Clyde Kluckhohn Research Articles

Chinese Families’ Pursuit of Confucian Learning Beliefs through Overseas Education: Rethinking Learning Cultures in Cross-Cultural Research

Aim. The aim of the article is to understand how Chinese parents draw on their learning beliefs and experiences within the Chinese educational context to make decisions about their children’s overseas education, as well as analysing how their learning beliefs are similar or different from East Asian or Western learning beliefs. Methods. The study is based on more than 100 in-depth separate interviews with 22 Chinese families conducted over serval years between 2016 and 2019. Based on interpretative phenomenological analysis and discourse analysis, the results are coded according to the theory of values proposed by Clyde Kluckhohn (1951). These learning values are further coded according to whether they are reflective of the American learning model (EALM), Confucian learning model (CLM), and Confucian learning philosophies. Results. The analysis shows that Chinese parents have displayed similar learning beliefs in socialising their children in the family domain, in their disapproval of the Chinese education system, and in their pursuit of a Western overseas education. The Chinese families’ pursuit of a Western education for their children are driven by their cultural leaning beliefs, which are rooted in Confucian heritage culture, and which also echo European American heritage cultures. Conclusion. Many researchers tend to emphasise cultural differences in learning, particularly between Confucian heritage and European American heritage cultures. This paper shows the possibilities of cultural learning values shaping educational choices, expands upon the understanding of Confucian heritage culture, and suggests the similarities between the learning cultures of East Asia and the West.

Exploring Ethnography in The Muram Batu’s Anthology Hujan Kota Arang

This research explores the ethnographical values in the Muram Batu’s book Hujan Kota Arang. The ethnographical values refer to the human culture, faith, belief, and language depicted in the literature, such as a short story. The author used universal categories of culture proposed by Clyde Kluckhohn consists of language, knowledge systems, social organizations, living and technological equipment systems, livelihood systems, religion, and the arts.This research is library research, and the research design is descriptive qualitative research. The author used content analysis and descriptive analysis to analyze the ethnographical elements in each short story. The result shows the ethnographical features depicted are language, social organization, religion and the arts. The language is revealed in the story of coffee shop, analieoita and dugan ragi manis. The social organization revealed in the the nemui nyimah and a story of the coffee shop. The religion is depicted in in the anaileoita and the death of sipatitik. The arts depicted in the dugan ragi manis.

Robert A. Georges (1933–2022)

Robert A. Georges (1933–2022)

Nilai Budaya dalam Novel Taira no Masakado Karya Eiji Yoshikawa (Kajian Antropologi Sastra)

The purpose of this research is to describe the cultural values which are contained in Taira no Masakado novel. The author used descriptive analysis methods to analyse data. This research used literature study method, observe technique, and noting technique to collect data. Miles and Huberman descriptive analysis model was used to analyse data, which is an interactive analysis model. There are five aspects of cultural value orientation within society that was analysed using theory by Clyde Kluckhohn. Those values are, the aspect of human-life reality cultural value, which consists of the value of piety and religiousness. The aspect of human-nature reality cultural value, which consists of the natural resource usage and unity value. The aspect of interhuman cultural value, which consists of the responsibility, helping other, love, and friendship value. The aspect of human-work cultural value which consists of the patient, perseverance, hard work, and loyalty value. And The aspect of human-time cultural value, consists of the time usage value.

THE LEGEND OF WA WULAMONIANDWA MATAIN MUNA ETHNIC

The aim of this research was to explain the meaning contained in the Wa Wulamoni and Wa Mata Legends in the Muna Ethnic, as well as to explain the values contained in the Wa Wulamoni and Wa Mata Legends in the Muna Ethnic.The theory used was the thought of Roland Barthes about Semiotics and Clyde Kluckhohn's thinking about Cultural Values. The method used in the research was qualitative descriptive. Data Sources in the research were Wa Wulamoni and Wa Mata legends that were extracted or taken from informants. Data collection techniques in this research were direct observation, recording and quotation.The data in this research were analyzed using descriptive analytics. The results of the analysis can be concluded that the meanings contained in Wa WulamoniLegenddescribe social life of the Muna ethnic, such as glorifying a woman, the Patience Test, persevering and describing the traditions of the Muna ethnic community, namely the traditions of kaghomboand marriage, whereas the meaning of Wa Mata legend, namely: Ethics or behavior of child care in the family, respect for women, and discordant marriages. The values contained in the Wa Wulamoni and Wa Mata Legends, namely: Economic values that describe the economic system of the Lamaeo Village community, moral values that describe habits in everyday life, and religious values that describe the belief system in Muna ethnic especially in the community of Lamaeo and Lakarinta villages. Keywords: Meaning, value, legend, Muna ethnic

Pergeseran Orientasi Nilai Kultural dan Keagamaan di Indonesia (Sebuah Esai dalam Rangka Mengenang Almarhum Prof. Koentjaraningrat)

This article is dedicated to the late Prof. Koentjaraningrat. It attempts to trace the history and the source of a concept and method used by Koentjaraningrat in a research and many of his speeches in the period of 1960-70s. The concept is called 'orientasi nilai-budaya'. The author finds that the concept was borrowed from the concept 'value orientation' used by Florence Kluckhohn and Fred Strodbeck, which was printed in their book, Variations in Value Orientation (1961). The concept 'value orientation' was originally stems from the concept 'value', which was once developed by Clyde Kluckhohn, the husband of Florence Kluckhohn, at Harvard University USA. This explanation, according to the author, is important for the student of anthropology in Indonesia. In the final of the article, the author attempts to apply the concept to the socio-cultural changes in contemporary Indonesia, particularly among the members of Islamic community. Key words: value orientation; value; socio-cultural changes.  

Pergeseran Orientasi Nilai Kultural dan Keagamaan di Indonesia (Sebuah Esai dalam Rangka Mengenang Almarhum Prof. Koentjaraningrat)

This article is dedicated to the late Prof. Koentjaraningrat. It attempts to trace the history and the source of a concept and method used by Koentjaraningrat in a research and many of his speeches in the period of 1960-70s. The concept is called 'orientasi nilai-budaya'. The author finds that the concept was borrowed from the concept 'value orientation' used by Florence Kluckhohn and Fred Strodbeck, which was printed in their book, Variations in Value Orientation (1961). The concept 'value orientation', was originally stems from the concept 'value', which was once developed by Clyde Kluckhohn, the husband of Florence Kluckhohn, at Harvard University USA. This explanation, according to the author, is important for the student of anthropology in Indonesia. In the final of the article, the author attempts to apply the concept to the socio-cultural changes in contemporary Indonesia, particularly among the members of Islamic community.

Dinéj Na`nitin: Navajo Traditional Teachings and History by Robert S. McPherson (review)

NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 Reviews 119 RICHARD T. MACE Dinéjí Nànitin: Navajo Traditional Teachings and History by Robert S. McPherson University of Colorado Press, 2012 HISTORIAN ROBERT MCPHERSON created Dinéjí Nànitin to share the insight he had gathered from over thirty years of speaking and meeting with Navajo elders . He explains that the elders have a “growing concern that the younger generation was losing its understanding of what their grandmothers and grand­ fathers” experienced (7). McPherson notes the “extreme anguish” felt by Navajo elders of having their traditional teachings and history lost as the younger generation is “buried in a contemporary blizzard of activities sponsored by white culture that has made the old ways seem arcane, outdated, and impractical” (ibid). Dinéjí Nànitin is composed of nine independent chapters whose intent is to present and preserve the important lessons and stories that the Navajo tribal elders are afraid of losing to time and the distraction of younger members of the tribe. In his first chapter, McPherson examines divination, explaining the concepts by which the Navajo perform ceremonies and come to answers through their religious worldview. Each form of divination—wind listening, star gazing , and hand trebling—differ from each other. Listening is auditory, gazing involves sight, and trembling involves touch. The Navajo believe the world is filled with invisible holy people who understand what has and what will happen and that supernatural power plays an important role in finding tribal members who have the ability to use divination. McPherson notes that the Navajo believe the power of divination comes at a cost. If these powers are abused by their practitioners, they are cursed with disease. In his second chapter, McPherson examines why the Navajo were so devastated by the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918–19. McPherson articulately explains the Navajo custom of leaving home after someone dies, as it is believed that the lonely spirit stays in the vicinity. He contends that after the Navajo left their warm winter hogans because of this practice, they became more susceptible to the elements and the flu, and greater numbers got sick and died. Another Navajo custom that exacerbated the problem was sweat lodges. Since the influenza is a respiratory illness, sweat lodges served to both spread the disease, as well as provided for a faster incubation. McPherson notes that the nearby Ute tribe’s ceremonies are not as communal, so they did not spread the disease as rampantly as did the Navajo, and subsequently did not suffer the same level of mortality. Reviews NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 120 Moving from the devastation of the flu, an evil foretold by the bad omen of a solar eclipse, according to sun gazing divination, McPherson explains ideas of medicine men and witchery. He highlights Clyde Kluckhohn’s study Navajo Witchcraft, which identifies the four types of “black magic”: witchery, sorcery , wizardry, and frenzy witchcraft. He notes that the Navajo do not draw a particular distinction between good and evil magic; it only matters how the magic is used. He explains that it is important for medicine men to have an understanding of dark magic. Otherwise, they would be unprepared to create countermagic to negate its effects. Balance is central in Navajo religion, even excessive good can be a negative by becoming out of control, but rituals provide “the means by which things out of bounds can be brought back to safety and order” (78). The second half of Dinéjí Nànitin focuses on language and traditional­ stories. McPherson explains that the struggle in maintaining traditional Navajo storytelling is that the younger generation does not appreciate traditional language. He points to Charlie Blueyes as an example of a repository of Navajo wisdom, whose grandson was fluent in English but his Navajo was almost nonexistent, as school and the dominant society replaced traditional learning. The significance of the dwindling numbers of those who can speak Navajo is that “only pure Navajo words are used in ceremonies” and that these words serve as a “major underlying tenet of the Navajo belief system” (215). With the passing of elders like Charlie Blueyes, traditional stories, wisdom , and ceremonies pass out of existence...

"UNTIL ALL THE DATA ARE IN" A Chapter in the History of American Archaeology

In the 1930s Paul Radin argued that Franz Boas refrained from generalizing, claimed that the time was not ripe because all the data were not yet available, and believed that once all the data were available they would speak for themselves. This characterization was applied in the 1940s by Clyde Kluckhohn and his student Walter Taylor to the work of culture historian A. V. Kidder. Processual archaeologists obtained the idea that culture historians in general used the unripe time argument based on philosopher of science Carl Hempel's description of the first step of inductive reasoning as gathering all the facts, and they used Kluckhohn's and Taylor's characterizations as substantiating evidence. Processualists likely reasoned that because culture historians operated inductively and thus sought to gather all the facts before they interpreted the archaeological record, culture historians also called upon the unripe time argument to warrant their hesitancy to draw conclusions. Evidence that culture historia...

David Maybury-Lewis and Pia: Social/Symbolic and Public Anthropology

David Maybury-Lewis and Pia have influenced my research, teaching, and activism in ways that evolved and hopefully will continue to evolve. The trajectory from teacher/scholar to public intellectual, expressed in David's and Pia's life and work, also influenced the life and work of others, as illustrated here. I was still a new graduate student at Harvard (second year) when David arrived as a new faculty member in Fall 1960. Initial impact was intellectual and personal; Cultural Survival and the public intellectual phase had not yet surfaced. David brought, via Rodney Needham and Levi-Strauss, a certain kind of structuralism and, from Evans-Pritchard, social anthropology. He also brought youth, energy, charm, a sense of adventure fresh from the field in Brazil, and a British and cosmopolitan persona into what was then a very US milieu, in anthropology and in the department of social relations at Harvard. Pia came too, and she and David together were the first faculty to invite me and other graduate students to their house, where we met to discuss social anthropology, eat her Danish pastries, and relish their warmth and verve. Sometimes guests joined us, such as Edmund Leach, who sat in a chair which collapsed, after which he brandished a chair leg from his spot on the floor. While I did not join the Ge project in Brazil, I took the structuralist influences, which resonated with Dutch anthropology, to Indonesian fieldwork and to thinking through an anthropological perspective. Even though my work was not related to his Ge project, David was kind enough to serve on my examining committee, write to me in the field, and express interest in what I did after I returned, as I excitedly and naively recounted what seemed new and original to me but failed to carry forward his own interests. Their civility and kindness I deeply appreciated, and, no doubt nostalgically, I mention it to others- most recently my mother's brother's granddaughter, who majored in anthropology at Harvard, thinking that someday she might need a welcoming human being. But it is especially graduate students who need decency in a world offering sparse rewards for what they do. David's public intellectual work, through Cultural Survival, the Millennium Series, and other work on advocacy and outreach stands as one of the great achievements by an anthropologist in what some of us term public interest anthropology. If one compares, say, Boas, one would ask whether he managed to create any organization such as Cultural Survival that outlived his own acts as a public intellectual. I have not participated directly in Cultural Survival other than to be a member, but I have been inspired by it in carrying out some related work, even though this initiative began after I had finished graduate work. I shall briefly illustrate, then, two kinds of work that owe a debt to David and to Pia. The first kind is academic, a social anthropological approach to the study of symbols and meaning. David arrived at a kind of lacunae within socio-cultural anthropology at Harvard and perhaps generally. The summer before he arrived, Clyde Kluckhohn, the anthropological founder of the Department of Social Relations, had died. Not long afterwards, Alfred Kroeber, co-author with Kluckhohn of an exploration of the concept of culture, died also. The death of these two leaders symbolized a dangerous period in US anthropology-the threat of an end to a humanistic and holistic conception of cultural anthropology that had been initiated by Boas with inspiration from German scholarship. However, a second major founder of Social Relations, Talcott Parsons, was still alive and active, together with his protege, Robert Bellah. Parsonsian theory provided a comprehensive (if not always comprehensible) framework for some of us in the social anthropology program within the Social Relations Department. Terry Turner, Thomas Kirsch, and I had been studying with Parsons in 1960, the Spring before Kluckhohn died and David arrived. …

Ezi Na Ulo: The Extended Family in Igbo Civilization

Ezi Na Ulo: The Extended Family in Igbo Civilization

Soviet Society, Social Structure, and Everyday Life: Major Frameworks Reconsidered

This is a good time to be a social historian. The linguistic turn has thoroughly discredited any attempt to see politics and culture as mere surface phenomena of deeper social transformations and thus freed social history from unnecessary reductionism. As a result of the sometimes harsh postmodern critique, historians are keenly aware of the complexities of the historical phenomena they deal with and the epistemological problems of their craft. It is time to move beyond these criticisms and reconstruct the project of writing a history of society. (1) Such a reconstruction of social history would see the linguistic turn as a constructive critique of older approaches, rather than as an all-encompassing paradigm shift. (2) One major effect of the critique of social history on our own field is a reluctance to theorize social structure and social stratification in the Soviet context. (3) By the mid- 990s, even labor historians felt compelled to theorize as an imagined community rather than as an objective structure of differentiated access to life chances. (4) Where class is encountered, it is deconstructed as a category of engineering. (5) It is as if the critique of vulgar Marxist class analysis (with all its assumptions about base and superstructure, historical progress, and consciousness) has de-legitimized the study of stratification per se. (6) It may be time to remember that the major classical theorist of social hierarchy was not Karl Marx, but Max Weber. (7) A second major effect is that the study of was replaced with the study of life. (8) In what amounts to a social history with the structure left out, historians focus on everyday practices rather than on large-scale structures such as classes or society at large, as the social history had done. The one over-arching structure left in such analyses is the state. Not only in the cities, but even in the under-governed countryside, Sheila Fitzpatrick, for example, focuses on interactions with the as the essence of the Soviet everyday. (9) Similarly, for Stephen Kotkin the grand strategies of the state define the field of action in which the little tactics of the habitat play out. (10) It is as if the everyday has replaced in the old dichotomy of vs. society which informed much of social history in the Soviet context. Again, it might be time to remember one of the major propositions of classical sociology: that the is only one element of the larger social organization that forms the context for everyday life and is in turn reproduced by it. (11) The goal of this article is to recover some of these insights of classical sociology in order to reconstruct a theoretical framework for a history of Soviet society. Rather than develop one coherent theoretical model, this article explores the general conceptual frames that lie at the base of several attempts to think about society and everyday life in the Soviet context. I start with the too often neglected Harvard Interview Project, which is most directly influenced by classical sociology. I contend that a re-appropriation of the general outlook of this approach is an essential step in a reconstruction of a history of Soviet society. I then contrast the Harvard Project's conceptual approach with several major alternatives: the political economy of socialism, social history in a state/society framework, and the history of everyday life a la Kotkin. Rather than replacing the conceptual work of Alex Inkeles, Raymond Bauer, and Clyde Kluckhohn, I argue that these approaches add specific complications to the original framework. Rather than stressing shifts between generations of researchers, this article thus assumes that different approaches have developed different aspects of a larger whole. Instead of stressing the differences between successive paradigms, I suggest we think of the historiographical development as the unfolding of a larger research agenda: the attempt to understand the socio-cultural complexity of Soviet society. …

A PERSONAL HOMENAJE TO PHIL WEIGAND

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale was “the” place to be for anyone interested in North or West Mexican studies. J. Charles Kelley, Carroll “Cal” Riley, Campbell Pennington, and Basil Hedrick constituted the cadre of scholars who specialized in the region but also served as mentors and models for what anthropological archaeology could be, even in the pre-Binfordian days. Walter Taylor also was there as an icon of theoretical archaeology. All of these scholars not only believed but also demonstrated that the subdisciplines of anthropology were intimately connected. To pursue one perspective to the exclusion of the other subdisciplines was deemed artificially limiting. Into this milieu came Lewis and Sally Binford during the summers of 1962 and 1963, working on the Carlyle Reservoir project in southern Illinois, which included excavations at Hatchery West, Toothsome, and Galley Pond. At about the same time, they began publishing archaeological theory and methodology that revolutionized the discipline. Only Lew and Sally can say how their time in Carbondale shaped their perspectives but, for me, I'd like to think that the Carbondale experience positively influenced their interdisciplinary work. I well remember discussions with Kelley regarding the new archaeology that he learned under Clyde Kluckhohn at Harvard before and during WWII, in comparison to the other “new” archaeology championed by the Binfords. Riley, Pennington, and Hedrick provided students with opportunities to integrate the archaeological perspective with the ethnographic and historical in material culture studies. The graduate students, including Weigand, Joe Mountjoy, and others, kept the discussion alive.

How They See Me vs. How I See Them: The Ethnographic Self and the Personal Self

The nature of the relationship between the researcher and the researched is critical to understanding the nature of the research as a whole. To be sure, the form that a particular ethnography takes emerges in discourse. An ethnographic interview, for instance, is a highly personal encounter that is shaped by the interpersonal exchange between the ethnographer and the informant. The speaker will only reveal what he or she wants the researcher to know. Therefore, the quality and depth of the relationship between the two individuals determines what will be said. Usually, the longer and more amiable the relationship, the richer and more consistent is the final product.1 Even if narrators answer a prepared set of questions, how they respond depends entirely on the level of rapport. As Clyde Kluckhohn stated: "No two researchers will ever see 'the same' culture in identical terms any more than one can step twice into the same river" (1959:254 cited in Pandey 1972:335). Strangely, despite all of the uproar surrounding the "crisis of representation" (Marcus and Fischer 1986) and all of the literature spawned as a result, there has been little more done than just talking about and around it. Countless books and articles are filled with well-intentioned theoretical pontifications, but only a small percentage of these are field-tested. [End Page 105] Methodological rigor—or honesty—has not yet come to fruition. Instead, it appears that most scholars are content to continue practicing an academic sleight-of-hand. If there is indeed such a "crisis" of representation, it seems to me that the obvious solution is to disclose the ways and manner in which the representation takes place. Although revealing how texts are constructed may spoil the aura of inviolability, it also lends credibility to the research. The only honest alternative is to acknowledge our particular role in the ethnographic process. What I am advocating here, of course, is reflexivity. According to Jay Ruby, to be reflexive "is to insist that anthropologists systematically and rigorously reveal their methodology and themselves as the instrument of data generation" (1980:153). More specifically, it is to be accountable to the three components of the communicative process: producer, process, and product (Ruby, 1980:157). While all ethnographies focus on the last, very little is explicitly mentioned about the first two. The Ethnographic Self and the Personal Self In his essay "The Ethnographic Self and the Personal Self," Edward M. Bruner calls the tendency for ethnographers to segment one from the other an exercise in futility: "The idea of a scientific, supposedly objective, ethnographic report that left the individual observer out of the account is not only a cliché, it is an impossibility. Every ethnographer inevitably leaves traces in the text" (1993:2). Ethnographers generally keep anything of a personal nature out of the final manuscript as a protective mechanism for fear of compromising scientific integrity. However, according to Bruner, to divorce the personal from the ethnographic is to create a false dichotomy because data are not independent of how they were acquired (Bruner, 1993:4). Thus, in this next section, I expose how my personal self has irrevocably influenced my ethnographic self. This article is based upon my experiences conducting research among members of the Benally2 family, a matrilineal network of clan related kin. In support of my doctoral dissertation in anthropology, I spent three years doing fieldwork on the Navajo reservation where I investigated the crucial role television plays in the formation and contestation of social and cultural identities. However, this anthropological relationship was preceded by a personal relationship with the Benallys that spanned over a decade. There is an old joke that a typical Navajo family consists of a mother, father, children, some sheep, and an anthropologist. I suppose this is true in [End Page 106] my case as well, but I must add that I was...

Russkie uchenye-emigranty (G.V. Vernadskii, M.M. Karpovich, M.T. Florinskii) i stanovlenie rusistiki v SShA, and: "Garvardskii Proekt" (review)

Reviewed by: Russkie uchenye-emigranty (G. V. Vernadskii, M. M. Karpovich, M. T. Florinskii) i stanovlenie rusistiki v SShA, and: “Garvardskii Proekt” Richard Pipes Nikolai Nikolaevich Bolkhovitinov . Russkie uchenye-emigranty (G. V. Vernadskii, M. M. Karpovich, M. T. Florinskii) i stanovlenie rusistiki v SShA [Russian Scholarly Emigrants (G. V. Vernadsky, M. M. Karpovich, M. T. Florinsky) and the Rise of Russian Studies in the United States]. 140 pp. Moscow: Rosspen, 2005. ISBN 582430162. Evgenii Vladimirovich Kodin . “Garvardskii Proekt” [The Harvard Project]. 207 pp. Moscow: Rosspen, 2003. ISBN 5824303851. These two slender volumes have one feature in common: they both deal with some aspects of American–Russian relations. In all other respects, they are vastly different: different in subject matter and quality. Kodin's volume, though published in 2003, breathes the air of the Cold War and could have been written by a Soviet propagandist. Its author is identified as the rector of the Smolensk Pedagogical Institute. By contrast, the work of Bolkhovitinov, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, is emphatically post-Soviet in its striving for objectivity and in its sympathetic understanding of the United States. The "Harvard Project" in the title of Kodin's book refers to the Émigré Interview Project launched in 1950–51 by the newly formed Russian Research Center and funded by the U.S. Air Force. It was overseen by the center's director, Clyde Kluckhohn, an anthropologist, and carried out under the direction of two sociologists, Alex Inkeles and Raymond Bauer. The three brought out in 1956 a volume under the title How the Soviet System Works, which summarized the findings of the project.1 Like the Russian Research Center itself, this endeavor had as its mission, by the application of sociological methods, to gain an understanding of the Soviet Union, which by this time had emerged as a dangerous enemy. Given the determined effort by Moscow to prevent Westerners from gaining access to the country and the unprecedented harshness of its censorship, which imposed absolute uniformity on public opinion, it seemed essential to find [End Page 383] some means of penetrating the wall that Stalin had constructed around his country and learn what the regime was really like. Was it effective? Was it popular? Was it stable? The means chosen to answer these questions were in-depth interviews of several thousand of the 250,000 Soviet refugees stranded in the West after the war. Obviously, since they had refused repatriation, these war refugees could not be regarded as objective witnesses, and extreme care had to be taken to filter out personal grudges and prejudices. The results have well stood the test of time. Kodin is fair in presenting these results but rigidly partisan in describing the Harvard Project itself. If one is to believe him, the Cold War was started by J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy. Referring to an opinionated 1990 UCLA doctoral dissertation by one Charles Thomas O'Connell on Soviet Studies at Harvard, he describes the project as a "socio-psychological study of the Soviet Union for the planned operation of the Air Force to subject the USSR to atomic bombardment." According to Kodin, Harvard of the 1950s was a hotbed of anti-communist hysteria. The results of the interviews contradict Kodin's premise that the entire Harvard Project was inspired by anti-Sovietism, for they challenged the prevalent belief that the USSR was loathed by its citizens and ready to explode. They revealed that only 5 percent of the respondents wanted to overthrow the communist regime, and that a similar number, consisting mostly of apparatchiks and military, were loyal to it. The great majority accepted the regime as a given and felt pride in its great-power status. The peasants were most hostile to it, and the young most devoted. The majority of the refugees were identified as socialists: only 14 percent favored capitalism. A major conclusion of the study, cited by Kodin, was thus summarized by the participants in the project: One of the things which the project staff has found most striking and challenging is the relatively low rate of active disaffection from the underlying ideas of the Soviet system as a way of...

Reflexivity Redux: A Pithy Polemic on "Positionality"

It is now taken for granted that a good ethnography should be reflexive. But what exactly does that mean? Most basically, describes the capacity of any system of signification, including a human being-an anthropologist-to turn back upon or to mirror itself. Twenty years ago, Jay Ruby's edited volume, A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology (1982), confirmed the arrival of in our discipline, although the concept itself was not entirely novel. In their jointly authored introduction, Ruby and Barbara Myerhoff recounted the ancient history of reflexive thinking, citing the case of stories about storytellers telling stories, and drew attention to some of the early experiments in reflexive approaches to ethnography, such as Elenore Smith Bowen's Return to Laughter (1954)1 and Gerald Berreman's Behind Many Masks (1962). Twenty years ago, was proposed as a corrective to a mode of ethnographic writing in which factual material was presented by an omniscient yet invisible author-narrator whose methods of fieldwork and data collecting were not always manifest, and who did not address the effect of her or his presence on others, much less the various effects that others may have had on her or him. Twenty years ago, there were no established conventions for writing a single manuscript reflexively, as opposed to a factual ethnography followed by a more diary-like confessional text. Since then, many modes of reflexive writing have been explored and reflexive lexicons introduced. Twenty years ago, it may have been premature to question the excesses of the nascent concept of reflexive anthropology, but now that reflexivity is a commonplace, it is time to revisit the concept and to initiate a critical but hopefully salutary appraisal of its many uses and guises, beginning with a consideration of the relationship between reflexive thinking and mirroring. What follows are some informally presented thoughts, or talking points, about and its conceptual offshoots provoked and quickened over the year by ideas, insights, and concerns gleaned from a broad range of books and articles as well as from working with graduate students of anthropology.2 The word mirror-both the noun and the verb-was frequently encountered in anthropological circles, whether as part of a title or as a description of didactic technique, well before the publication of A Crack in the Mirror. In Clyde Kluckhohn's Mirror for Man (1949), anthropological inquiry was likened to a mirror held before us to allow and encourage a better understanding of ourselves through the study of others. However, a mirror is not an inert device and can be deployed to contain or control differences and oppositions. Thus, in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), written during WW2, Ruth Benedict's mirror rendered Japanese national character intelligible as American national character the other way around. In order to make America's most alien enemy appear more human, Benedict positioned Japanese and Americans as the mirror image of each other: [t]he arc of life in Japan is plotted in opposite fashion to that in the United States (Benedict 1946: 253-4; see Robertson 1998). However humane her anthropological motives, Benedict made getting to know Japan too easy, and the Japan she profiled was all too knowable, a legacy that Japan anthropologists continue to grapple with in different ways. The potential of mirrors to create the conditions for both solipsism and reification should be obvious. Moreover, an anthropologist's metaphoric mirror can render her or him the de facto ethnographic subject, and turn the self into the fieldsite. Egocentrism is one of the pitfalls to avoid in exercising reflexivity. A laudable theory about epistemology, is also a method for conducting fieldwork and constructing ethnographies. A reflexive anthropologist intentionally or self-consciously shares (whether in agreement or disagreement) with her or his audiences the underlying assumptions that occasion a set of questions. …

From Cain and Abel to Esau and Jacob

FROM CAIN AND ABEL TO ESAU AND JACOB Angel Barahona UniversidadComplutense, Madrid The theme of twins or of enemy brothers is one which fascinates anthropologists owing to its frequency, the beauty of its mythopoetic settings, and its social significance. The theme always appears in relation to fratricidal violence, and is always linked to myths offoundation or origin. Clyde Kluckhohn in his book about brothers "born in immediate sequence" reminds us that the death of one of them brings with it a momentary peace, the foundation ofa new social order. Thus it is not the fact ofbeing twins, or antagonistic brotherhood per se which is the key to the stories, but violence: Twins are impure in the same way that a warrior steeped in carnage is impure, or an incestuous couple, or a menstruating woman. All forms of violence lead back to violence. We overlook this fact because the primitive concept of a link between the loss ofdistinctions and violence is strange to us; butwe need only consider the calamities primitive people associate with twins to perceive the logic of this concept. Deadly epidemics can result from contact with twins, as can mysterious illnesses mat cause sterility in women and animals. Even more significant to us is the role oftwins in provoking discord among neighbors, a fatal collapse of ritual, the transgression of interdictions—in sort, their part in instigating asacrificial crisis....Behindthe image oftwins lurks the baleful aspectofthesacred, perceived as a disparate but formidableunified force. (Girard 1977, 58) All the mythological, literaryand historical accounts oftwinswhichwe have involve bloody conflict: Eteocles and Polyneices, Romulus and Remus, Richard the Lion Heart and John Lackland, and so on. To a 2 Angel Barahona surprising extent even the development of the different stories is similar. When Polynices departs from Thebes leaving his sister there, hoping to reign through her, he takes with him his fraternal conflict as if it were an attribute of his being. Wherever he goes his brother appears to him, and will oppose him to the death. When an oracle announced to Adrastrus that his two daughters would marry, respectively, a lion and a wild boar, animals which are different in their appearance but identical in their violence, it was presaging fraternal conflict. In Euripides' The Suppliant Women, the king tells how he came upon his sons-in-law. At his door, one night, Polynices and Tideus, both reduced to poverty, were quarreling furiously over possession ofa camp bed. Their brotherhood by virtue ofmarriage with two sisters brings them within the fraternalcategory, likeOedipus and Creon, orDionysus and Pentheus, rival cousins. A plot of land or a kingdom, a woman or an object, the status of firstborn or an unjust inheritance, all give pretexts for conflict. We cannot avoid conflict when desires converge on the same object. It is difficult for the brothers to be aware of their symmetry, their reciprocity, the intense violence which is hidden behind their brotherhood,—an awareness which might spare them their confrontations—because they never occupy the same positions atthe same time. The reciprocity is real, but it is the sum of non-reciprocal moments. The antagonists occupy the same positions in time, but successively, not simultaneously. The same acts and the same sentiments appear in cyclical alternation, but the brothers cannot directly observe their own reciprocity, and thus their identical nature, because they seem to be differentiated by the role which each one plays. Cain and Abel There are many stories ofconfrontations between brothers in Scripture, including those related to the rights of the first born. From Genesis 4,5 onwards we see how these are an interminable source ofconflicts. The first example, Cain and Abel: "And the LORD had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell" anticipates the themes ofthe blessing and the looking at the face. And we can observe the games of symmetry with the language: "the LORD had regard for Abel and his offering, but forCain and his offering he had no regard." Cain and Abel are presented as an agriculturalist and as a shepherd respectively, two forms ofsocial life. In this quarrel...

The Harvard study of values: mirror for postwar anthropology.

In 1949, social scientists at Harvard University began a long-range, multidisciplinary research project called the Comparative Study of Values in Five Cultures. The topic of values had been hotly debated since the 1920s, a debate that was renewed with vigor in the postwar period. When Clyde Kluckhohn, an anthropologist well known for his work among the Navajos, designed the Values Study research, he thus focused on a topic of much interest. This essay describes how this little-known project had roots in the debate on values and cut a trajectory through a quickly changing intellectual environment.

A world from brave to new: Talcott Parsons and the war effort at Harvard University.

This article argues that for Parsons and some of his colleagues at Harvard, the Second World War and the post-war period provided a context in which their work contributed to the transformation from totalitarianism to democracy in Central Europe (especially Germany) and Japan. The various agendas of Parsons' work are shown, supplemented by that of three of his colleagues with whom he collaborated (Gordon W. Allport, Carl J. Friedrich, Clyde Kluckhohn). The immediate effect of this work, for Parsons, however, meant frustration rather than fame, and his eventual reputation, I maintain, came unexpectedly with the third of his three attempts in the immediate post-war period to sum up what he believed were crucial insights that the Second World War had yielded concerning the ways in which sociology could contribute to the analytical understanding of democracy. The significance of this work is that it was both political and scientific. Because of the world situation of the 1940s, when the Holocaust in Germany was the nadir of civilization, Parsons believed that social science could contribute to the cause of making the world safe for future democracy. In the 1940s, this future depended on brave citizens, or such might have been Parsons' worldview. Targets envisaged for the 1950s, then, were community and citizenship in the newly democratic societies such as (West) Germany, the land that defeated Nazism.

Ideas of culture: Romanian para-anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century

Two scholars—outsiders to anthropology in a strictly disciplinary sense—provide a comparison with their contemporaries, Ruth Benedict, Alfred Kroeber, Clyde Kluckhohn, and others who formulated ideas of culture. Anthropogeographer Simion Mehedinţi devised an ecological definition and analysis of the concept in 1928. Poet and philosopher Lucian Blaga (1895–1961) analyzed Romanian folk culture by means of a “stylistic matrix” and elaborated a metaphysical definition of culture. The two figures' systematic thinking, growing out of European traditions, underlines the direction that anthropologists elsewhere chose to take the study of human culture. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.