ABSTRACT

The Marxist influence is potentially an ecological model but understandably, given the sheer impact of industrialisation, nevertheless lacks a correspondingly developed concept of semantic causality, such that we end with a kind of quasi-physical determinism in which mental and emotional processes follow, reflect, or are governed, often falsely, Marxists say, by this economic base. Michael Chance classifies exactly two forms of solidarity in primate and human societies: agonic and hedonic solidarity. TenHouten's reading of Durkheim is crucial to the broadening of the affect-relations of solidarity from group-based spectra of agonic and hedonic forms to larger-scale social formations. Ortner's title and emphasis relates to her argument that 'close' anthropologies or ethnographies of subjectivities 'on the ground' must be understood in relation to wider socio-structural conditions of dynamics. Ortner's insistence on the lived world of members 'disciplined' by greater movements and Sewell's mutual mutability does not, though, go far enough to qualify as an ecological model.