When he said not all civilizations are equal, French interior minister Claude Gueant used a word that is a veritable landmine--so much so that anthropologists have avoided it for the past 50 years.
"We prefer talking about 'cultures'," says Francois Flahault, an emeritus professor and anthropologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research.
For Flahault, the word culture is more appropriate for 'everything that human generations transmit from one to another in a non-biological manner."
On the other hand, "civilization" the word used on Saturday by Interior Minister Claude Gueant when he made his controversial comment that ?all civilizations are not equal?? is a word that many find to be problematic.
Marc Crepon certainly does. For this philosopher at ENS, one of France?s best institutes of higher education for those entering government or academia, the word "civilization" is hard to disassociate from ?some of the most murderous ideologies of the 20th century that had a very precise idea about the hierarchy of civilizations and their different values and importance.?
An implied hierarchy
So, what is the difference between the words "culture" and "civilization".
"Unlike the word 'culture' the word 'civilization' always implicitly includes a value judgment--one culture is contrasted with another considered more barbarian," says Maurice Godelier, the director at the School for the Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris. "For example, in 'civilization' there is 'civis' meaning 'citizen'. There is the Greek and Roman idea that the civilized live in cities or states while the barbarians were nomads or peasants."
In fact, the beginnings of modern anthropology in the 19th century were marked by this kind of value judgments. In Ancient society, published in 1877, the American Lewis Morgan showed how human evolution followed a schema characterized by three different stages: savagery, barbarism and civilization.
"According to him, the most civilized were the Americans. The Europeans were less so because they still preserved some vestiges of the feudal system," Godelier explains.
"That's where the problem clearly manifests: those who use the notion of civilization put themselves, as if just by chance, in the most advanced category," agrees Flahault, the professor at the French Institute of Scientific Research. "It can make you doubt the scientific pertinence of this concept."
Ethnocentrism
In his 1952 masterpiece Race and History, French anthropologist and ethnologist Clause Levi-Strauss (the so-called 'father of modern anthropology') said that ethnocentrism fathered a biased vision towards other cultures. Destroying evolutionist theories, Levi-Strauss' structuralist ethnology showed how "the theory of the hierarchy of cultures was just a mask borrowed by the theory of race inequality," explains philosopher Marc Crepon.
"These days, we believe that there are numerous lines of evolution and not all of them lead to the Occident or the United States," says Maurice Godelier, director of the School of Social Sciences.
Civilizing the political arena
While universities banished the word 'civilization' from their vocabulary fifty years ago {after WWII?} that doesn't stop the term from reappearing in the political arena. In the early 2000s, the term reappeared on the lips of American Republicans and neo-conservatives who evoked the idea of the 'clash of civilizations' to justify the so-called war on terror.
Thus, it is not a shock that the word "civilization" has reappeared in the context of the French presidential election campaign. In declaring that not all civilizations are equal, Claude Gueant introduced an "aggressive value judgment that leads us to think that certain people are inferior to others with the implication that the 'Islamic civilization' is inferior to the 'French civilization" says historian Alfred Grosser.
It isn't just Grosser who overheard these undertones. On Monday, the French Council of the Muslim Faith (Conseil francais du culte musulman) demanded that Gueant say that he was not targeting "the Muslim civilization" in his comments.
In a letter released Tuesday, Gueant said that he was not targeting any group in particular. He continued by saying that he was not targeting "our fellow citizens of the Muslim faith who respect and adhere fully to the values of the Republic and whose beliefs the Republic respects and protects."