Processual logic applied to anthropologist's critic on elias' idea about simpler societies

A certain vision about psychic structures of people living in simpler societies is basic to the thinking of Elias about changes in human history as well as to his concrete historic studies.  Yet at the same time it is exactly this vision what raises strong resistance to Elias among anthropologists. This would be of no relevance if anthropologists did not claim absolute professional competence about early societies, and if sociologists and historians did not accept it. But as they do the role played by “primitives” for Elias’ theory design became unpronounceable. The subsequent taboo makes it difficult to discuss what Elias meant by processual sociology and which would be its radical consequences claimed by Richard Kilminster some years ago.

Anthropologists currently argue that Elias did widely ignore ethnographic literature, assuming that no one sufficiently informed would be able to present a theory of the kind Elias presented. At the same time they assume some kind of moral failure on the side of Elias, being handled over in one and the same pocket ignorance and moral deficiency. There have been some replies arguing that Elias was not so ignorant and ethically not so bad. This paper is aimed to take these replies somehow further arguing that anthropologists resistance to Elias is due to the cognitive structure underlying as well as bounding there way of thinking. It is argued that it is this structure what opposes to a processual logic. We thus have no need of doubt with respect to Elias knowledge about “primitives” but may assume that he refers mainly to the same facts known to anthropologists. The question at stake is not a matter a facts known to one and another but rather a question of different ways of thinking representing both different logics.