Social Theory and Regional Studies in the Global Age

8: Evolutionary Grades within Complex Societies: The Case of Ethiopia

8 Evolutionary Grades within Complex Societies The Case of Ethiopia Donald N. Levine The title Social Theory and Regional Studies may seem oxymoronic. Regional studies have long been thought valuable only for historical understandings or practical interventions. Their idiographic focus appears at odds with rigorous theory work. Nevertheless, to scholars primed with theoretic agendas, regional studies offer bounteous opportunities to fructify social theory. Over the years, my work in Ethiopian Studies engaged an array of types of theory work.1 At times I was prompted to redefine a conventional concept, as when I recast the notion of nationhood by looking at the three modalities of nationhood in present-day Ethiopia—homeland, Diaspora, and virtual (2011). I found myself moved to construct conceptual frameworks and typologies, for example, in perusing ethnographic data that called out for fourfold analytic tables, as when I compared Amhara and Oromo social systems and proceeded to generate the hierarchical individualism and egalitarian collectivism boxes ([1974] 2000). A less common genre of theory work consists of finding and justifying new problems, for example, by encountering an unfamiliar phenomenon and playing with it to tease out theoretical issues, as when I discovered “wax-and-gold” (poetically ambiguous) language in Amhara culture and went on to seek formulations about the significance of univocal/ambiguous communication in theories of culture (1965; 1985). A related genre involves redirecting current scholarship; so, in tracing lines of influence in 221 222 Donald N. Levine defensive modernization among Ethiopia, Japan, and Jamaica I used a case of cross-national interactions to suggest a fresh way to configure modernization (2006). My paradigm of types of theory work indicates that one can theorize new areas in a number of ways. (1) Through extrapolation from earlier work, drawing on previous work by myself on Amhara society and others on Oromo society, I used comparative structural analysis to suggest a model of historic change, accounting for the making of the modern Ethiopian nation by pointing to contrasting features of the traditional Amhara and Oromo social systems ([1974] 2000). (2) One can theorize new areas by attending to emergent phenomena. I did so when exploring forms of cultural creativity in Ethiopian Diaspora communities and thereby constructed a generic model for dimensions of cultural creativity ([2006] 2011). (3) Sometimes one theorizes a new area by coming to construct a new analytic angle, in the course of examining ways in which a universal phenomenon manifests itself distinctively in a particular tradition, as when I analyzed dimensions of legitimacy in traditional Amhara culture (1964). (4) One can also adduce new perspectives to analyze familiar phenomena, as when I sought to reconceive the nature and relations of Abrahamic religions, viewing them through their manifestations as sister religions in Ethiopia (2007). At times, engaging regional material can generate causal hypotheses. For example. I used the method of residues to generate hypotheses about the contrasting developmental paths of Ethiopia and Japan, when I depicted Ethiopian and Japanese civilizations across two millennia as overwhelmingly similar but different in a few crucial respects (2001c), and when I examined the sources and consequences of “the masculinity ethic and the spirit of warriorhood” in Ethiopian and Japanese cultures (Levine 2006a). Finally, for now, an important kind of theory work consists in building diagnostic models of general applicability. I did this when investigating the political opportunities missed at five crucial junctures of Ethiopian history between 1960 and 2005 (2007) and thereby created a paradigm for analyzing political situations with an eye to exploring missed opportunities and their causes. The foregoing illustrates how empirical work on a region can be turned to modify or create theoretical forms. In the present project, however, I seek to reverse the flow of influence, by applying theoretic constructs in order to illuminate unnoticed aspects of historical reality.2 I shall apply a theoretic perspective, neo-evolutionary theory, to selected features of Ethiopian civilization. My initial goal was simply to show that applications of that sort might strengthen theory simply through enhancing the salience 223 Evolutionary Grades within Complex Societies and heuristic value of systematically generated concepts. In executing the project, however, I came to realize certain benefits for the theoretic constructs involved: (1) by finding myself pressed to modify those constructs as I proceeded; and then (2) by realizing certain implications of that work for more general theoretic constructs, which I had not set out to deal with originally.3 This latter includes...