Jeffrey Broadbent talks about "Movement in Context: Thick Networks and Japanese Environmental Protest"

On 5 November 2014, Jeffrey Broadbent, University of Minnesota, talked at the MWK about his life-long research on Thick Networks and Japanese Environmental Protest. Grown up in a Quaker environment, at the age of 12, he met a Japanese Zen Buddhist from Kyoto at a Quaker retreat centre which impacted on the path of his life. As a young adult, he spent 2 years meditating with a Buddhist Zen-master in the Japanese woods, back home, became a ‘gardener’ to find out that he was called for something else. The next inspirations were the Frankfurt School and Marxism-Leninism, and, more than those, Robert Bellah’s course on sociology of religion at UC Berkeley (1970-74) (and his arguments in Tokugawa Religion) who pointed him towards Max Weber, Protestant Ethic with his emphasis on Protestantisms influence on growth of industrial capitalism in Northern Europe while Catholicism hindering it.

For his PhD, he started with the following research orientation:

• -          if an how Japanese culture would affect the Japanese protection of Nature.
• -          Anthropologist White – environmental degradation due to Biblical religious culture (Christianity) that separated humans from nature.
• -          Japanese Buddhist and Shinto culture does not make this separation. Humans part of Nature. Therefore, should take care of nature.
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Weber's complex theory

-          who did “not replace one-sided materialism with one-sided idealist explanation”
-          values on one factur, institutions and raw power also count in understanding society
-          Talcott Parsons extended this in his theory on AGIL: A (Human being adapting to economy) G(oal making processes) I (inner values, community, trusting friends) L (visible aspects, manifested values), interpenetration of effects in social formation

-          Can be used without functionalist assumptions

Discovery of Society

• -          Bellah’s course on Japanese society
• -          Nakane Chie’s Tateshakai no Rikigaku (=The dynamics of a vertical society)

Vertical Societies

• -          Based on Nakane of social anthropology with Evans-Pritchard at Oxford and comparison with India.
• -          Vertical society thesis, relations to the hierarchical chain of command as personal loyaty
• Harvard University MA and PhD (1974-82)
• -          conflict in Japan between state and protest movements over the building of a polluting and community-destroying industrial factory
• -          Case study in Oita, Kyushu.
• -          did Japanese culture and social structure play a causal role, or only conflicting material interests?
• -          Bellah: Japan not an axial society

Field discoveries

• -          expansion of Oita industrial development plan
• -          protective Buddhist and Shinto village impulses
• -          appreciation of nature and traditional village
• -          protection by local Shinto God invoked by the student radical leader
• -          but
• -          triple control structure in village society
• -          local village councils not voluntary associations
• -          manipulated by higher elites up to central ministries
• -          Confucian background (filial piety)
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Environmental Politics in Japan: Networks of Power and Protest (Cambridge, 1998).

• -          Self missing or weak, not driven by guilt, instead immediate emotional connection and personal relation (shame culture, vs. western guilt culture)