Center and Periphery in the 21st Century

Abstract

Like many key concepts for understanding religion and society, the idea of center and periphery looks "easy" because the words are clear and easy to translate. It’s only in exploring what is central and peripheral that we link high-level concepts with the specifics of histories and societies. For some Muslims, one might say that the "center" is Mecca, with the annual pilgrimage, praying toward Mecca, and if possible, undertaking the pilgrimage. Is Mecca thus more the center for Islam than Karbala, Najaf, or Qum? Or is the real pilgrimage just one of the heart?

From the mid-twentieth century to its end, many sociologists and political scientists predicated the success of "development" upon secularization, finding the idea of center and periphery as key to understanding national and state authority. The prevailing orthodoxy of the social sciences from the 1950s through the 1970s was "modernization theory", a notion that we place in brackets to suggest that this "theory" is an historically bounded phenomenon whose time has come and gone. It presupposed that a prerequisite of political development was the integration of outlying regions to national and international political and economic networks through common educational, economic, and communications systems. In the study of religions, did dichotomies such as "great" and "little" traditions solve much other than serving as a convenient way to organize lectures? Does the notion of "central" versus "outlying" lands advance or cloud how global religions work?

The first difficulty with such organizing schemes is that they suppose only one hierarchical center rather than multiple ones. We can also conceive of forms of integration that do not presuppose such an order, or multiple linkages among various ethnic, kinship-based, regional, and religious communities which do not arrange themselves into an agreed ranking or that do not allow for the emergence of one. The relations and even alliances among these groups often shift, frequently in ways that thwart bureaucracies and hierarchies.

Many societies and religious organizations are too large and too differentiated for those at the supposed center to have adequate knowledge about the rest of society. There is also a tension between the centers to dominate the periphery, and for the struggle of multiple centers to retain their autonomy.

Finally, there has often been the almost unquestioned assumption that written texts are more central than oral traditions or other cultural forms of authority. Yet the significance of texts derives not from their inherent centrality but from the contingent political, social, and economic circumstances of those interpreting them.