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reluctance to accept homosexuality,
role of the deviant,
As part of the recent reappraisal, feminist and lesbian and gay anthropologists have claimed Ruth Benedict as a foremother.
primitive cultures
Use of primitive
narrow definitions of normal behavior penalize or give preference to certain innate capacities,
In 1939, when Nazi racism threatened freedom everywhere, she devoted her one free semester to writing Race: Science and Politics.
hope that an understanding of Japanese ability to try new paths would make Americans wiser in their postwar relationships with Japan.
Wer will was Lebendig’s erkennen und beschreiben, Sucht erst den Geist heraus zu treiben, Dann hat er die Teile in seiner Hand, Fehlt leider nur das geistige Band.
We must understand the individual as living in his culture; and the culture as lived by individuals.
discovery of fundamental attitudes
The relativity of what is considered social or asocial, normal or abnormal, is seen in a new light.
and in so far as he remains an anthropologist he is bound to avoid any weighting of one in favour of the other.
great gamut of custom
mass of detailed behavior more astonishing than what any one person can ever evolve in individual actions no matter how aberrant.
sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking.
as over against
Odd phrasing
The life-history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community.
rôle
Circumflex?
any scientific study requires that there be no preferential weighting of one or another of the items in the series it selects for its consideration.
we no longer set our own belief over against our neighbour’s superstition.
the fourteenth century refused with passion to have this planet subordinated to a place in the solar scheme.
fought with all the weapons at his command for the uniqueness of the soul, an unknowable attribute given by God to man in such a manner that it disproved man’s ancestry in the animal kingdom.
indignity evolution proposed against the notion of man’s uniqueness.
whether it is a question of imperialism, or of race prejudice, or of a comparison between Christianity and paganism, we are still preoccupied with the uniqueness,
conceals from him the fact that it is after all an historical accident.
equivalence of human nature and his own cultural standards.
has protected us as man had never been protected before from having to take seriously the civilizations of other peoples;
long ceased to account for historically, and which we read off rather as necessary and inevitable.
always to identify our own local ways of behaving with Behaviour, or our own socialized habits with Human Nature.
Primitive man never looked out over the world and saw ‘mankind’ as a group and felt his common cause with his species.
Chosen People and dangerous aliens,
between the true believers and the heathen.
very often slightly differentiated religions: on
race prejudices,
The resistance is in large measure a result of our misunderstanding of cultural conventions,
Modern existence has thrown many civilizations into close contact, and at the moment the overwhelming response to this situation is nationalism and racial snobbery.
Traditional Anglo-Saxon intolerance is a local and temporal culture-trait like any other.
failed to understand the relativity of cultural habits,
cultural basis of race prejudice is a desperate need in present Western civilization.
Not one item of his tribal social organization, of his language, of his local religion, is carried in his germ-cell.
Linnaeus classified them as a distinct species, Homo ferus, and supposed that they were a kind of gnome that man seldom ran across.
An Oriental child adopted by an Occidental family learns English, shows toward its foster parents the attitudes current among the children he plays with, and grows up to the same professions that they elect.
Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex.
enormous role of the cultural process of the transmission of tradition.
such a category is merely another version of the in- and the out-group and does not refer to the actual biological homogeneity of the group.
We cannot discover by introspection or by observation of any one society what behaviour is ‘instinctive,’
modern civilization has grown too complex for adequate analysis except as it is broken up for the purpose into small artificial sections.
Culture, with its processes and functions, is a subject upon which we need all the enlightenment we can achieve, and there is no direction in which we can seek with greater reward than in the facts of pre-literate societies.
emphasized the inevitable unrest of the period of puberty.
so-called puberty institutions are a misnomer if we continue to think of biological puberty.
