ABSTRACT
The concept of ‘civil society’ has attracted renewed interest of late as sociologists and others struggle to come to terms with what many take to be novel and vigorous processes of social change. The largely unexpected events of 1989 in eastern Europe, for example, occasioned many to ponder the possible contributions to change fashioned in the apparently re-politicized and revitalized civil societies of nations long accustomed to authoritarian socialism (Arato, 1993). But it remains a concept more enthusiastically invoked than defined. Moreover it undeniably has a rhetorical ring to it (Seligman, 1992). Certainly as opinions on its usefulness or otherwise have proliferated over the last decade they have become more polarized. Hall (1995: 25) is among those with an unapologetically positive view of civil society: ‘civil society is a particular form of society, appreciating social diversity and able to limit the depredations of political power, that was born in Europe; it may, with luck, skill and imagination, spread to some other regions of the world’. Hann (1996: 1) takes an entirely different line in his introduction to a collection of anthropological papers which challenge ‘western models’ of civil society, insisting that ‘the term is riddled with contradictions and the current vogue predicated on a fundamental ethnocentricity’.
