Civilisations as Contrasting Cosmocracies-West Africa and China

Since the 1960's, as an idea,civili-sation has been a rejected concept in anthropology and sociology because of its evolutionary and Euro-centric misuses.However, the question of scale im-plied by the term civilisation remains significant. More recently, other more historically informed ap-proaches have resuscitated the concept on more sustainable grounds.In order to renew a discussion of its usefulness as a concept, we will start with the most promising, least Eurocentric, conception of civilisation in classical sociology and anthropology, the one forged by Marcel Mauss.Mauss stressed the histories of civilisations in the plural and rejected connecting them to some hypothetical, generalized evolution of humankind.As Mauss defines it, a civilisation consists of “those social phenomena which are common to several societies”.However, we should notice how he then insists that they are also socially linked by adding that they must be“more or less related to each other” by lasting con-tact “through some permanent intermediaries, or through relationships from common descent”.On the next page of his discussion, he further refines the concept and calls civilisation a family of socie-ties.