Social Movements across Time and Disciplines
In this chapter, I begin my journey of tackling issues involved with the concept of social movements by tracing historical trends in social movement theory in sociology, “basic”
anthropology, and applied anthropology. Any history is a cultural construction that entails selectivity, but I hope this selective representation will satisfactorily explain the unfolding of discourses on social movements. Guiding my attempt at constructing a historical overview of social movement theory is the idea of maintaining tensions. Donna Haraway advocated keeping
“the ‘four temptations’—positivism, Marxism, feminism/antiracism, and poststructuralism—in tension with one another, without allowing any one of these epistemological frames to silence the others” (di Leonardo 1998: 22). While her list of epistemological frames is not the only way that such a list could be constructed (nor, arguably, is it the best), I feel that the idea of keeping different frames in tension allows for a more nuanced historical overview. In particular, I have tried to maintain a tension between the contributions of individual theorists and the
generalizations of historical periods and schools of thought. Just as ethnographies strive to give their informants a voice, I liberally use quotations from social scientists to give a voice to the individuals to counterbalance the necessity of using generalizations. Because anthropology is a rather small discipline, comparatively speaking (Garfield 1984: 514), I draw out more specific writings in anthropology that mention social movements, while using broader strokes in the picture I paint of sociology. This is an unfortunate inevitability since doing justice to sociology’s voluminous record would require more time and space than I have. Still, I hope that a reasonable
balance is maintained between generalization and multivocality in all three cases. Also, I hope that the advances in theory are given an adequate context of broader scholarly, sociopolitical, and technological trends, without giving the impression of any form of determinism. Computers and colonialism, for instance, did not solely determine the course that sociology and anthropology were to follow, but did have a noteworthy influence upon them.
Finally, drawing upon trends in the existing social movement theory, I will make a case for the Cultural Politics approach. This approach, developed in recent years in anthropology by Arturo Escobar, sees social movements as the encounters between groups with different cultural meanings and practices in their attempts to achieve social change. Developing this approach lays the groundwork for the study of DFA.
Definition of a Social Movement
Snow et. al. (2004), while acknowledging the existence of a wide variety of definitions of social movements, have distilled them down to a few essential elements. They write: “most [definitions] are based on three or more of the following axes: collective or joint action; change-oriented goals or claims; some extra- or non-institutional collective action; some degree of organization; and some degree of temporal continuity” (p. 6). Within these general themes, a variety of competing definitions (and underlying ideologies) exist. For example, Nicholas (1973) has criticized Heberle’s definition of social movements for its basis in political economy,
claiming the emphasis on social movements changing relations of labor and property “betrays its Western bias” (p. 69). He also takes issue with Wilkinson’s criticism of “charismatic leadership,”
which he finds “indispensable” (Nicholas 1973: 69). At this point, it will be sufficient to note these common elements in the definitions of social movements that have been proposed rather than come up with an exact definition, with a couple of caveats; there are two specific
problematic themes within these definitional debates that I would like to touch on before
proceeding. These two points must be addressed so that the applicability of the social movement concept and literature to DFA is clear.
One of these themes is whether it is possible and meaningful to distinguish between social movements and interest groups. Snow et al. (2004: 7-8) attempt several distinctions between the two: 1. social movements attempt to change other institutions in addition to the state; 2. social movements lack the political legitimacy of interest groups; 3. social movements use non-institutional means to achieve their goals, such as boycotts and marches. However, as Burstein (1998) points out, these distinctions collapse upon examination.1 He notes, for instance:
“If SMOs [that is, Social Movement Organizations2] represent outsiders, then once they begin to succeed, they seemingly cease to be SMOs, even if their goals, membership, and tactics do not change” (p. 42). Tarrow notes that the use of classical forms of protest (sit-ins, etc.) has become more commonplace and accepted by authorities since the 1960s, and “the decades since the 1960s have seen the appearance of hybrid forms of interest group/social movements like the public interest group and the franchised movement organization” (1998: 33). This leads him to ask:
“How do changes such as these affect the analytical distinction between social movements and institutional politics? If the forms of collective action formerly associated with social movements are also used by interest groups, civic associations, and, on occasion, elected politicians, what remains distinctive about social movements?” (p. 34). Burnstein convincingly answers his question as follows: “Rather than continue trying to make the distinction…we should simply say that a variety of non-party organizations try to influence political outcomes; the organizations vary in a variety of important ways (tactics, organization, number of members, resources, goals, etc.), but the simple dichotomy between ‘interest group’ and ‘social movement organization’
cannot stand up to scrutiny and should be abandoned” (1998: 45).3 (This point will be discussed further in Chapter 3.)
The second problematic theme is the common definitional assumptions made about the targets selected by social movement for change. “There is a tendency within social movement research to conceptualize social movement actors as opponents of the state,” Smith (2004: 315) writes, and for social movement researchers to assume that “the national state defines the relevant political space for political contenders” (p. 314). Yet the nation-state’s reign as the dominant institution has not gone uncontested. Wolfe (1977) describes the formation of a supranational sociocultural system where “[s]tates and firms are to the emerging supranational system what tissues and organs are to a biological organism” (p. 617). The changing sociopolitical context in which the state exists suggests that the state by itself cannot be considered the reference point by which we define social movements, since nation-states are part of a larger system. The state may still be the target of social movement demands despite these changes (e.g. Edelman 1999: 187-8), though international organizations are now on the menu of possible targets also (e.g. DeLuca and Peeples 2002).
These distinctions were necessary to lay the groundwork for my literature review in this chapter and throughout this dissertation. Maintaining the artificial distinction between social movements and interest groups may have led to the exclusion of some sources where the distinction was not clear, thereby impoverishing the breadth of the review. Problematizing the state as the reference point for social movements calls attention to the forces of globalization, which must be accounted for in our theorizing on, and methodological approach to, the study of social movements. As Rubin explains, “Analysis of social movements from a historical and cultural perspective enables us to see the interconnectedness of movements and states and suggests that these are neither homogenous nor distinct spheres. In this way the study of social movements contributes new tools and perspectives to the analysis of politics” (Rubin 2004: 107).
DFA has change-oriented goals, has some degree of organization and temporal continuity, and is
involved in cultural conflicts; these similarities suggest the applicability of the social movement concept and literature.
A History of Social Movement Theory in Sociology
Anderson (2001) argues that the imagined community4 of the nation-state arose “only…
when, and where, three cultural conceptions, all of great antiquity, lose their axiomatic grips on men’s minds” (p. 589). The first was that that a particular language reflected ontological reality.
The second was the belief in the divine right of monarchs to rule. The third was “a conception of temporality in which cosmology and history were indistinguishable” (p. 589). In the eighteenth century, “the consolidation of the national state… created the framework in which national social movements developed. They resulted both from statebuilders’ penetration of society and from their creation of common frameworks of citizenship. Although expanding states sought to repress opposition and reduce the periphery to obedience, they also created categories of identity, standard relationships, and offered a fulcrum on which people could fight out their social
conflicts with others” (Tarrow 1996: 567; also see Calhoun 1993: 395).
The use of “movement” in the English language5 in the context of collective action first appeared in 1828 (Douglas 2001), and was “used to describe group responses to the social and cultural crises produced by the conditions of factory labor and urban life during the industrial revolution” (Nicholas 1973: 63)6. The labor movement became a paradigmatic social movement for European sociologists, leading later theorists to declare the discovery of “new” social
movements by contrast to it (Calhoun 1993: 385, 389). The social movements of the nineteenth century in both the United States and Europe “played a significant role…in virtually provoking the discipline [of sociology] into existence” (Bash 1994: 249). The sociopolitical contexts of the two differed, however; Europeans at the time believed that “the very existence of society was in jeopardy” (p. 249), while for Americans, “the legacy of the Enlightenment had rendered progress
as something of an article of faith” (p. 250). Or, “[s]tated another way, American sociology sought, through social reform, to cope constructively with a proliferating scatter of ‘social problems’ that seemed to impede the realization of social progress; its European counterpart attempted, through social reconstruction, to stem and, hopefully, to avert the threat of ‘The Social Movement’ that was massing in response to what was perceived as the failure of social progress”
(p. 258, emphases in original).
Writings in American sociology on social movements during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were “largely isolated from the broader structural contexts of society” (Bash 1994: 257). “In nineteenth-century images of the mob, normal, reasoning individuals were thought to be transformed in the presence of a crowd, becoming angry, violent, impressionable, and generally unthinking” (Goodwin et al. 2000: 66). Even in much of the first half of the twentieth century literature on social movements, one finds the dynamics of crowds as a central question and the distinction between emotions and rationality as a theoretical truism (Reed 2002;
Jenkins 1983: 528). Sigmund Freud, for instance, wrote: “When individuals come together in a group, all their individual inhibitions fall away and all the cruel, brutal and destructive instincts, which lie dormant in individuals as relics of a primitive epoch, are stirred up to find free gratification” (Freud 1959 [1921]: 15, quoted in Goodwin et al. 2000: 66). Many other psychologists have pathologized social movement participants in a variety of similar ways (Goodwin et al 2000: 67; Jasper 2003: 156-7). The major theoretical strands of this era were mass society theory, relative deprivation theory, and collective behavior theory, collectively known as Classical Theory, which “pointed to sudden increases in individual grievances generated by the ‘structural strains’ of rapid social change” (Jenkins 1983: 528).
Until 1939, sociology was characterized by the “time-honored technique of rational speculation” (Hedley 1993: 123, quoted in Crist and McCarthy 1996: 87). An early Classical Theorist, Le Bon, wrote: “If we wish… to remain within the narrow but safe limits within which
science can attain to knowledge… all we must do is simply to take note of such phenomena as are accessible to us, and confine ourselves to their consideration” (Le Bon 1896: 7). His
methodology, in his own words, consisted of “the most attentive observation of the facts of history” (p. 4). However, he also made a distinction between using “pure reason” and “practical reason” (p. 5), allowing him to safely “explain to the reader why he will find me draw
conclusions from my investigations which it might be thought at first sight they do not bear” (p.
4). Goodwin et al. note that: “In the absence of empirical investigation, what LeBon and Hoffer thought they saw in crowds was more a projection of their own fears and anxieties than an accurate psychological portrait of the protestors” (2000: 69). Smelser, another Classical Theorist, looked for “structural conduciveness,” “conditions of strain,” and “generalized belief,” in order to
“generate a systematic account of the activation of events and situations as determinants”
(Smelser 1997[1963]: 108). Again, no empirical evidence is offered other than an implied reading of history.
After World War II, the European and American sociological traditions began to
influence each other more, partly because of refugee European sociologists. This led to American sociologists considering social movements not simply in terms of the collective behavior of crowds, but as distinct, goal-oriented social phenomenon to be empirically studied. However, they still retained their view of social movements as social problems (Bash 1994: 259-60).
During the 1950s, there were “[p]rofound changes…within the methodological repertoire of sociologists…which included the ascendancy of survey research, the elaboration of techniques for statistical analysis, and the increasing availability of data collected by bureaucratic
organizations” (Crist and McCarthy 1996: 87). Improvements in communication and
transportation technology “blended to create an extra-local infrastructure which permitted direct electronic communication with large numbers of individuals in relatively brief periods of time, the basic recipe for survey research” (p. 88). Classical theorists began to use more empirical
evidence; “classical theorists have frequently inferred the presence of the presumed psychological state (alienation, dissonance, anxiety) from objective, rather than subjective, data. Thus, after comparing income, education, and occupational levels for whites and non-whites, Geschwender concludes that, as an explanation of the civil rights movement, ‘the Status Inconsistency
Hypothesis…is consistent with the data examined’” (McAdam 1985:13; also see Marx and Wood 1975: 378).
Changes in social movement theory in the second half of the twentieth century may be partially explainable by changes in who was doing the research: “The emphasis of the field has changed. At the turn of the century it was dominated by higher status theorists threatened by social change. In the 1950s its spokesmen were more or less detached researchers. These have given way to an increasing number of more activist researchers, who view the study of collective behavior as a way to encourage social change” (Marx and Wood 1975: 364; also see Aguirre and Quarantelli 1983: 200-6).
The 1960s gave birth to a variety of successful social movements that “highlighted the inadequacy of existing social scientific frameworks and gave rise to new ideas and rich debates”
(Edelman 2001: 285; also see McAdam 1999: 1, Calhoun 1993: 414). On the other hand, some have argued that social movement theory in general draws too heavily upon certain movements, many formed or popularized around this period, for informing its theory. Smith (1996) writes:
“we ought to remember that the peace, women’s, student, and environmental movements are not the only movements to be studied. Indeed, once could argue that the great attention paid in recent years to these four ‘core’ movements… has produced something of a counterproductive myopia in social-movement studies” (p. 4). Crist and McCarthy (1996: 94) found that the civil rights movement was indeed the most frequently studied movement by sociologists. The civil rights movement has even been referred to as “the paradigmatic American social movement” (Costain and McFarland 1998: 1). If sociologists had focused on this “paradigmatic American social
movement” to the exclusion of others, they at least had good reason to do so; the civil rights movement has had perhaps the most profound effect of any other on American society and culture.
Methodological repertoires changed during the 1960s and 1970s as well. During the 1960s, the availability of computers in American universities gave quantitative methods a boost;
complex statistical analyses could be completed in a fraction of the time they once took (Crist and McCarthy 1996: 88). During the 1970s, “[t]he federal government cut back its funding of social research, which turned sociologists toward cheaper, more efficient ways to collect data. The use of survey research designs declined markedly, giving way to a variety of other data sources” (p.
88; see di Leonardo 1998: 265 for a discussion of 1970s budget-slashing). The reliance on rational speculation, “objective” data, and surveys up to this point had created a blind spot in social movement research; Marx and Wood (1975) noted that: “In general… data used to study crowds are gathered before or after the crowd behavior occurs. This is all the more striking when one considers that theories… depend on data acquired during the occurrence of the collective behavior” (p. 372). In the early 1970s, “[t]he study of social movements and collective action [had] expanded greatly…and many of the important studies responsible for the advancement of social movement theory have relied on qualitative research techniques” (Staggenborg 1998: 353).
Social movement theory was merely one arena in which the theoretical and methodological disputes of this time were played out (Buechler 2004: 47); Glaser and Strauss’s The Discovery of Grounded Theory was published in 1967, which opened the door for other sociologists to
legitimately write about and utilize qualitative methods (Oakley 1998: 709). Some have even gone as far to claim that the push for qualitative methods should be seen as a social movement itself, attempting to change the quantitative ‘Establishment’ (Reinharz 1990:294, quoted in Oakley 1998: 724-5). Qualitative methods were a needed corrective to the past sociological methods used to study social movements, as historical research and questionnaires alone proved
to be a poor indicator of the psychological and cultural dynamics of movements (Goodwin et al.
2000: 72). Still, the emergence of qualitative methods did not overtake more traditional methods;
“the vast majority of event studies have used newspapers as their primary source of data” (Swank 2000: 29). This is not to say that newspapers are not an important data source, but they cannot be treated as an unproblematic recording of events, as media practices are shaped by a variety of cultural and political factors (see Chapter 2). Crist and McCarthy (1996: 96) found that participant-observation accounted for only 11%-13% of the published studies on social
movements in major sociology journals. Other methods used around this time include computer simulations, field experiments, and videotaping (Aguirre and Quarantelli 1983: 199-200; Crist and McCarthy 1996: 90; Marx and Wood 1975: 414).
In the early 1970s, rational choice theory became the social movement theory of choice by many sociologists (Goodwin et al 2000: 70; Smith 1996: 3; Jasper 2003: 153); “[r]ather than being studied alongside fads, crazes, and panics, social movements were now seen as ‘politics by other means’” (Goodwin et al 2000: 70). The newfound emphasis on the rationality of movement participants seemed to have been a reaction against their supposed irrationality in Classical Theory. Rational choice theory sees individuals as rational actors seeking to maximize their personal gain. Mancur Olsen, an economist, “posited individuals as so rational that they would not participate in collective endeavors… because each could benefit from others’ activity as a
‘free rider,’ pursuing low-risk self-interest at the group’s expense” (Edelman 2001: 287-8). As Edelman notes, countless examples of people’s personal sacrifices for the good of a collective can be found, and therefore this theoretical framework leaves much to be desired (p. 288; also see Greenbaum 2002: 18-9, 168; Douglas 1986: 9, 18-22, 30, 47). Still, the concept of the “free rider” has often emerged in subsequent writings on social movements.
Developed during the 1960s but popularized during the late 1970s (Duijvelaar 1996, sec.
2.2), resource mobilization (RM) theory focuses on the strategies by which social movements
mobilize resources—including material, psychological, technical, and social—which are utilized in order to “expand, reward participants, and gain a stake in the political system” (Edelman 2001:
289). This theoretical framework regards “collective action mainly as interest group politics played out by socially connected groups rather than by the most disaffected” (p. 289; also see Jenkins 1983: 529). One major flaw of the RM paradigm is that it tended to focus on groups with greater resources and neglected those “contexts of extreme inequality, severe repression, and hopeless odds” (Edelman 2001: 290); it also “understood ‘success’ primarily as the achievement
289). This theoretical framework regards “collective action mainly as interest group politics played out by socially connected groups rather than by the most disaffected” (p. 289; also see Jenkins 1983: 529). One major flaw of the RM paradigm is that it tended to focus on groups with greater resources and neglected those “contexts of extreme inequality, severe repression, and hopeless odds” (Edelman 2001: 290); it also “understood ‘success’ primarily as the achievement