dialogue

These materials are made available at this site for the educational purposes of students enrolled at Anne Arundel Community College. They may be protected by U.S. Copyright law and should not be reproduced or transmitted electronically. One photocopy or printout may be made of each article for personal, educational use.

SICK SOCIETIES

AH societies are sick, but some are sicker than others, This paraphrase of Orwell's famous quip about the equality of animals calls.attention to the existence of traditional beliefs and practices that threaten human health and happiness more in some societies than in others. But it also indicates that there are some customs and social institutialns in all societies that compromise human well-being. Even populations tha t appear to be well- adapted to their environments maintain some beliefs or practices that unnecessarily imperil their well-being or, in some instances, their.survival. Populations the world over have not been well sewed by some of their beliefs such as, for example, those concerning witchcraft, the need for revenge, or male supremacy, and many of their tradkionral practices invoiving nutrition, heaIth care, and the treatment of chillrirem have been harmful as well, Slavery, infanticide, human sacrifice, torture, female genital mutilation, rape, homicide, feuding, suicide, and environmental pollution have sometimes been needlessly harmful to some or all members of a society and under some circumstances they can threaten social survivnl.

To Americans besieged by headlines and television reports concerning our endangered environment, homelessness, child abuse, the threat of drugs, ADS, or gang violence, the idea that some things people do may be harmful to themselves.and others wpl hardly seem controversiaE. Beliefs that Iead to anorexia nervosa or wife beating are likely to be seen as harmful, and beliefs favoring anti-Semitism or male supremacy are aIso likely to be seen as dangerous. Americans mny also believe that if surveys can rate various cities in the United States in terms of their 4crelative quality of life," the same could be dome for foreign cities and, for that matter, foreign countries. Many would surely be troubled by the! idea that the political systems of Iraq, HftlePs Germany, or the Khmer Rouge ia Cambodia were, or are, as good as those in, say Norway, Japnn, or Swiberland. And they would probably react with disbelief to the assertion that there is no -.=;. scientifiz - A- basis for evaluating J'

, another society" practice of genocide, judicial torture or human sacrifice, for example, , , except as the people in that society themselves evaluate these practices. Yet that is exact1

-t YI what the principle of cultural relativism asserts, and this principle continues to be widely ,

" and strongly held. I

So too is the belief that "primitive'' societies were far more harmonious than ,J-

societies caught up in the modern world. We know that human misery, fear, loneliness, pain, sickness, and premature death are typical of America's urban ghettos and its homeless people, South Africa's black townships, the starving villages of the Sudan, the sEarms of Brazil, andl the was-ravaged lands of Central America or the Middle East. We also know that people in places such as these are the hapless victims of sach forces as governmental neglcct; racism; corruption; ethnic, religious and political strife; and economic exploitation, among other kinds of social, cultural, and environment~l pressures. However, many prominent scholars believe &bat this sod of lnaise~y is not natural to the E

human condition, that people in smaller, more homogeneous "folk" societies have historically lived in greater harmony and happiness, and that many small popu8ations continue to do so today. The belief that primitive societies are more harmonious than modern ones, that savages are noble, and that life in the past was more idyElic than life today is not only reflected in the motion pictures and novels of our popular culture (the., ,

:I film Dmces w i t Wolves comes immediately to mind), it is deeply ingrained in scholarIy li-I discourse as well.

This "community-lost'' way of reconstructing history is founded in the romantic bdief that the malaise and mayhem of the modern world is not the natural human - condition. Instead, human misery is thought to be the product of pervasive social disorganization, divisive ethnic or religious diversity, class conflict, or competing interests that plague large societies, particuIwrly nation states. "because smaller and simpler societies, on the other hand, developed their cultures in response to the demands of their immediate and stable environments, their ways of life must have produced far greater harmony and happiness for their populations. /%bin Fox, for emmpIe, vividly described the upper Paleolithic environment of big-gam$ hunters as one in which Y . . there was a harmony of our evolved attributes ns a species, including our intelligence, our imagination, our violence (and hence our violent imagination), our reason and our passions-a harmony that has been ~lost."(~f-a small society is found that lacks harmony, many social scientists conclude that this condition must be the result of the disorganizing effects of culture contact, particularly urbanization. This idea, like cultural relativism, has been deeply embedded in Western thought for centuries, and it persists in scholarly thinking t o d a d

In 1947, when Robert Redfield published his well-known folk-urban typology, he did Iittle more than lend the cachet of anthropology to an aIready ancient distinction. ( h e idea that cities were characterized by crime, disorder, and human suffering of all sorts ; while small, isolated, and homogeneous folk societies were harmonious communities goes back to Aristophanes, Tacitus, and the Old Testament. The idea was given renewed prominence in nineteenth-century thought by many influential figures, not least of whom Emile-qurkheim and Karl Marx in his Communist M a ~ i f a t o . Their writings and those of -- others led to a cofisensus that the emotional and moral commitment, personal intimacy, social cohesion, and continuity over time that cl~arwcterized folk societies were lost in the tramsition to urban life, where social disoqanizatisn amti personal pathology prevailed. In the twentieth century, the contrast between folk "community" and urban "society7' became - one of the most fuladamental ideas in all of social science. The idea that large urban societies lost the harmonious sense of community that was thought to be characteristic of , folk societies is widespread among social philosophers, political scientists, socioll~gists, psychiatrists, tbeologiams, novelists, poeb, and the educated public in general,, Author Kirkpatrick Sale defended the criticism of his book The Cufiquesd of Papadire (about t be

-

European conquest of the native peoples of America) by vigorously insisting tbrt compared to the culture of Europe, the Ccprimal commnaities" of preconquest America were I ./ Cchasmonious, peaceful, benign and content"

The contrast between folk harmony and urban conflict is rooted in the evolutionary assrsmption that while people in folk societies, Iike the Indians sf America, were achieving hnrmonioras ways of living together, they were also developing traditional beliefs and practices that helped them to adapt to their environrnenta without depleting or destroying them. Jan-Jacques Rousseau made the idea of the Noble Savage part of our common I parlance, rand in one form or another many modern scholars sustain this viewpoint. . . . .-

When a society was encountered that seemed to lack a meaningful system of beliefs or effective institutions, it was usually assumed that the cause must lie in the baneful influence of other peoples-such as colonial officials, soldiers, missionaries, or traders- who had almost always been on the scene before anthropologists were. When a society was encountered whose traditional beliefs and practices appeared to be meaningless or even harmful, the blame was often laid to extcrmal disruption. Thus, the conviction,has persisted that before the social-disorganization and cultural canfu&bn brought about by foreign contact, the lives of traditionaf populations must have been, if not quite idyllic then at Least harmonious and meaningful. . . . Therefore, rather than rerort the alienation, violence, or cruelly that sometimes dominated the Iives of the people they came to study, some anthropologists tried to reconstruct the people's way of life as believed it was bcfore it was disrupted by the religious beliefs, taxes, laws, and economic interventions of the colonial powers. Anthropologists may have believed that homicide, suicide, rape and warfare were part of folk societies, but most of them wrote their ethnographies as if suchl behaviors were either infrequent or somehow helped these people to adapt to their environmental circumstances. As a consequence, even anthropologists who knew better inadvertently reinforced the myth of primitive harmony.

11 I

It is very diffiicult to be precise about the frequency with which maladaptive trai ts occurred in these smalI societies, because the existing ethnographic accounts seldom addresses the possibility that some of the beliefs or practices of the people were anything other than adaptive. On the contrary, when paradoxical, irrational, bizarre, inefficient, ar dangerous beliefs or practices are described a t alLand very often they are not-they are usually presumed $a be adaptive and are treated as if they must serve some useful purpose. For example, even the most extreme forms of penile mutilation-slashing open the urethra, scourging it with abrasive stalks of grass or other plants, mutilating the glans or infibulating it-have typically been andyzed in the ethnographic literature (but the i., psychiatric) 8 as irrational, nonadaptive, or mahdaptive practices but in Perms of their positive social, cuItural, or psychologica~ consequences.

i / - .-.

Simi!arIy, the practice of Pharanoic kircumcision or fernale genital infibu8atidn) common in parts of Muslim Northeast Africa, involEves slashing away n girl's clitoris and both sets of vaginal labia. The wound is sutured together, leaving an opening the size of a matchstick for the passage of mine and menstrual blood. When young women are married, this small opening wrast be suqicwllly enlarged ta permit sexual intercoursa In addition to inflicting great pain, these procedures arny a considerable risk for infection, infertility, and even death, Nevertheless, %Re anthrops80gists have commonly chosen to