-
Elias argues in The Court Society that people who think that studying the power distribution and dependence of dukes, princes and kings is unrewarding, because these positions have become marginal to our society, have misunderstood the task of sociology. Rather, it involves working with a kind of comparative research that will help modern people, including sociological researchers, to resist the temptation of demeaning past societies or simpler peoples as implicitly ‘inferior’. […] The Civilizing Process was partly intended to bring about readers facing their own latent (and in some cases in the 1930s in Germany, their manifest) feelings of superiority over ‘uncivilized’ peoples and outsiders generally. By implication, this aim could be less successfully achieved by a sociology that investigated only ‘modern’ societies because such approaches already tacitly embody the assumption of civilized superiority in the first place. Or at least they do not make controlling for that possibility intrinsic to research.
—
Richard Kilminster, Norbert Elias: post-philosophical sociology
The more I read about Elias the further he climbs up my to read list. Loving this challenging of supposed boundaries between the domains of sociology, history and anthropology.
(via robert-brydie)(Source: thepovertyoftheory)