Suchergebnisse

"Why do members of a society espouse culturally constituted beliefs that are at odds with their personal interests and experiences? In this book Melford Spiro, a psychological anthropologist, answers this question by investigating ideologies of gender and sex relations in Burma, according to which men are superior and women are morally and sexually dangerous - despite the reality that women enjoy high economic, legal, and social status. Spiro argues that these sexist ideologies - prevalent in most of the human world - are an expression of male anxieties and insecurities." "Spiro propose a theory of cultural reproduction that is an alternative to the enculturation model of radical cultural determinism. He postulates that cultural systems are reproduced only insofar as they are internalized by members of society and that this occurs if these systems resonate with members' conscious and unconscious beliefs and desires or are employed by them as a resource for the construction of defense mechanisms. He compares his firsthand observations of a Burmese village to extensive data from a wide array of other societies (including our own) and argues that this explanation applies to all societies."--Jacket

Following an explication of "utopianism," this article describes the social and cultural systems of the original utopian communes comprising the Israeli kibbutz movement. It then describes the radical changes that have been made in those systems. After accounting for these changes, it assesses their implications for the utopian and cultural determinist theories of human nature.

There has been a strong tendency in structural and symbolic anthropology to assume that sex and aggression are of no concern to cultural symbol systems. Even when cultural beliefs, myths, or rituals are explicitly and preponderantly sexual or aggressive in content, they are typically interpreted as metaphors for social structural themes. This thesis is illustrated with respect to aggression by an analysis of Lévi‐Strauss' interpretation of a Bororo myth, after which the assumptions that structural theory makes concerning the place of aggression in cultural symbol systems are contrasted with the opposing assumptions of psychoanalytic theory. [structuralism, psychoanalysis, cultural symbol systems, myth]