Paradigmatic systems define cultures through central domains without essentializing them.

Evidence

In line with the theory of paradigms I set forth earlier, it will be said that Islamic cultures were defined by an ethos, by a particular range of attitudes to the world, and by a group of discursive and highly dialectical traditions that attempted to fashion, and often produced, certain kinds of subjects. To see in this characterization a tendency to essentialism or to reductionism is to misunderstand the theory of paradigms that I have advanced in the previous chapter. It is to misunderstand how paradigmatic systems drive cultures and “civilizations,” for, as I have noted, there are undeniable central domains that characterize every society. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 145

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains that Hallaq’s ‘theory of paradigms’ treats a civilization’s central domains as constitutive but compatible with internal variation — the key methodological move that immunizes his analysis against the essentialism charge.
• XREF: connects to: Culture in Relation divides and specifies without claiming primordial status — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 814