Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Japan: "ex toto" personality

human history, each offering its own paradigm of society and self. The first, ex toto, ... The second code, ex parte, reverses the relation, placing the self at the center of particular group attachments and ...
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Modernity and the construction of collective identities.by S.N. EisenstadtInternational Journal of Comparative Socio... Feb 1998 v39 n1 p138(21)
This paper analyses in a comparative framework the relations between construction of collective identity and those of state-civil society relations in three modern settings - namely, in a general way Europe, the United States and Japan - the three major modern industrialized societies, with a brief comparative glance at Latin America. This analysis is based on the assumption first that collective identity is not naturally generated but socially constructed: it is the intentional or non-intentional consequence of interactions which on their turn are socially patterned and structured. Collective identity depends on special processes of induction of the members in the collectivity, ranging from various rites of initiation to various collective rituals, in which the attribute of "similarity" among its members, as against the strangeness, the differences, thedistinction of the other, is symbolically constructed and defined. Constructing boundaries and constructing a basis for trust solidarity and communal equality are two aspects of such processes.
Thus the central axes around which thesetwo patterns crystallized in Europe were those ofhierarchy-equality, of relatively pluralistic "ex-parte" asagainst homogeneous "ex-toto" conceptions of the socialorder, and the major institutional implications.(10)
10 Rainer Baum, Authority and identity: The case forrevolutionary invariance. In Roland Robertson and BurkartHolzner (Eds.), Identity and Authority. New York: St.Martin’s Press, 1979, pp. 61118.

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