoogle Scholar), 31; Hagen, Everett E., On the Theory of Social Change: How Economic Growth Begins (Homewood, Ill. 1962Google Scholar), 66; and Hunter (fn. 31), 40. Hunter also mentions the use of witchcraft. These sanctions were not always fully effective; some peasants managed to establish outside links and become masters over their former peers.

43 See Beqiraj, Mehmet, Peasantry in Revolution (Cornell Research Papers in International Studies, 1966Google Scholar, V), chap. 1.

44 Moore, Wilbert E. states that it is most useful to see social systems in terms of intrinsic strain. Social Change (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1963), 67–68Google Scholar.

45 See Tilly, Charles, The Vendée (New York 1967), 59–65Google Scholar, for a discussion of the growth of the influence of outside norms.

46 Besides Hunter (fn. 31), see Wolf, Eric R., “Aspects of Group Relations in a Complex Society: Mexico,” American Anthropologist, LVIII (December 1956), 1065CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bailey, F. G., “The Peasant View of the Bad Life,” The Advancement of Science, xxiii (December 1966), 403Google Scholar–4; and Moerman, Michael, Agricultural Change and Peasant Choice in a Thai Village (Berkeley 1968), 77Google Scholar.

47 Scott (fn. 37), 20.

48 See, for example, the statement by , William H. and Wiser, Charlotte Viall, Behind Mud Walls 1930–1960 (Berkeley 1964), 20Google Scholar.

49 Hagen (fn. 42), 192, sees “withdrawal of status respect” as a key element in precipitating social change.

50 Craig, Wesley W., “Peru: The Peasant Movement of La Convención,” in Landsberger, Henry A., ed., Latin American Peasant Movements (Ithaca, N.Y. 1969), 293Google Scholar–94. For a further reference to the stratification under lords and the ability to seize opportunities, see Erasmus, Charles J., “Agrarian vs Land Reform: Three Latin American Countries,” in Bock, Philip K., ed., Peasants in the Modern World (Albuquerque 1969Google Scholar). Erasmus writes of the reconsolidation of holdings after the blockage of hacendados disappears.

51 Skinner, , “Chinese Peasants and the Closed Community: An Open and Shut Case,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, xiii (July 1971), 270CrossRefGoogle Scholar–81.

52 The imperialism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came primarily through the mechanism of colonialism. I have used the word imperialism, however, to convey die idea of a transfer of wealth from the rural areas to outside centers. This need not come only through the dominance of occupation. It is also important to note that, as Galtung points out, imperialism is not merely an international relationship but a combination of intra- and international relations. The center of the colony, for example, served as a bridgehead for the colonialists. Galtung, Johan, “A Structural Theory of Imperialism,” Journal of Peace Research, viii, No. 2 (1971), 81–117CrossRefGoogle Scholar. One can also think of a case of such transfer from the peripheries to the center as being almost wholly internal (Japan) without the international element to fit it into the rubric of imperialism. Nevertheless, I have used the word imperialism because of its effect in uniting the various peripheries (albeit in what Galtung calls a feudal interaction) and causing such crises universally and simultaneously. For a collection of interesting articles on the effects of imperialism, see Rhodes, Robert I., ed., Imperialism and Underdevelopment: A Reader (New York 1970Google Scholar). Also see Dos Santos, Theotonio, “The Structure of Dependence,” American Economic Review, LX (May 1970), 231Google Scholar–36. For an opposing view on the role of imperialism, see Cosgrove, Carol Ann, “Colonial Legacies and Development Prospects in the Third World (Part I),” International Relations, iv (May 1972), 52–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 McAlister and Mus (fn. 40), 36, 41, 73–74, note the devastating effect these changes in tax policy by the French had in Vietnam.

54 See, for example, Eglar, Zekije, A Punjabi Village in Pakistan (New York 1960Google Scholar); Henry Orenstein, Gaon: Conflict and Cohesion in an Indian Village (Princeton 1965Google Scholar); Wilson, Peter J., A Malay Village and Malaysia: Social Values and Rural Development (New Haven 1967Google Scholar); and Lee, Shu-ching, “Agrarianism and Social Upheaval in China,” The American Journal of Sociology, LVI (May 1951), 517Google Scholar–18.

55 A Chinese proverb states, “Nobody stays rich for three generations; nobody stays poor three generations.” McAlister and Mus (fn. 40), 33.

56 In Thyagasamathiram, Madras State, India, as restrictions imposed by the Brahmin caste eased, those in the non-Brahmin castes who had more resources increased their wealth. Their land accumulation reduced opportunities of others to acquire more land. Sivertsen, Dagfin, When Caste Barriers Fall: A Study of Social and Economic Change in a South Indian Village (New York 1963), 101Google Scholar–2.

57 See, for example, T. S. Epstein's discussion of the village of Wangala, India, as an illustration of how those who are better off use outside ties to solidify and strengthen their position. Economic Development and Social Change in South India (Manchester 1962Google Scholar).

58 For example, in India between 1911 and 1931, there was an increase of 53.4% in agricultural laborers—from 21.7% to 33.3% of the total agricultural population. M. C. Dantivala, “Problems in Countries with Heavy Pressure of Population on Land: The Case of India,” in Parsons, Kenneth H., Penn, Raymond J., and Raup, Philip M., eds., Land Tenure (Madison, Wis. 1956), 136Google Scholar. The green revolution in the 1960's seems only to have accelerated the process of land consolidation at the expense of the weakest. In the Indian Punjab, they seem to have suffered an absolute economic decline. Fran-cine R. Frankel and Karl von Vorys, “The Political Challenge of the Green Revolution: Shifting Patterns of Peasant Participation in India and Pakistan,” (Policy Memorandum No. 38, Center of International Studies, Princeton 1972). In the Sahiwal District of Pakistan, the income of the 70 % of the population hovering near subsistence has declined relatively in the 1960's, and a good portion has declined absolutely as well. Carl H. Gotsch, “The Distributive Impact of Agricultural Growth: Low Income Farmers and the ‘System’ (A Case Study of Sahiwal District, West Pakistan),” paper presented to the Seminar on Small Farmer Development Strategies, The Agricultural Development Council and The Ohio State University (Columbus, September 13–15, 1971), 52. One study on Pakistan has shown that, between 1959 and 1969, those with less than 10 acres and those with 10 to 25 acres lost 12.2% and 6.9% of their land respectively. Shahid Javed Burki, “Development of West Pakistan Agriculture: An Interdisciplinary Explanation,” paper read at the Workshop on Rural Development in Pakistan, Michigan State University (East Lansing, July 16, 1971), 28.

59 On this phenomenon, see, for example, Grant, James P., “Marginal Men: The Global Unemployment Crisis,” Foreign Affairs, L (October 1971), 112CrossRefGoogle Scholar–24.

60 An interesting example of such syncretism occurs in an African tribal dance. Here, low-status urban workers seek to express their traditional tribal solidarity but use prestige-creating European clothes—a sign of their recognition of the new rules in the status system. “Those who by virtue of their position in the community can command little prestige in everyday life, on Sundays don the symbols and outward marks of rank and display these in front of the admiring spectators at the dance arena.” J. Clyde Mitchell, The Kalela Dance: Aspects of Social Relationships among Urban Africans in Northern Rhodesia, Rhodes-Livingstone Paper No. 27 (Manchester 1956), 15. Also see his discussion of worker-management relations and tribalism, 33–34.

61 “What appears to the outsider as backwardness can thus be seen as a rational response to an erratic market and exploitative credit and market mechanisms.” Rhodes (fn. 29), 403.

62 Based on the explanation presented in this article, one can speculate on the different reactions, by the peasants of Hualcan and Recuayhuanca, to their working experience on Peru's agricultural-industrial plantations. For those with resources to make outside alliances, there must have been a lessening of internal restraints as well as a sufficiently secure “outside” in which to risk participation. Two elements seem to be important. First, lacking highland grazing pastures, Recuayhuanca had much less agricultural potential than Hualcan. Second, Peru's caste system made upward mobility for Indians into creole or even mestizo society impossible. Thus, in the case of Hualcan, even with a high degree of culture contact those with adequate resources did not find a sufficiendy hospitable and secure outside environment in which to invest and make alliances. The continuing viability of the Hualcan economy and prestige system may have made it the best place for an Indian to invest for prestige. Recuayhuanca's poverty and lack of agricultural potential, however, may have made investment for prestige there even less inviting than trying to break the larger societal caste barrier. There are interesting stories of how Indians in such cases adopt a mestizo self-identity, dress, etc., but are still considered lower-caste Indians by the mestizos themselves. Severe poverty, and a lack of viability of community institutions stemming from that poverty, may make even an inhospitable environment more attractive for those with resources to invest.

63 See Burki's charges against sociologists and economists who studied Pakistan (fn. 58), 24 and passim.