| As exemplified in the common concerns of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, sociology fundamentally originated in an attempt to define modern, industrial society as a phenomenon qualitatively different than its predecessors. The dichotomy of "modernity" versus "tradition" was likewise decisive in demarcating the original intellectual boundaries of the social sciences, so that non-European societies became a residual empirical object under anthropology, which deployed a specialist interpretive paradigm centered around the concept of culture. In sociology, by contrast, culture increasingly came to be regarded as an epiphenomenal matter which "modern" society ostensibly both transcends and homogenizes. However, the rise of religious "fundamentalism" on a global scale, the recrudescence of European ethnic rivalries, and the unpredicted industrial vitality of Asia's "little tiger" nations are all contemporary developments hinting at the basic unsatisfactoriness of sociology's understanding of culture.;Against the erstwhile unthinkable backdrop of Buddhist economic dynamism--Thailand boasts one of the world's fastest growing economies--this dissertation takes up as a case study in empirical cultural analysis whether Thai culture has been as vulnerable to and incompatible with industrial modernity as Western social scientific critics hypothesized a generation ago. Replicating mid-century ethnographic interview research, the present study establishes striking (and sociologically significant) continuities between the way today's Thai understand themselves and world-views documented half a century ago by Ruth Benedict and other noted anthropologists. These continuities, it is proposed, call into essential question how both culture and industrial modernity have been heretofore co-theorized in the social sciences. In the concluding analysis, directed towards sociology's neonate "sociology of culture" sub-field, it is argued that these findings simultaneously substantiate the heuristic power of the implicit epistemology and methodology of Max Weber's studies of the world religions, a cultural-analytical precedent whose underlying promise has been obscured by its association with the critique of Oriental backwardness in which it originated. |
