ABSTRACT
Analysis of community and family structures and their influence on the sociopolitical evolution of respective societies appears to be rather relevant for Second and Third World studies.1 First of all, it is important for understanding the prospects of those countries in terms of transition to democracy, i.e. of achieving the declared goal of the majority of regimes supported by the West. Modern democracy is a phenomenon that originated and developed within a particular (European) sociocultural context. Thus many attempts to make non-European societies truly democratic (that is, not merely to implant a democratic political system but to establish a civil society as well) have sooner or later come into conflict with the local social and cultural milieu. The 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran is the most vivid example of this. It therefore seems counterproductive and fruitless to try to estimate the ‘democratisation potential’ of non-Western societies (societies, not merely political systems) without a historical-anthropological look at their sociocultural backgrounds.
