Euro-American Societies Research Articles

The Place of Complexity

This article is an attempt to understand the increasing profile of complexity theory as a geography of dissemination. In the first part I suggest that complexity theory, itself a rhetorical hybrid, takes on new meanings as it circulates in and through a number of actor-networks and, specifically, global science, global business and global New Age. As complexity theory circulates in these networks, so it encounters new conditions, which generate new hybrid theoretical forms. In the second part of the article, I consider how complexity theory might be interpreted as the emergence of a new structure of feeling in Euro-American societies, which frames the future as open and full of productivity. The conclusion offers some words of warning.

Everything Is Tottering

Although the demise of our reliance on absolute truth at times may seem threatening, it actually is an opportunity to do exciting new explorations in scholarly methodology and research. BuddhistChristian dialogue is at the cutting edge of that constructive work. In 1896 Ernst Troeltsch attended a lecture by Jules Kaftan. He disagreed with Kaftan's presentation, and, in the question and answer period that followed, legend has it that he leaped to the platform and announced to those gathered, Ladies and Gentlemen, everything is tottering.1 The specific tottering to which Troeltsch referred was the collapse of the constellation of absolute presuppositions that supported the notion that, of all the religions in the world, Christianity was singular in its salvific power. Although Troeltsch's challenge to Christianity was unique, the late nineteenth century was peppered with approaches that challenged time-honored constellations of thought. Darwin challenged how human beings understood themselves in the order of creation. Freud and Jung introduced a new way to understand human motivations. Marx attacked the political and economic theories that had sustained the wealthy and powerful for centuries. Intellectual positions such as these are representative of how ideas change from one era to the next. They are part of the way human understanding edges forward. They present human beings with the necessity to reevaluate the usual and thus encourage the encompassing of new ideas. They provide intriguing solutions to old problems, suggesting novel organizing principles that gradually become part of the cognitive milieu. Human beings react best to change when it proceeds at a slow enough pace that they can accommodate it. Change does not come in neatly packaged bundles, however, and the experience of the twentieth century is no exception. Two world wars (plus significant but less encompassing conflicts, such as Korea, Vietnam, El Salvador, several African nations, Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia), combined with countless technological advances and the space program, ushered in a time of unprecedented change. Structures of thought we had at one time considered essential, if not divinely ordained, have been Buddhist-Christian Studies 18 (1998). ? by University of Hawai'i Press. All rights reserved. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.111 on Tue, 09 Aug 2016 06:19:37 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms SHARON PEEBLES BURCH placed into question. I understand us to have lost nothing less than a concept of God that knit together Euro-American society as a relatively cohesive whole. I am not referring to a concept of God that can be argued intellectually, or tinkered with without penalty. I mean a thoroughgoing loss of the absolute presuppositions on which our testing of reality was based. Absolute presuppositions are not wholly available to human consciousness. We learn them, but we learn them from how our language is structured, and from the pattern of cognition represented by news announcements, comic strips, soap operas, and sports events. They are part of the expectations that are passed on, both verbally and tacitly, as we are socialized. Thus they have a tensile strength that knits our expectations into a

Indigenous Peoples' Claims to Cultural Property: A Legal Perspective

This essay examines the legal dimensions of indigenous peoples' claims to cultural property. Law and anthropology often address issues of cultural property in different ways. Anthropologists seek to understand cultural property within the context of the indigenous cultures themselves, while lawyers attempt to translate concepts of indigenous property into the language of Euroamerican law. Indigenous peoples' claims to cultural property provide a compelling example of the need for new legal relationships to be articulated between Indian nations and Euroamerican society.

Women and nurture in industrial societies.

To address the subject of women and nutrition, it is necessary to work across disciplines. There is a long tradition of nutritionists and anthropologists working together in the United States, thanks to the pioneering work of Margaret Mead in this area. In Britain, the collaboration began even earlier with Audrey Richards (1932) in the 1930s. This collaboration continues today in the Economic and Social Research Council’s research programme on the Nation’s Diet: the Social Science of Food Choice, directed by Professor Anne Murcott. Unfortunately, in Canada it never really began. The following are some reasons why collaboration between anthropologists and nutritionists is valuable: 1. while the immediate causes of hunger and malnutrition may be related to an inadequate intake of nutrients, the basic underlying causes of hunger are rooted in the cultural system; 2. nutrition programmes and interventions are often assumed to be transportable crossculturally. This is not so. Awareness of cultural differences suggests how programmes may be adapted to fit different cultural contexts; 3. what is considered ‘edible’ is culturally determined. Nutritionists need to know how food and drink are defined and categorized in the local language before undertaking any food-intake data collection; 4. nutritional methods such as dietary surveys and anthropometric assessment are inadequate for explaining reasons behind food selection or eating patterns; 5. sample selection and targeting of at-risk populations is more effective when the nutritionist has knowledge of intra-cultural diversity within a given population; 6. both the media and policy makers can use in-depth case studies derived from anthropological fieldwork to communicate with the public about food and hunger issues; 7. knowledge of cultural factors allows for the development of culturally-appropriate messages regarding nutrition and food; 8. cultural analysis shows how food issues are interconnected with other domains such as agriculture or health; this facilitates integrating nutrition programmes with other programmes. Nutritionists are professionals in a field with well-defined methods for evaluating nutritional status and dietary adequacy. It is unrealistic to expect nutritionists to have the motivation, need, or opportunity to study anthropology. However, nutritionists and anthropologists working together make powerful and effective teams. When we discuss topics such as women and nutrition, this collaboration is essential. Nutritionists talk about nutrients, and both nutritionists and anthropologists talk about food and the relationship between food and health. But without careful consideration of the topics of power and gender, we may well be talking to ourselves, and not affecting the context within which women live, nurture others, and eat. The present paper addresses the relationship between women in industrial societies, and nurture, the capacity to nourish and provide food for others. I refer generally to EuroAmerican societies dependent on industrial food systems. Such food systems provide a wide variety of highly-processed foods often produced at a distance from the consumer

Native American art and the New York avant-garde: a history of cultural primitivism

Avant-garde art between 1910 and 1950 is well known for its use of primitive imagery, often borrowed from traditional cultures in Africa and Oceania. Less recognized, however, is the use United States artists made of Native American art, myth, and ritual to craft a specifically American Modernist art. In this groundbreaking study, W. Jackson Rushing comprehensively explores the process by which Native American iconography was appropriated, transformed, and embodied in American avant-garde art of the Modernist period. Writing from the dual perspectives of cultural and art history, Rushing shows how national exhibitions of Native American art influenced such artists, critics, and patrons as Marsden Hartley, John Sloan, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Robert Henri, John Marin, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, and especially Jackson Pollock, whose legendary drip paintings he convincingly links with the curative sand paintings of the Navajo. He traces the avant-garde adoption of Native American cultural forms to anxiety over industrialism and urbanism, post-World War I return to roots nationalism, the New Deal search for American strengths and values, and the notion of the dark Jungian unconscious current in the 1940s. Through its interdisciplinary approach, this book underscores the fact that even abstract art springs from specific cultural and political motivations and sources. Its message is especially timely, for Euro-American society is once again turning to Native American cultures for lessons on how to integrate our lives with the land, with tradition, and with the sacred.

The Cup of Gyptis: Rethinking the Colonial Encounter in Early-Iron-Age Western Europe and the Relevanceof World-Systems Models

AbstractA critical evaluation of the appropriateness of traditional 'Hellenization' and recently popular 'world-systems' interpretive perspectives on the colonial encounter in Iron Age western Europe is offered. These approaches are shown to have some common flaws stemming from shared implicit premises resulting from a profoundly embedded cultural legacy of hegemonic Helleno-centrism that permeates interpretive discourse. This legacy is a result of the construction during the Renaissance of a European identity with ancestral roots in ancient Greece and Rome and the consequent importance of these classical cultures to the definition of 'cultural capital' in modem Euro-American society. Additionally, world-systems models have problematic tendencies toward mechanistic structural over-determination and reductionism. An alternative interpretive strategy, grounded in the anthropology of consumption and the historical anthropology of colonialism, is applied to the initial phase of the colonial encounter during t...

Fire-Water in the Frontier Romance: James Fenimore Cooper and "Indian Nature"

There is something painful in reflection that these people were once numerous, and that by our approach they have been reduced to a few. It is natural that we should feel averse to admission that true causes of their decline are to be found among us. Hence we have sought for seat of disease among them ...(1) Indiana Senator John Tipton, defending before Senate in 1838 an appropriations bill augumenting federal support for those Americans who had recently been removed to Territory, identified one of major features of nineteenth-century Euro-American discussions of intercultural relations in America. Many nineteenth-century Euro-Americans accepted without hesitation distinction between savagism and as an explanation for Americans' perceived inabilities to assimilate neatly into Euro-American society.(2) The concept of savagism was derived from a model of social evolution that situated barbarous Americans below civilized Euro-Americans, characterizing Americans according to their apparent cultural deficits. Nineteenth-century debates concerning interaction between Euro-Americans and Americans thus often focused upon nature; presumed inferiority of nature became a central rationale for continued Euro-American migration westward and consequent dispossession of American lands.(3) Since most nineteenth-century Euro-Americans could conceive of possibilities only of civilization or extinction for Americans, Euro-American visions of Americans' future were often determined in large part by how Americans were perceived to react to Euro-American presence.(4) As Tipton noted, Euro-Americans tended to interpret these reactions more for what they were understood to reveal about nature than what they might suggest about Euro-American society. Some of most durable stereotypes regarding nature have involved alcohol; the drunken has long been a distinct type in Euro-American culture. Alcohol undoubtedly has had a profound impact upon American peoples; in his American Indian Holocaust and Survival, Russell Thornton asserts that many native societies were virtually destroyed by quest for alcohol.(5) Seeking an accurate understanding of American behaviors, modern anthropologists have proposed a variety of theories. Indeed, diversity of plausible explanations has led some anthropologists to conclude that any assumption that there is (or was) such a discrete phenomenon as Native American drinking as opposed to various patterns of among different American communities--patterns which may or may not be related--may very well itself constitute stereotypical thinking.(6) Most nineteenth-century Euro-Americans, however, were not so cautious in their speculations concerning alcohol and Americans. From first years of Euro-American colonization in America, American had been considered such a hazard that numerous laws were passed that sought to curb what became known as Indian liquor trade.(7) An 1832 federal regulation declared that No ardent spirits shall be hereafter introduced, under any pretence, into Indian country, beginning of an official federal prohibition of American that would last until 1952.(8) However, despite strict federal laws reports still proliferated of whiskey traders selling liquor throughout American communities. Euro-American authorities could not effectively enforce laws prohibiting such trade. In fact, beliefs, popular among Euro-Americans, that alcohol was fast destroying Americans and that liquor trade could not effectively be stopped were frequently used to fuel support for removal, most far-reaching federal policy promulgated concerning Americans in first half of nineteenth century. …

Race, Gender, and Social Control: Voices of Imprisoned Native American and White Women

There is a dearth of empirical data on incarcerated females. Especially neglected in the literature are imprisoned women of color, who represent 60% of the total population of women incarcerated in state prisons (Greenfeld & Minor-Harper, 1991). Whereas imprisoned women of color have been ignored in sociological studies of female criminality (Lewis, 1981; Mann, 1984), the subject of imprisoned Native American women is virtually an unexplored area. There is little systematic research on how women experience prison. The majority of studies on women in prison refer to women as a homogeneous group and ignore the interaction of race, gender, and class. There is scant recognition of special problems women of color may face while incarcerated, thus there is an underlying assumption that all women are equally afflicted. I conducted the first study of imprisoned Native American women in 1990-1991 (Ross, 1992). The purpose of this study was to give voice to these subgroups of women by describing and defining their experiences as prisoners. One way in which imprisoned women can resist oppression and facilitate social change is by telling their own stories. In the words of bell hooks (1989, p. 43), oppressed people resist identifying themselves as subjects, by defining their reality, shaping their new identity, naming their history, telling their story. Incarcerated women need to tell their own stories. In this study, I let the women speak for themselves. Furthermore, I am interested in systems of oppression and issues of equality in Euro-American society. Because our society is stratified by race, class, and gender, different categories of people experience life in unequal ways. Racism, classism, and sexism exist outside prison in Euro-American society. I was interested in how they functioned within a state prison, and how they affected the experiences of incarcerated Native American and white women. The data suggested that experiences of women incarcerated in Montana's Women's Correc17

Ethnic Cleansing, Homestyle

It is a commonplace that all art tells more about the artist and the era in which he or she lives than about the subject or the period depicted. Nowhere is this more true than in popular entertainment forms. This article will examine images of the continent's indigenous peoples in the American musical, both stage and motion picture, from its inception to the present. In the process, it will examine both positive portrayals as well as the far more prevalent negative ones, reinforcing stereotypes acceptable to the dominant society. In discussing depiction of Natives in motion pictures. Vine Deloria, Jr. writes, Underneath all the conflicting images of the Indian, one fundamental truth emerges: the white man knows that he is alien and he knows that North America is and he will never let go of the image because he thinks by some clever manipulation he can achieve an authenticity which can never be his.1 As a result, in the popular imagination, real Indians cannot be permitted to survive into the 20th Century. Their very existence serves as a painful reminder of the illegitimacy of white claims to the continent. Indians must therefore be stereotyped, relegated to a fabulous 19th Century, an extinct breed, This is necessary if the myth of the frontier is to survive. In the musical, this is reflected in a form of ethnic cleansing, wherein Natives are either erased entirely from the landscape depicted or pushed to the periphery as stereotyped members of a vanishing race. In the collective American psyche, Euro-American pioneers conquered a vast, unsettled, primeval wilderness.2 They bent it to their plow and to their will. reality, however, is starkly different. Instead. European explorers and invaders discovered an inhabited land.3 Historian Francis Jennings puts it succinctly when he writes, The American land was more like a widow than a virgin. Europeans did not find wilderness here; rather ... they made one ... so-called settlement of America was a resettlement, a reoccupation of a land made waste by the diseases and demoralization introduced by the newcomers.4 Of course, Jennings fails to point out that a great many were simply slaughtered as well and that the land to which their mythology was intimately tied was stolen outright. Historian Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., an important analyst of the condition of 20th Century Natives, recapitulates two distinct stereotypes of American Indians in his book White Man's Both of these were inextricably bound up with White self-evaluations, describing Indians negatively in terms of what they were not or what they lacked in terms of Euro-American society. First is what might be called the Noble Savage or, for Berkhofer, the good Indian. These Indians lived in harmony with nature in a state of liberty, simplicity, and innocence. They were beautiful in physique and modest and regal in bearing. Brave in combat, they were tender and loyal in family and friendship relationships.5 Juxtaposed with this image is that of the bloodthirsty or bad Indian. Upon these Indians are heaped all the negative qualities of White society, many of them associated with sex. They are naked, lecherous, debauchers. They are lazy, deceitful, and treacherous.6 To Berkhofer's categories must be added a third, the stereotype of the ...real Indians cannot be permitted to survive into half-breed. An extension of the bad Indian image, half-breeds have no the 20th Century. Their very existence serves as redeeming virtues. They are neither White nor As such they are dea painful reminder of the illegitimacy of white generate products of miscegenation, distrusted by both cultures and fitting claims to the continent. in nowhere.

POST-MODERNISM AND THE CONSTRUCT OF THE DIVISIBLE SELF

Current Euro-American society is aware of a profusion of alternative modes of thinking and consciousness,derived from other cultures,as no other people or civilization has ever been.

Religious Studies: The Shaping of a Field and a Guide to Reference Resources

As with most modern academic disciplines, religious studies emerged in the latter part of the nineteenth century as a discrete area of inquiry. Prior to that time, most scholarly literature on religion had an apologetic purpose; that is, it was designed to promote the beliefs and practices of a particular religion or reli gious style. Many writers took as their task advancing religious faith and assumed that readers were members of religious groups espousing their own creeds or dogmas. Few were interested in ! examining the phenomenon of reli gion itself or the ways in which religion and culture were intertwined in virtually every human society. In Euro-American society, much writ ing on religion took for granted the superiority of the Christian or per haps the Western biblical tradition, and when other religious traditions came under scrutiny and were con trasted with Christianity especially, they were generally seen as inferior and somehow less worthy. In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, some scholars began to realize that religious expression and experience cut across cultural lines, that in their own context all religions had internal integrity, and that religion manifested itself in simi lar patterns wherever it occurred. Most scholars agreed that human beings in all places and all times sought to endow their experience with meaning and that the pro cess of doing so was the basic religious enterprise. Such realization gave birth to the modern academic study of religion or the discipline of religious studies. This essay will first look at religion or religious studies as an academic discipline by identifying selected key figures whose theories and interpretations continue to shape the field of religious studies. Then it will briefly annotate selected reference works that provide basic information about

Black Yankees: The Development of an Afro-American Subculture in Eighteenth-Century New England

This book examines the development of an Afro-American subculture in eighteenth-century New England. Piersen concerns himself not with the machinery of slave control or the political and social disabilities of bondage, but with the processes of cultural change and creation from the black bondsman's point of view. What was it like to be an African immigrant in colonial New England? What attitudes and assumptions underlay the Afro-American response to Yankee culture? What does the development within the confines of a predominantly white and ethnocentric New England of an Afro-American folk culture in religion, public rituals, folk arts and crafts, social mores, and daily behavior say about the creation of American culture?On the face of it, the master class called the tunes and slaves danced the beat. Blacks who were taken into New England's bondage were clearly engulfed in a pervasive, narrow-minded Euro-American society that had no interest in fostering Afro-American autonomy. The New England experience was often cruel, and the numbers alone suggest it was among the most unequal of black/white cultural contacts in the New World. Nonetheless, despite the strictures of bondage, the black Yankees of eighteenth-century New England created a sustaining folk culture of their own.

In and out of the Labor Force: The Lummi Indians and the Development of the Commercial Salmon Fishery of North Puget Sound, 1880-1900

During the developmental phase of the commercial salmon fishery of Puget Sound the Lummi Indians were an important segment of the labor force, both as producers and processors. As the industry developed, however, the Lummi found themselves pushed aside. An attempt is made here to understand how this occurred. Dependency theory is used to discuss the Lummi in their capacity as an internal colony, politically and economically dependent on the dominant society. In i855 the Lummi were party to the Point Elliott Treaty with the United States federal government. Prior to and immediately after treaty negotiations, the Lummi were engaged in a traditional fishery that adequately met their subsistence needs. The traditional Lummi fishery persisted into the i88os despite attempts by the federal government to force the Lummi to become agriculturalists. In the early era of the commercial fishery, they were producing not only enough for their sustenance but a surplus for market. This article will examine the federal policies and economic relationships that affected Lummi use of the salmon resource during the late nineteenth century. It will be demonstrated that the change of patterns in the Lummi use of the resource and the concomitant changes in Lummi society can be seen as the direct result of the domination of the Lummi by the larger Euroamerican society. The Lummi are one of several groups speaking a Coast Salish language who lived on north Puget Sound1 and the Strait of Georgia on the Northwest Coast of North America. Suttles (195ia: 6) has referred to the speakers of the language as Salish, and that term has become conventional. Besides the Lummi, who resided on the San Juan Islands and adjacent mainland, the Straits Salish include the Semiahmoo, in the Boundary Bay, Drayton Harbor, Birch Bay area; the Saanich, on Ethnohistory 35:z (Spring I988). Copyright ? by the American Society for Ethnohistory. ccc 00I4-i8o /88/$ .50. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.111 on Tue, 09 Aug 2016 04:19:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Ethnohistory: The Unfinished Edifice

The development of ethnohistory is examined in the context of Euroamerican society. Its principal accomplishment to date has been to reveal the biases that have distorted Euroamerican views of native people from the sixteenth century until the present. In recent years, ethnohistory has benefited from historical studies of how Europeans perceived native Americans and from advances in paleodemography and the analysis of oral traditions. Further assistance can be expected from the development of comparative ethnology and more importantly from ethnosemantics. Despite these ad- vances, only as the marginalization of native Americans in modern society is overcome can Euroamerican ethnohistorians advance beyond critiques of their own society to realize their stated goal of studying native American history.

Change in American Indian World Views Illustrated by Oral Narratives and Contemporary Poetry

Unlike other ethnic groups, American Indians had little to celebrate during the bicentennial year in 1976. Other ethnic groups, with the exception of blacks and Mexican Americans, came to America to find a better way of life. In contrast, few American Indians have left this country in search of a better life elsewhere. Hence, being an oppressed minority in a society governed by Western thought and values, Indians can only lament the loss of their rights to live and govern their lives according to particular religious, cultural, and social values, for they have been forced to change world views and way of life under both the overt and covert pressures of Euroamerican society.

Biomedical Practice and Anthropological Theory: Frameworks and Directions

The exploration of medicine-Biomedicine---extends a new frontier in medical anthropology. Anthropologists have returned from abroad to follow trails blazed by sociological pioneers (55, 135). The anthropological venture of self-examination has encountered resistance from our medicine itself (136a) as well as from the anthropological community (142), even its medical division (78). Such resistance attests to the powers of as a sociocultural system and to the epistemological difficulties of reflexive anthropology, in which one's own society provides at once the perspective and the subject of one's examination. By the name we refer to the predominant medical theory and practice of Euro-American societies, a medicine widely disseminated throughout the world (191). Each of its many denominations, Western, Cosmopolitan, Modern, Scientific, Allopathic, and Biomedicine as well, captures ones of its characteristics, while misleading us in other ways. While may have its principal origins in Western civilization, and has even been a leading edge of modernism (117), it has incorporated and now penetrates other traditions as well (146, 191). Even though it is widespread, the exclusive erudition and catholicism connoted by Cosmopolitan (42a, 105a) is inaccurate. may have appeared more recently and changed more

Women, Work, War, and Family: Some Recent Works in Women's History. A Review Article

Reviewing a number of books in another field is a risky undertaking somewhat akin to fieldwork in another culture. The terrain seems familiar, but the natives' view of the landscape implies rather different systems of assumptions and meanings. I selected the books under review in the hope that they would demonstrate different methodological and conceptual approaches to the study of women in Euro-American society. I had hoped to be able to compare the works, but in writing this essay I find it most appropriate to look at each book separately and to ask some informed questions of these works for I am, unfortunately, ill-equipped to evaluate the specific historical data which the authors marshall for their arguments. I shall first examine three works which focus on American women (mainly in the nineteenth century) and then look at two books which focus on women in wartime situations.

Some Early Attempts to Modify Penile Erection in Horse and Human: An Historical Analysis

Between 1856 and 1919 Letters Patent were granted by the U.S. Patent Office for 49 antimasturbatory devices; 35 were designed for application to Equus caballus, while 14 were intended for Homo sapiens. Many of the devices relied upon a simple servomechanism (or feedback loop) in which the precurrent response of erection produced aversive stimulation and hence reflex detumescence. After analysis of the surprisingly modern principles involved, an attempt is made to relate the onset and cessation of patenting activities to more general cultural variables in Euro-American society.

The Metonymic Pole and Social Roles

Cognitive thinking uses key attributes to recognize phenomena. For both the Plains Cree and traditional Western (Euro-American) societies, the capacity for maternity is the key attribute for defining woman. This metonymic usage has stereotyped and restricted women's roles, specifically by preventing women from attaining the most prestigious healers' roles. Euro-American societies permitted females to become medical doctors only after the metonymic conceptualization was challenged by the modern legal definition of person.

SCHIZOPHRENIA AMONG PRIMITIVES

A survey of the literature reveals that the present state of our knowledge of the schizophrenic reaction in non-literate societies is as inadequate as our knowledge of comparative psychopathology in general. This inadequacy becomes apparent when one considers what should be known about the psychopathologies of a wide range of societies. Ideally, answers to the following questions would seem to be called for in the case of each society investigated. (1) What mental disorders are found, and how do the symptom pictures differ from, or resemble those of Euro-American society? (2) To what extent are psychopathological behaviors defined as such in terms of Euro-American values, to what extent are they defined relative to the values of the culture investigated, and to what extent do they represent deviations from universal social norms (e. g. mutism, extreme negativism, homicidal mania, etc.)? (3) Which personality and temperament types enjoy the greater opportunities for expression, for drive and wish fulfillment, and in what social spheres do these opportunities exist? (4) What are the adjustment hazards figuring in the histories of individuals ultimately declared abnormal? How are they related to the social organization on the one hand, and to the biology of the individual on the other; and in what ways do they resemble or differ from the adjustment problems of the mentally ill in various Euro-American groups? (5) To what extent do the psychotic productions— language, thought and other behavior in the psychosis—reflect inter- and intra-institutional conflicts; and to what extent do they reflect conflict between social and individual expectations? (6) In what ways may the incidence of mental disorder in the society in question be said to be associated with the "advance" of material culture and civilization? The students of schizophrenia among primitives have devoted themselves almost exclusively to the question, Where is schizophrenia found? Seligman and Fans report an absence of the disorder in societies which remain largely isolated from white influences, but one may not attach great importance to their findings inasmuch as the data are limited, and methodological assumptions and research operations are veiled and suspect. Yet, in view of the fact that wherever schizophrenia has been reported the society in question has been in process of acculturation, a sociological hypothesis involving the concepts of culture conflict, marginality and shock appears tenable. Laubscher, Hummer, Dhunjiboy, Shaw, Kraepelin, Lopez, and Mend found schizophrenia among peoples who, though frequently classed as primitive—even by the investigators in some cases—are actually in the throes of acculturation. However, the rarity or absence of schizophrenia among truly primitive peoples generally has simply not been established, in spite of Devereux's overoptimistic conclusion that it has Moreover, it would seem that the definitive answers to the research questions previously formulated will come only from a body of facts that is at present almost wholly non-existent. That is to say, any satisfactory understanding of comparative psychopathology, either among primitive or civilized societies, must be predicated (1) on reliable diagnoses (and derived statistics of incidence) made by psychiatrists who are willing to honestly entertain sociological hypotheses; and (2) on the interpretation of detailed life histories by psychiatrically oriented sociologists, or preferably, by psychologists and sociologists in collaboration. Unfortunately, such knowledge remains as conspicuous by its absence today as it was seven years ago when Hallowell called attention to our need of it, and the task of the travelling field-worker is considerably complicated by wars and rumors of wars.