The Clash of Civilizations

“The Clash of Civilizations”

Samuel Huntington defines a civilization by stating that it is a cultural entity. He feels that villages, regions, ethnic groups, nationalities and religious groups all have distinct cultures at different levels of cultural heterogeneity. Even though cultures may be separated by different parts of a village, both may share culture commonalities that separate them from other cultures. Examples include: European communities share cultural features that distinguish them from Arab or Chinese communities. He believes that a civilization is the highest cultural grouping of people and broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species.

According to Huntington, civilizations are defined by common objective elements, such as history, religion, customs, language, institutions, as well as subjective self-identification of people. People have different levels of identity and one can define himself as a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, Christian, European and Westerner. The civilization to which he belongs is the broadest level of identification with which he intensely identifies. The boundaries of civilizations can change because people can redefine their identities. Samuel Huntington believed that civilizations were self-contained and did not acknowledge that people have different values that identify their different cultures and felt that these ideas were not changeable.

Civilizations may involve a large number of people, a very small number of people or include several nation states, such as with the Westerners. Civilizations, therefore, may blend and overlap and include subdivisions. They are meaningful entities and the lines between them are seldom sharp. Samuel Huntington also states that civilizations are dynamic, rise and fall, divide and merge. Civilizations may also disappear and become buried in time.

The Civilizations that Huntington Identifies Include:

Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin-American and

possibly the African civilization.

Criticisms of Huntington’s Work By Edward Said In The Video, “The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations”

Mr. Said felt that the weakest part of the Clash of Civilizations is the rigid separation assumed between countries, despite the overwhelming evidence that today’s world is in fact, a world of mixtures, migrations and crossings over of boundaries. An example is that one of the major crises in the U.S., France and Britain was brought about by the realization that no culture or society is purely one thing. Mr. Said’s major criticism of Huntington is that boundaries transverse over, so no one culture or civilization can be insulated from another. The sizable minorities; the Indians, Asians, North Africans in France, African elements in the U.S. and populations in Great Britain dispute the idea that civilization that prided themselves as homogeneous, can continue to do so. Mr. Said stated that any attempt to separate cultures, like water-tight compartments, believed by