Introduction

The subject of civil society has stimulated much research and lively debates within and across several academic disciplines in recent years. Contributions from anthropologists have been few and far between, and it is not hard to see why. There is something inherently unsatisfactory about the international propagation by western scholars of an ideal of social organisation that seems to bear little relation to the current realities of their own countries; an ideal which, furthermore, developed in historical conditions that cannot be replicated in any other part of the world today. I shall suggest that the term is riddled with contradictions and the current vogue predicated on a fundamental ethnocentricity. It is therefore no surprise that most anthropologists have hitherto ignored it. One apparent exception turns out to confirm the rule. Ernest Gellner (1994) provides an enthusiastic endorsement of civil society as a model of social organisation. Gellner’s model differs from pervasive neo-liberal approaches by acknowledging the need for an effective guarantor state (to prevent excesses of ‘insider-dealing’). In fact he endorses a kind of pluralist system, based on a mixed economy as it used to exist in countries like Britain. However, he does so not as an anthropologist but as a social philosopher writing squarely within the

traditions of the European enlightenment. When Gellner considers nonEuropean societies, notably those of the Islamic world, he does so in even more abstract terms, without investigating ethnographic particulars.