Head of Olmèques civilization
These colossal heads of more than two meters in height, and weighing sometimes up to 30 tons, posed many problems with the archeologists. With a straightforwardly Negroid facies or mongoloïde, these statues do not resemble much the features of the men of other méso-American civilizations. However, Olmèques civilization is regarded as the “mother” of all the cultures of the area.
The marquis de Mirabeau, economist and father of the French revolutionist, was one of the first to be used the term of “civilization”, in the Friend of the men or Treaty on the population, published in 1756. Since, this word never left indifferent the sociologists, the anthropologists or the philosophers. To study the evolution of its significance and to determine its various meanings exceed the simple the historical to join study, more total and more fundamental field, of mentalities. The historical field
It is at the end of the XVIII E century that the term becomes of an everyday usage, both in France and in England. Formed starting from the Latin word civis (“citizen”), which gave rise to civilis (“polish”, “of suitable and refined manners”), the new substantive sanctioned a distinction which had been established little by little between people of the cities and inhabitants of the campaigns, the latter being regarded as closer to the “state of nature”. Moreover, the etymology suggests already that the concept of civilization is to be put in relation to the development of the urbanization and the social division of work. The word “civilization”, under the influence of the Lights, becomes the incarnation of an ideal towards which must tighten all the people.
Explorations and the voyages very quickly will widen the horizons. The presence, on all the continents, from old and evolved companies, but whose lifestyles and institutions are distinguished deeply from those of Europe, will contribute deeply to the revival of mentalities. One realizes that the history of the companies does not follow a uniform course; to understand them, it is necessary to analyze them and accept the differences of them.
Also, as of first half of the XIX E century, one will speak about “civilizations” in the plural: the multiplicity of the cultures is allowed. However the evolutionary diagrams will still prevail during all the XIX E century. In the line of Montesquieu, Lewis Henry Morgan proposes to distinguish three stages in the evolution from the companies: brutality, cruelty, civilization (the latter representing the most advanced stage that a company can reach).
During the XX E century, the development of sociology and ethnology will call in question this design. It is admitted that between the companies exist differences of internal organization which necessarily do not lead to differences in value. After the Second world war, the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss much will contribute to specify this approach.
Remain a problem of method: How to define a civilization? Is it necessary to adopt a purely historical prospect in order to determine how and starting from which threshold of social, political or religious evolution are born from civilizations? Does one have rather to adopt a comparative step by analyzing the “phenomena of civilization”? In other words, which are the criteria used to determine if one or of the companies constitute a “civilization” except for whole?
What a civilization?
It is the combination of the two approaches - history and comparative - which appears most profitable, as work of the sociologist Marcel Mauss and the historians Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel shows it. Indeed, those make it possible to specify which social realities are indicated by the term “civilization”. On this subject, Fernand Braudel written: “The concept of civilization is at least double. It indicates at the same time material values morals and values.”
Before him, the British ethnologist Edward Burnett Tylor had specified in his book primitive Civilization (1871) that a civilization includes “knowledge, the beliefs, art, morals, right, habits and all the other aptitudes specific to the Man as a member of the company”.
For general that they are, these definitions do not have of it less the merit to release the main components of what one understands by “civilizations”. It is about complex units which integrate all the aspects of the social activity: techniques of production as well as religious beliefs, political institutions and the rules morals. The originality of each civilization lies in the way in which these multiple factors are combined, in their place and their importance in the company, and thus in the way in which they articulate the ones compared to the others. In other words, a civilization is a specific form of organization of the idéel - all that is field of the mental representations - in its relationship with the material - all that touches with the production and the reproduction of the company.
Characters of civilizations
Certain authors identify culture and civilization, others reserve the first term with all that concerns the intellectual life and the second with the phenomena of material and technical order: one speaks about “traditional Greek culture” and “industrial civilization”. Without claiming to slice a complex debate, one will notice that the term of “civilization” includes a set of concepts vaster than that of “culture”. Consequently, can one release from the features structural and the characters common to the unit of the ages of the whole world?
The geographical surface
Each civilization concerns initially this concept, in which the climate, hydrography and the natural resources determine the conditions of the existence. It is obvious, for example, that the climate of monsoon of the Far East, favorable to the culture of rice, affects the local populations very different from that which the climate of the large plains of North America has on the Indians.
Demography
Abundance, or the scarcity, of labor determines at the same time the type of habitat and the type of report which the community maintains with nature. Thus ancient Egyptian civilization is it inseparable from the immense efforts made to arrange the Nile in order to increase the cultivable zones.
Production
Essential with the definition of civilizations, its study must take into account all its aspects: the organization of collective work, techniques and tools. Thus, traditional China had pushed very far acquisition from the scientific knowledge and techniques, but, because of its rigid social organization, those were not applied systematically to industry and agriculture. In addition, the development of the production generally involves a deep modification of the structures of the company: social classes appear, a clear separation is introduced between leaders and directed.
States
They are constituted with their specialized administrations and their standing army. Urban centres, seats of the power and trade, emergent. The writing becomes an invaluable tool which makes it possible to record the laws and the decisions of the power. The Code of Hammourabi, which dates from the II E century before J. - C., is one of the most outstanding testimonies of Babylonian civilization. This table would be incomplete if it did not include the social reports. The sexual division of work, the organization of the family, the place granted to the women in the public life are as many factors which act in-depth on the companies.
The cultural surface
Each civilization also belongs to a precise cultural surface. Generally, the religious beliefs constitute the axis of it; but it is necessary to take into account all the elements which take part of a vision of the world common to the populations concerned: political ideologies, philosophical and literary and artistic traditions.
The language
It contributes to the cohesion of civilizations. Often, the original core of great civilizations corresponds at a speech community (it is the case of Greece, Rome and China). But, as their expansion, civilizations can gather populations of different languages (Europe is an illustration).
Great civilizations The history kept the trace of one very a large number of civilizations. But, at dawn of humanity, the migrations and the exchanges which take place in the companies were in the beginning great mixings, often at the level of the continents. Thereafter, the conquests and alliances between States still accentuated the bringings together between the people. One will thus hold the term of “great civilizations” to the vast units which, with the wire of the centuries, were born from these multiple contacts. They gather very diverse companies, with the different political regimes, the dissimilar social structures, and are characterized at the same time by their supranational dimension and the long life of their influence. They are maintained in life beyond the conquests, the collapse of the empires and the fall of the political regimes; in that, they do not merge with the States which they include.
Three examples make it possible to illustrate this matter.
The Far East
The climate of monsoon and hydrography, the overpopulation and the culture of rice constituted the support of its development. They partly explain the mode of organization of the companies: very centralized States, to conclude great work essential to the control of nature (irrigation), are based on village communities equipped with a broad autonomy; the social structures are strongly treated on a hierarchical basis (the system of the castes in India constitutes of them the typical example and the borderline case). This native of the Far East unit developed around two poles: India and China, which knew each one a specific history. Between the two, one distinguishes from the subsets: Viet-Nam, Khmer Empire (Kampuchea), Indonesia. Japan constituted concrete cases.
European civilization
Its dominating position in the world holds with the synthesis that it knew to realize between the legacy of the Antiquity of ancient Greece and the Romain Empire and the Christian religion. If the Greek philosophical thought constitutes the rational core of its culture, the Roman Empire, which extended on all the Mediterranean basin, on the other hand, put it in contact with a large number of civilizations. In addition, Christianity, monotheistic religion become universal, worked its institutions and its vision of the world.
The institutions born of the fall of the Roman Empire allowed, starting from X E century, a rebirth of the economic life. It is indeed in Europe that appeared the modern cities, places of production and culture. It is also in Europe that capitalism knew its advent. The economic dynamism and cultural as well as the capacity of expansion which resulted from it contributed to modify the face of the planet - which, starting from the XVI E century, lived at the European hour.
Islamic civilization
It extends its influence on a very vast zone, of the Black Africa in India and Indonesia, of the Maghreb in the Middle East. It draws its force first from the cohesion which the Islamic religion confers to him. The latter, at the same time original creation and synthesis of the cultures and the former ages of the Middle East, is also a social morals, a theoretical and practical political design. That explains why whole populations, which often have difficult living conditions, find in it an answer; it offers a comprehensive view of the company and a hope in the future to them. Taking into account the importance of immigration in the economically developed countries, Islamic civilization is one of the important components of modernity.
This presentation, inevitably diagrammatic and lacunar, has the advantage of highlighting the force of the traditions which civilizations incarnate. It makes it possible to raise on reasonable bases the question which Raymond Aron at the era of the tightening of the times of communication raised, of the multiplication of the contacts between the people and convergences between political systems (still increased by the crisis of socialism): can one accept the possibility of a world civilization, resulting from the fusion of all those which remain to date?
Failing to allow an definitive answer, the report of the strength of old civilizations helps to measure the width of the obstacles which are drawn up on this way.