Hi Douglas, Liz, Mark, all
Thanks for this interesting conversation. I am simply not well-read enough
to proffer anything substantial; but I thought I'd throw in a few responses.
I did appreciate Peter's comments, as little warning bells go off in my head
whenever I heard "hardwiring" applied to sophisticated human behaviours,
both social and individual. I don't dispute that genetics has its place,
but I seriously question that human behaviours can be wholly explained by
that kind of determinism, however inflected. One example Douglas raised was
sexual difference, but sexual difference is so various, and traits
considered masculine and feminine have shifted so much over the past two
millennia, and so very often under the gaze of a supposedly "objective"
scientific observation (a most interesting book by Thomas Lacquer looks at
this), that it seems to me that social expectations are at least as
important as any other factor, and that the truth is somewhere in between,
in an unpredictable combination of genes and environment. And such
generalisations as "male" and "female" brains make very little sense most of
the time when applied to individual experience, and seem to depend very
heavily on large swathes of exception. An old argument, but it seems to be
fought over fairly regularly.
And yes, there are many kinds of community, and many ways of interacting.
Most of us probably exist in several, which may contain fewer than 200
people but which altogether might add up to considerably more. I don; quite
buy the idea that city communities are per se anonymous and anti-human
because of their size; there is an obvious truth in that which probably
obscures more complicated other truths.
I've been reading Artaud's The Peyote Dance recently, a collection of his
writings about his encounters with Indian mysticism. I don't think it can
have any anthropological status at all, Artaud's observations being so
inflected through a very tormented Christianity and then later repudiated by
him anyway - but as a record of a poetic liminal state that can only be seen
as psychotic in Western society, it's a pretty fascinating and rather sad
document.
Best
A
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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