Conservatism and Change in the Village Community: A Jordanian Case Study

Abstract

In a changing society it is quite as important, and perhaps more revealing, to ask the question, Why have things remained the same? as it is to pose the more familiar query, Why have things changed? It is the former rather than the latter question that has oriented anthropological investigations of tribal and peasant communities in the recent past. The social anthropologist’s predilection for the examination of continuity and integration rather than change has arisen not only with his obligation to present a coherent “way of life” based on a limited period of field observation but also with his theoretical concern with the fundamental circumstances of societal existence. This concern antedated Malinowski’s call for functional studies of social structures at the end of the first World War. It characterized the investigations of the French school of sociology at the end of the nineteenth century. It was the hallmark of the work of Emile Durkheim whose various publications consistently posed the question, Why does society exist a tall?