A diversidade cultural segundo a abordagem da antropologia evolutiva

Trata-se de um ensaio teórico em teoria antropológica a respeito da questão da diversidade cultural, a partir da perspectiva evolucionista. Inicialmente, toma-se como referência as contribuições de Morgan, além de insights de Tylor e Frazer. Em seguida, abordam-se algumas ressalvas críticas à perspectiva evolucionista defendidas pela antropologia cultural, a partir de Franz Boas e Ruth Benedict. Finalmente, conclui-se com uma reflexão sobre o imperativo de se preservar a diversidade das culturas, a partir de insights de Lévi-Strauss.

Psyche im kulturellen Spannungsfeld zwischen Universalismus und Relativismus

Aus einer ethnohistorischen Perspektive werden die Diskurse um die Frage nach den Gemeinsamkeiten und Besonderheiten von Kulturen beginnend im 19. Jahrhundert dargestellt. Hierbei wurde der Evolutionismus häufig mit dem Kulturuniversalismus gleichgesetzt, ohne die unterschiedlichen Prämissen ausreichend zu reflektieren. Mit der Etablierung eines Kulturrelativismus unter Franz Boas wurde ein Gegenmodell entwickelt, um den Einfluss der Umwelt auf die partikulare Herausbildung von psychischen Merkmalen gegenüber biologischen Faktoren herauszustellen. Am Beispiel der Japan-Studie der Boas Schülerin Ruth Benedict wird gezeigt, wie stark kulturrelativistische Positionen zur Stereotypisierung des Japanbildes in und außerhalb Japans beigetragen haben. Schließlich wird an den Träumen von Frauen auf Samoa gezeigt, wie postkoloniale Einflüsse auch heute noch Einfluss auf das psychische Erleben der Kolonisierten nehmen. Es wird für einen globalen Aushandlungsprozess plädiert, in dem universelle Gemeinsamkeiten wie kulturelle Besonderheiten in einem produktiven Verhältnis zueinanderfinden.

Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives: The Poetry and Scholarship of Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict

Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives re-examines the poetry and scholarship of three of the foremost figures in the twentieth-century history of U.S.-American anthropology: Edward Sapir, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict. While they are widely renowned for their contributions to Franz Boas’s early twentieth-century school of cultural relativism, what is far less known is their shared interest in probing the representational potential of different media and forms of writing. This dimension of their work is manifest in Sapir’s critical writing on music and literature and Mead’s groundbreaking work with photography and film. Sapir, Mead, and Benedict together also wrote more than one thousand poems, which in turn negotiate their own media status and rivalry with other forms of representation. A. Elisabeth Reichel presents the first sustained study of the published and unpublished poetry of Sapir, Mead, and Benedict, charting this largely unexplored body of work and relevant selections of the writers’ scholarship. In addition to its expansion of early twentieth-century literary canons, Writing Anthropologists, Sounding Primitives contributes to current debates about the relations between different media, sign systems, and modes of sense perception in literature and other media. Reichel offers a unique contribution to the history of anthropology by synthesizing and applying insights from the history of writing, sound studies, and intermediality studies to poetry and scholarship produced by noted early twentieth-century U.S.-American cultural anthropologists.

Tras las huellas del pícaro en la cultura venezolana. Raíces y derivaciones

El trabajo revisa y cuestiona la figura del “pícaro” en Venezuela, que la literatura reconoce con alguna frecuencia en la idiosincrasia latinoamericana y caribeña. Con la ayuda del concepto de “personalidad modal” de Ruth Benedict, antropóloga, de la corriente del configuracionismo cultural, el objetivo es describir esta “personalidad” tal como ha sido abordada por variados autores, particularmente Axel Capriles, psicólogo, y desarrollar para ella una contextualización histórica y sociológica. Para eso se revisan autores provenientes del campo de la antropología/etnopsicoanálisis (Samuel Hurtado), la sociología (Alberto Gruson), la psiquiatría (José Luis Vethencourt) y la psicología (Alejandro Moreno), quienes desde el enfoque del psicoanálisis, fundamentaron aspectos de la sociedad venezolana, que se relacionan con esta personalidad. El método utilizado es una selección documental intencional que desglosa el tema del pícaro venezolano desde ángulos disciplinarios diversos y que arroja luz sobre la pregunta sobre esta figura y su funcionalidad en la sociedad, con una revisión crítica de los argumentos de los autores, entre los que se incluyen el matricentrismo, la matrisocialidad y la indefensión. Revisamos los significados por la posible evolución del término a lo largo de la historia y para una posible segmentación interpretativa del significado de pícaro, por su importancia simbólica en la construcción de cultura y para promover una apertura a la problematización de los rasgos de identidad que no operan en favor de la cohesión social.

Conceptual Results of the Practice of Re-reading and Rethinking of Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture

Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture has a long history of professional criticism by cultural anthropologists. Still, at the beginning of the 1990s, appeared singular attempts of critical rethinking of the concept of patterns of culture, which were provided with appropriate reconstruction. The initiative belonged to P. Bock and S. Leavitt. Other instances of critical analysis came from attempts to generalize the phenomenon of re-reading the works of Ruth Benedict. In this article those rare initiatives of ‘critical re-reading’ are represented by the paper by B. Babcock and J. Boon. As an analytical unit for reviewing B. Babcock’s academic exposition of conceptual considerations and criticisms, we chose the description of positive perception by Ruth Benedict of the idea from W. Dilthey that we have no grounds for hoping to get any eventual categorical form of rationalization of life from philosophy. As the textual analysis has shown, Ruth Benedict picked this postulation of W. Dilthey’s to block the effect of ‘final’ apologetical theses for support and acceptance of functional descriptions of living archaic cultures of Trobriand Islands and Mainland of Melanesia by B. Malinowski as a template for description of any culture. Regarding the attachment of gestalt psychology implications to existing apologetic arguments for presentation of the mentioned functional descriptions of living archaic cultures as a sample for description of any living culture, the multiplicative meaning of Dilthey’s thesis for Ruth Benedict becomes clear. This multiplicative assignment of Dilthey’s argument shows that in critical reconstruction by P. Bock and S. Leavitt gestalt psychology implications were incautiously presented as a horizon for inclusion of the ideas of configuration, individuality, and culture into the concept of pattern of culture. Concurrently, J. Boon managed to demonstrate that descriptions of antagonism of Indian tribes of Pueblo and Plain cultures contain no depictions of internal testing of one culture by the other. Therefore, a full description of these cultures antagonism as opposition of Apollonian and Dionysian patterns of Indian tribes of Pueblo and Plain culture made up the focal matter of ‘dispositional description’, which is an important methodological achievement of Ruth Benedict.

Bread and Wine

If Mead had only been weighing whether to stay with Luther Cressman or marry Reo Fortune, the year after her trip to Samoa would have been difficult enough. But there was another person very much on her mind and in her heart, Ruth Benedict. Mead’s attempts to parse her feelings for, and duties to, all of these people caused great agony. While the sexual and psychological dimensions of these relationships have been explored at some length by other biographers, the spiritual aspects have received less attention. It is perhaps most accurate to say that, while Mead did not find the sexual ethics of her chosen denomination compelling, the symbols and metaphors of faith continued to shape her perspective.