Gender Ideology and Psychological Reality 9780300146554

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Gender Ideology and Psychological Reality

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Gender Ideology and Psychological Reality An Essay on Cultural Reproduction MELFORD E. SPIRO

Yale University Press

New Haven and London

Copyright © 1997 by Melford E. Spiro. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Designed by James J. Johnson and set in Melior and Optima types by The Marathon Group, Inc., Durham, North Carolina. Printed in the United States of America by BookCrafters, Inc., Chelsea, Michigan. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Spiro, Melford E. Gender ideology and psychological reality : an essay on cultural reproduction / Melford E. Spiro.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-300-07007-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Sex role—Burma. 2. Gender identity—Burma. 3. Ethnopsychology—Burma. 4. Interpersonal relations—Burma. 5. Burma—Social life and customs. I. Title. GN635.B8S63 1997 305.3'09591-dc21 97-3919 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 1 0 9 8 7

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TO THE MEMORY OF

George Devereux and Weston La Barre

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Contents

Preface Acknowledgments 1. Introduction

ix xix 1

2. Males and Females in Village Burma

11

3. Cultural Internalization: Conscious Desires and Beliefs

45

4. The Concept of Desire

74

5. Cultural Internalization: Unconscious Desires and Beliefs

90

6. Culturally Constituted Defenses and Psychopathology

118

7. Internalization of Sex and Gender Ideologies

136

8. Conclusions and Implications

177

References

191

Index

211

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Preface

If the prevalent academic Zeitgeist might be characterized as postmodernist, then this book is unabashedly modernist. That is, it is written from the point of view of the "Western Rationalistic lïadition" (as Searle calls it). More particularly, it is written from the point of view of what might be called the tradition of classical anthropology. Following Searle (1993: 60-68), I might summarize the postulates of the former tradition in the following set of interrelated propositions. First, reality exists independently of human representations, and any true statement about the world refers to "actual" situations that correspond to the statement. Second, language serves not only to communicate meanings but also to refer to objects and situations in the world that exist independently of language. In short, pace postmodernism, language has referential, not merely communicative, functions. Third, statements are true or false depending on whether the objects and situations to which they refer correspond, to a greater or lesser degree, to the statements. This is the "correspondence theory" of truth, which—to the extent that postmodernists hold a theory of truth (many of them reject such a concept as "essentialist")—stands in sharp contrast to their "coherence" or "narrative" theory. ix

x : PREFACE

Fourth, knowledge is objective, which signifies, pace postmodernism, that the truth of any knowledge claim is independent of the motives, culture, ethnicity, race, social class, sex, and gender of the person or persons who make such a claim. Rather, its truth depends on the evidence adduced on its behalf. Fifth, logic and rationality provide a set of procedures, methods, and standards (of proof, validity, or reasonableness) that, pace postmodernism, enables one to assess competing knowledge claims. Sixth, pace postmodernism, there exist valid criteria (both objective and intersubjective) for judging the relative merit of statements, theories, explanations, interpretations, and other kinds of accounts. Accordingly, for example, ethnopsychological explanations for dissociative states do not have the same cognitive status as the explanations of "scientific" psychology. If these metaphysical and epistemological postulates of the Western Rationalistic Tradition constitute the intellectual framework of this book, then the postulates of classical anthropology constitute its guiding methodological principles. In its classical period, anthropologists—whether Boas or Radcliffe-Brown, Sapir or Lévi-Strauss, Kroeber or Fortes, Malinowski or Mead, Hallowell or Redfield—conceived of their discipline as the "study of man" (to quote the title of Linton's classic text). That is, they conceived of anthropology as a theoretically oriented, empirically grounded, comparative science whose purpose was to understand the diversity of cultures and peoples and to explain this diversity by means of transcultural theories. This conception, the one that informs this book, has been repudiated by most postmodernists, symbolists, hermeneuticists, and feminists, along with a few others, who view it as arrogant, misguided, or futile, if not all three: arrogant because it is an expression of a Western, hegemonic, and patriarchal discourse; misguided because it is a manifestation of scientism, positivism, and reductionism; and futile because non-Western cultures and peoples are "other," opaque in principle to Western investigators, however well intentioned, fair-minded, and empathie. (For fuller expositions, see Spiro 1992: intro., chs. 1-2; 1994: intro.).

PREFACE : xi

Because science is supposedly a Western patriarchal discourse, it is, postmodernists argue, a particular kind of storytelling. This means that scientific stories, like any others, are not so much empirically as ideologically grounded. Put differently, science (to paraphrase Clausewitz) is politics by other means. Thus, "the academic literature on emotion can be considered a form of political discourse on gender relations That literature arises out of and reenters a field of power struggles for the definition of true womanhood" (Lutz 1990: 78). If science is ideologically motivated storytelling whose function is domination, what makes one scientific story better than another is not, so postmodernists contend, that one is true and the other false, but that one is good and the other bad. "Good" and "bad" are, taken not as cognitive, but as moral and political predicates. That being so, a scientific story is good insofar as it empowers subjugated groups (ethnic and racial minorities, women, Third World peoples), and it is bad insofar as it perpetuates their subjugation (e.g., Abu-Lughod and Lutz 1990; Scheper-Hughes 1992,1994). Thus, two feminist readers of the manuscript objected to my invoking principles of biological evolution and my making the implicit assumption that males and females are governed by the same principles of cultural internalization, but neither adduced empirical grounds for their objections; it was sufficient that those principles and assumption allegedly violate feminist theory. Again, another reader claimed that the manuscript was sexist because I relied on Rreudian theory, which is "paternalistic," and because I approvingly cited George Devereux, who claimed that "women wish to be raped." Never mind that the paternalistic Fteud does not appear in the manuscript and that Devereux never made that claim. Many contemporary culture theorists object to classical culture theory because it conceives of anthropology not just as a science but as a comparative science. For them, the very possibility of a comparative anthropology is precluded by the fact that nonWestern peoples and cultures are "other." Their alleged otherness follows from three tenets of contemporary culture theory: whole-

xii : PREFACE

sale cultural determinism, virtually limitless cultural diversity, and radical cultural relativism. These concepts were the stock-intrade of classical culture theory, so it is the adjectives wholesale, limitless, and radical that distinguish contemporary theory. Thus, classical theory emphasized that human action and the human psyche are culturally determined for the most part; many contemporary theorists, however, contend that human thought, emotions, beliefs, and motives are wholly culturally determined (or, as they say, culturally constructed). Classical culture theory emphasized, moreover, that cultures are different one from another, whereas many contemporary theorists hold that cultural diversity is of a magnitude that renders every culture incommensurable with any other. Finally, classical culture theory stressed that cultural determinism and cultural diversity entail a commitment to cognitive and moral relativism (the view that it is not permissible to evaluate non-Western peoples by the cognitive and moral standards of Western culture), whereas many contemporary theorists add a third consideration: epistemological relativism (the view that it is not permissible to explain non-Western peoples by the explanatory principles of social science, which is just another ethnoscience). In short, inasmuch as the gap between Western and non-Western peoples is epistemologically unbridgeable, non-Western peoples are other, and, hence, a comparative anthropology is impossible to achieve. Together with classical anthropologists, I reject the tenets of virtually limitless cultural diversity, wholesale cultural determinism, and radical cultural relativism. The wide range of nontrivial cultural differences, whose documentation was one of the signal achievements of classical anthropologists, should not blind us to the impressive array of nontrivial cultural universals. These have been commented on in a number of studies, including those by Arnheim (1988), D. E. Brown (1991), Davenport (1987), Edgerton (1992), Hallowell (1955: chs. 1, 4; 1976: chs. 5-6), Hockett (1973), Kluckhohn (1953, 1959), La Barre (1954), Levinson and Malone (1980), Lloyd and Gay (1981), Murdock (1945), Staal (1988), and Tiger and Fox (1971).

PREFACE : xiii

Even on the highly dubious assumption that the human psyche is the product exclusively of cultural determinants, Western and non-Western peoples would be expected, given cultural universals, not only to differ in many psychological characteristics but also to be similar in others. The more likely assumption, however, is that the human psyche is also the product of biological and social determinants, which supply two other grounds for expecting similarities. Because all human beings are the product of a common evolutionary history, hence constitute a single biological species, it can be presumed that they all share a set of biologically determined psychological characteristics (e.g., Hallowell 1955:13; 1976: 227). Although human beings are members of different social groups with different social systems, all social systems also exhibit many common features, some of which—such as the relatively permanent biparental family, prolonged biparental socialization of children, and intrafamily incest avoidance—are arguably the social determinants of a common set of human psychological characteristics. If, now, there are strong cultural, biological, and social grounds for believing that human beings differ in some nontrivial psychological characteristics and are similar in others, there also are strong grounds for rejecting epistemological relativism and its corollary that non-Western peoples are other. In this book I hold with Bourguignon (1979: 79) that "the differences between human groups are not so radical that we cannot recognize ourselves as we are, or as we might be, in others"; with Bruner (1986: 6) that "we understand other people and their expressions on the basis of our own experience and self-understanding"; and with Paul (1990: 433) that we should be wary of social science theories that do not come "close to corresponding to what one's own actual experience of being alive is like." I agree with these views not only on the previously adduced empirical grounds but also on experiential and theoretical grounds. The experiential ground derives from fieldwork conducted in three very different cultural groups—among the Ifaluk of the Central Carolines of Micronesia, in a kibbutz in central Israel, and in

xiv : PREFACE

a village in Upper Burma. That these groups are markedly different from one another and that all are different from my own (American) group is undeniable—which is precisely why I chose to study them. But to claim that because of their differences from my own group, they are other for me, and I for them, flies in the face of my experience with them and, unless I am badly mistaken, theirs with me. In short, my experience in living with these three groups has convinced me that however diverse our cultural and social systems, we have a common human nature. To say that an Ifalukian, a kibbutznik, a Burmese villager and an American share human nature is not to say that psychologically we all are the same. It is, however, to say that, whatever our differences, their psyches and mine are governed by the same principles and hence are explicable by the same theories. This is but another way of expressing a central postulate of classical anthropology, "the psychic unity of mankind" (e.g., A. L. Kroeber 1948: 572-573; Wallace [1961] 1970). Many contemporary anthropologists have rejected this postulate. Instead, they would hold with Shweder (1991: 73) that because of cultural diversity, cultural influences on the human psyche result "less in psychic unity for humankind than in ethnic divergences in mind, self, and emotions." In order to evaluate this claim—never mind that it ignores the influence of cultural, biological, and social universals—we must first determine what it means. The contention that there are ethnic divergences in emotions, for example, could have the following quite different meanings. 1. No common emotions are found across ethnic groups, so sadness and anger, for instance, may be present in some groups and absent from others. 2. Certain emotions may be found across ethnic groups but may differ in the principles by which they are governed. Thus, the thwarting of desires may arouse anger in some groups and curiosity in others; and in the latter, it may be the gratification of desires, not their thwarting, that arouses anger.

PREFACE : xv

3. Different ethnic groups may share a set of emotions, but each may also have a set of unique emotions. 4. Different ethnic groups may share a set of emotions but may differ in how they express them. The contention that the first or second proposition represents the meaning of ethnic divergences in emotions would be rejected out of hand by classical anthropologists (and by me), for both are incompatible with the postulate of the psychic unity of humankind: the first because it denies universal cultural, social, and biological determinants of emotions, the second because it denies that the same emotion is governed by one and the same principles. If, however, the third or fourth proposition is meant, the claim would readily be assented to by classical anthropologists (and by me) as entirely consistent with the postulate of psychic unity: the third because just as universal determinants might be expected to produce universal emotions, so, too, diverse determinants might be expected to produce diverse emotions; the fourth because ethnic differences in the expression of a common emotion do not entail the emotion's being governed by different principles. Suppose, for example, that for any two ethnic groups A and B, A is characterized by a high incidence of anger-instigated social aggression, B by a low incidence of the same. Does this difference indicate that anger is aroused by the thwarting of desire for A but not for F? Hardly. The low incidence of anger-instigated social aggression in B may be due to any number of factors, all of which are consistent with that principle: (1) desires are less frequently thwarted in B; (2) although desires are as frequently thwarted in B, its social actors have been socialized to repress their aggressive wishes; (3) more social and cultural resources are available in B for coping with anger; (4) such resources are equally available in both societies, but in A the resources—like witchcraft—encourage the displacement of anger (and hence aggression) onto the social world, whereas in B the resources—like the belief in malevolent spirits— encourage the projection of anger (and hence aggression) onto the supernatural world. And so on. In short, despite ethnic divergences

xvi : PREFACE

in anger-instigated aggression, the arousal of anger may be governed by one and the same principle, and the expression of aggression may be explained by one and the same theory, including the cultural channeling of emotions, the existence of unconscious wishes, and culturally constituted defense mechanisms. The postulate of the psychic unity of humankind is the theoretical ground not only for the rejection of otherness but also for a comparative anthropology. Given this postulate, social and cultural differences (the greater the differences, the better) are not an obstacle to a genuine panhuman social science; rather, they are its precondition. This is so for two reasons. First, these differences provide the opportunity and the requirement for formulating theoretical principles that apply in the diverse range of human societies. Second, they provide the opportunity and the requirement to formulate explanations and interpretations of single societies and cultures by reference to findings, principles, and theories derived from other studies of diverse societies and cultures. When I characterized the present book as unabashedly modernist (as opposed to postmodernist), I did so because it represents an attempt to implement these opportunities and requirements. The explanations of the ethnographic case addressed in Chapters 2 and 7 (the Burmese sexual and gender ideologies) are based not only on Burmese cultural data and Burmese psychological theory but also on a wide range of comparative ethnographic data and Western psychological theory. And the theory of cultural internalization developed here is meant to apply pari passu to any cultural context. The term Burmese refers to the dominant ethnic group in the Southeast Asian country formerly called Burma (Bama) but whose name was recently changed to Myanmar by the military junta that presently rules the country. I have retained the name Burma both because that was its name when I conducted my fieldwork and, primarily, because none of the actions of the junta, which seized power illegally in a military coup and is opposed by most of the population, can be considered binding.

PREFACE : xvii

The Pali and Sanskrit terms found in the ethnographic sections are spelled without the diacritics. Let me also note that if some pertinent recent works are not referred to in my discussion, it is not from oversight or prejudice but because the manuscript was mostly completed in 1990.

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Acknowledgments

I wish to acknowledge the assistance of many individuals and institutions, not all of whom will agree with the sentiments expressed in the Preface or with ideas and interpretations expressed in other parts of the book. For more than twenty years I have had the singular good fortune to teach and write in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, a environment with stimulating colleagues and students who have contributed in some measure to the thinking reflected in this book. In particular, I wish to thank Roy D'Andrade, David Jordan, Marc Swartz, and Donald TUzin for commenting on the manuscript; their criticisms and suggestions were consistently helpful and productive. I also wish to thank Donald Levine for reasons he alone will understand. In addition, I wish to acknowledge the helpful suggestions of the reviewer for Yale University Press, who importantly contributed to the tightening of my argument. Finally, I wish to thank Gladys Topkis for her willingness to publish this book despite warnings about its "political pitfalls" and Mary Pasti for her patient attempts to make it user-friendly. The ethnographic case addressed in Chapters 2 and 7 is based on fieldwork that I conducted in Upper Burma in 1961-62 and among Burmese refugees in Thailand in the summers of 1969—72. xix

xx : ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My gratitude, both personal and intellectual, to my Burmese friends and coworkers in Yeigyi village and elsewhere has been expressed in other publications., Here let me reiterate my heartfelt appreciation for their unfailing cooperation. Because of the current political situation in Burma, it is best not to identify them by name. Fieldwork in Burma and Thailand was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the National Institute of Mental Health. Work on this book was aided by a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and a sabbatical leave from the University of California, San Diego. To all of these institutions I wish to express my gratitude. Parts of Chapter 2 were published in modified form in Sex and Gender Hierarchies, edited by Barbara Diane Miller (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), and in a special edition of the Journal of Psychohistory (1991) edited by Marcelo SuarezOrozco (18: 533-46). Parts of Chapter 7 were published in modified form in The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, vol. 15, edited by L. Bryce Boyer and Simon A. Grolnick (Hillsdale, N.J.: Analytic Press, 1990; copyright © 1990 by the Analytic Press). All are reprinted by permission.

1 Introduction

The Problem Stated

For any anthropologist acquainted with the work of Edward Sapir and A. L Hallowell, Talcott Parsons and Robert Merton, Ralph Linton and Melville Herskovits, and a few of our other intellectual ancestors, a great deal of contemporary anthropological discourse poses a challenging problem in intellectual history. Because some of the key terms of this discourse (practice, intentional subject, cultural reproduction) merely replace traditional terms (role enactment, actor, cultural persistence), the anthropologist might have the feeling, best expressed by that great American sage Yogi Berra, that "it's déjà vu all over again." We may well wonder why it has been necessary to reinvent the wheel. Is it that contemporary anthropologists are ignorant of their intellectual heritage? Or is it that they are characterized by what Harold Bloom (1973), in his discussion of "strong" poets, calls the anxiety of influence? Or, in that this new discourse largely consists of repackaging old psychological wine in new sociological and cultural bottles, is it that contemporary anthropologists are characterized by what D'Andrade (1990a) has termed psychophobia? Rather than pursue these speculations, let me say that in this book I address three interrelated conceptual issues that can be for1

2 : INTRODUCTION

mulated in the terms of either traditional or contemporary discourse. 1. Why do social actors ("intentional subjects") believe what they believe and do what they do? In other words, what motivates belief and action ("practice")? 2. How important a role does culture play in the motivation of belief and action? 3. What accounts for the persistence of cultural systems over successive generations of social actors ("cultural reproduction")? I should perhaps emphasize at the outset that I do not share the view of some anthropologists that the concepts of practice and cultural reproduction are necessarily related to notions of power, hegemony, and the like. Thus, for Bourdieu cultural reproduction is by definition "symbolic violence" (Birdie and Passeron 1977), and for Ortner practice is by definition characterized by "asymmetry, inequality, domination, and the like Human activity regarded as taking place in a world of politically neutral relations is not 'practice* " (1989:12). Since I see nothing to gain (and much to lose) by employing such arbitrary definitions, the concepts cultural reproduction and practice as I shall use them may involve notions of hegemony and violence but do not entail them. My interest in these and related concepts was aroused many years ago when, as a graduate student, I read Sapir's pioneering essays on the psychology of culture (e.g., Sapir 1917,1932,1933). Nevertheless, the writing of this book was stimulated by an ethnographic problem that I encountered recently in consequence of writing a paper on gender and the relations between the sexes in a village in Upper Burma, a paper based on materials collected in the course of fieldwork conducted many years earlier. Among the many propositions that compose the Burmese cultural system of gender, two subsets are distinguishable by the fact that they are, or at least seem to be, anomalous. One subset, which I designate the Ideology of the Superior Male, is anomalous because although many of its propositions are inconsistent with or even the reverse of the social system of male-female relations,

INTRODUCTION : 3

(male) actors espouse it with strong conviction. The second subset, which I designate the Ideology of the Dangerous Female, is anomalous because although most of its propositions are highly threatening to the (male) actors and, moreover, are either empirically undemonstrable or demonstrably false, this ideology, too, is held with strong conviction. Because historical evidence suggests that these ideologies (cultural systems) have persisted over long reaches of historical time, they posed a vexatious ethnographic problem when I first encountered them. Later, when I discovered that similar ideologies, as well as their anomalous associated conditions, are hardly unique to Burma but are widespread across human societies, it became evident that I was confronted not merely with a problem in Burmese ethnography but with a more general theoretical problem. Given the questionable empirical status of both ideologies and the psychologically threatening status of the second to males, how can we account for their reproduction? Alternatively (to formulate the problem in the terms of traditional discourse), why have these cultural systems been transmitted from one generation of (male) actors to the next? And given that they are transmitted, why are they internalized—that is, why are they held by these actors with such strong conviction? In this reformulation, cultural reproduction is conceived not as a single and impersonal process—as if culture, like DNA, reproduces itself—but as a dual and personal process consisting, on the one hand, of a social transaction between actors (which I call cultural transmission) and, on the other hand, of a psychological operation within actors (which I call cultural internalization). Conceived in this way, the process of cultural reproduction raises two critical theoretical issues. If the various cultural systems composing the culture of any society are reproduced by being transmitted from enculturated actors (usually adults) to cultural novices (usually children and subadults), the first theoretical issue concerns the conditions under which cultural systems are acquired by the novices. And granted that they are acquired, the second theoretical issue concerns the conditions under which

4 : INTRODUCTION

cultural systems are internalized (taken to be true) by these novices (cf. Strauss 1992:1,11). The global concept of cultural reproduction obscures these issues because it conflates the social process of cultural transmission with the psychological process of cultural acquisition and, in so doing, ignores the critical distinction between the psychological processes of cultural acquisition and cultural internalization. Thus, even when cultural systems are transmitted, some of their constituent propositions may be rejected rather than acquired by the cultural novices; and even if they are acquired, it is not infrequently the case that rather than being internalized, they are acquired only as clichés and have no motivational relevance for action (practice). For example, although the proposition that all humans are the children of God is a core doctrine of Christianity, and although Christianity is a central cultural system of Western culture, Western (like non-Western) societies have often been marked by slavery, warfare, genocide, and other horrors. Similarly, although American culture—or that part of it encoded in such sacred texts as the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence—stresses social equality as a paramount value, American society (like most others) has often been characterized by racial, sexual, and ethnic inequality. The doctrines of Christianity and the values of American democracy have been transmitted in a variety of media and in many forums, so the contradictions between culture and practice can hardly be explained by saying that the cultural values of brotherhood and equality have not been transmitted. A more likely explanation is that, rather than internalizing these values, many actors have acquired them as clichés. This explanation is supported by the finding that a wide range of constitutionally protected rights are internalized by only a minority of American actors (McClosky and Brill 1983). Since analogous findings have been reported in virtually every ethnography, my concern here is not with these examples as such but with their implications for cultural reproduction and practice. Thus, (1) the reproduction of cultural systems does not entail

INTRODUCTION : 5

their internalization; (2) cultural systems affect practice only if they are internalized; and (3) the transmission of cultural systems, though necessary, is not sufficient for their internalization. To those anthropologists for whom culture theory is not concerned with practice, these propositions are of little relevance, but to those of us who eschew such a hermetic theory of culture they are highly relevant, for at least three interrelated reasons. First, if cultural systems affect practice only when they are internalized, culture theory must take account of the fact that culture is located not only in cultural symbols but also in the the minds of social actors. A theory of culture must therefore include a theory of the mind (cf. Shore 1991; Sperber 1985). Second, if the transmission of cultural systems is not a sufficient condition for their internalization, a theory of cultural reproduction must include a theory of cultural internalization. Third, if cultural systems are cognitive systems (systems of beliefs, values, ideas, and the like), but practice is a function of both cognition and motivation, a theory of the cultural influence on practice must include a theory of motivation (cf. D'Andrade and Strauss 1992). These propositions are interrelated because if a cultural system is internalized, it is related to practice both as producer and as product. That is, the internalization of a cultural system is the product of mental action, and the implementation of a cultural system is one, but not the only, producer of social action (practice). This distinction between mental and social action, which is the basis for the distinction between cultural and social reproduction, is complicated by the fact that action involves an actor (intentional subject); and the more complex the conception of the actor is, the more complex the relation between culture and action appears to be. According to the conception of the actor to be developed in the following chapters, cultural internalization is the product of two types of mental action, cognitive and motivational, each of which may be either conscious or unconscious. These crosscutting types of mental action have different consequences for the role of culture as a producer of social action (practice). Moreover, when cultural internalization is the product of unconscious men-

6 : INTRODUCTION

tal action, it is defensively motivated, which complicates the relation of culture to social action all the more. If all this makes the seemingly simple concepts of cultural and social reproduction appear exceedingly complex, that is because they are. When the actor is brought in—not the actor denoted by such vapid terms as intentional subject or culturally constructed selfoi social person but an actor with desires and fears, hopes and anxieties, loves and hates, conflicts and defenses, the kind of actor we know ourselves and the people we study to be but who nevertheless seldom appears in our culture theories—then complexity unfortunately cannot be avoided. To be sure, anthropologists, as Ortner (1984:151) has remarked, "have generally found that actors with too much psychological plumbing are hard to handle methodologically." But if actors are fitted with this kind of psychological plumbing, ethnographic reality is much more complex than contemporary anthropological theory would have us believe. The function of theory is not to deny the complexity but to render it conceptually intelligible. That is precisely what I attempt to do in subsequent chapters. Because cultural internalization plays a key role in that attempt, let me explicate that concept systematically and precisely. Cultural Internalization

To explicate the meaning of cultural internalization, it is first necessary to define culture. As I shall use the term here, culture refers to that subset of ideas, norms, and values which are found in social groups as a consequence of social transmission and hence are socially shared in varying degrees.1 In short, culture refers to 1. To what degree culture is shared is an empirical question. Whatever the degree, however, it is clear from the work of Schwartz (1978), Swartz (1982a), and Wallace ([1961] 1970), among others, that the old model according to which culture is universally shared within a group must be replaced with a distributive model. Although cultural sharing may be minimal (the limiting case being a social dyad), sharing is nevertheless one of the defining characteristics of culture, and in that regard the distinction between cultural propositions which, though shared, are not socially acquired and those which are shared

INTRODUCTION : 7

traditional ideas, norms, and values. Correspondingly, a culture refers to the traditional ideas, norms, and values found in a particular social group. Often these ideas, norms, and values are transmitted to cultural novices explicitly by means of verbal instruction. If so, they are conveyed in the form of propositions (e.g., "The earth revolves about the sun"; "Drive on the right-hand side of the road"; "Life is sacred"). Just as often, however, these elements of culture, as they might be called, are transmitted to cultural novices indirectly in the course of their observation of and participation in social relations and rituals. Although in this case they are not conveyed in the form of propositions, still, that is the form, I believe, in which novices typically represent them in their minds. For cultural novices, the ideas, values, and norms that constitute the culture of their group are wholly outside them. That is, the ideas, values, and norms are located in public symbols and other signs that represent them, in the actions of social actors that express them, and in the minds of cultural initiates who hold them. As a result of the novices' enculturation (the process by which culture is internalized), these cultural elements are represented by them in symbols and other signs (both public and private), expressed in their actions, and held in their minds (cf. Levy 1984). When that occurs, the cultural novice has become a cultural initiate. Now that the novices are enculturated, the ideas, values, and norms that make up the culture of their group are located not only outside the erstwhile novices but also inside them. These cultural elements have been not only acquired but also internalized; that is, they are held not as clichés but as personal beliefs. because they are socially acquired is only apparently trivial. In fact, the latter distinction has important implications for the theory of cultural determinism. If the condition of being socially shared were a sufficient criterion for designating some proposition as cultural, it would logically follow that, for example, (1) because Americans share the belief that the sun rises in the east, or that rain falls from clouds, these beliefs are culturally determined, or that (2) because Americans act upon these beliefs—they seek shelter from anticipated rain when they see clouds—such action is culturally determined.

8 : INTRODUCTION

As Talcott Parsons put it, cultural ideas, norms, and values may be said to be "internalized" when they have become part of the actor's personality system (1964: ch. 1). The term cultural internalization does double duty, then; it refers both to the process (enculturation) by which cultural propositions become personal beliefs and to an end-state, that is, the condition of their having become personal beliefs. Our present concern is not with the process but with the end-state. Let me emphasize that the term cultural proposition is not synonymous with the conventional term cultural belief. A belief is a proposition (cultural or otherwise) that is held by an actor to be true or right. A cultural proposition—a proposition that expresses a traditional idea, norm, or value—is held to be true or right if and only if it is internalized by a social actor. Hence, an internalized cultural proposition is not (according to the terminology adopted here) a cultural belief but a culturally constituted belief. For a cultural proposition to become a culturally constituted belief—for it to be internalized—it must first be acquired, and this may occur at any one of four "levels of conviction." These levels constitute what I call a scale of cultural acquisition. At the first level of conviction a cultural novice acquires an acquaintance with the proposition without, however, assenting to it. At this level, the cultural initiate is indifferent to thé proposition or may even reject it outright. At the second level of conviction the novice acquires the proposition as a cliché. That is, although he (or she) assents to the proposition, he honors it more in the breach than in the observance; he only pays lip service to it. Thus, a Westerner may say that he believes Jesus died for our sins or that one ought to care for the poor, but if he acquires these propositions at the second level, he himself may have little sense of sin, and his concern for the poor may be negligible. This is not to say that cultural clichés are socially irrelevant. Some clichés, those that Swartz (1991: 139-142) has called tokens, may have the important function of promoting social solidarity. But if an entire cultural system is acquired as a cliché, the system is what Sapir (1924) called spurious.

INTRODUCTION : 9

It is only when a cultural proposition is acquired by the cultural novice as a cognitively and emotionally salient belief—the third level of conviction—that it may be said to be internalized. If the propositions that Jesus died for our sins and that one ought to care for the poor are acquired by a novice at this level, he himself may evince a sense of sin and be generous to the poor. In short, if a cultural proposition is internalized, it is held to be true, proper, or right. If an entire cultural system is internalized, it is what Sapir (1924) called genuine. If a cultural proposition is acquired at the fourth level of the scale of acquisition, the cultural novice not only internalizes it but has a powerful emotional attachment to it, so its psychological salience is especially strong. Thus, believing that Jesus died for our sins, the cultural initiate is preoccupied with sin; and believing that one ought to care for the poor, he is generous to the point of personal sacrifice. Having now elucidated the concept of cultural internalization as an end-state, I plan to proceed as follows. In Chapter 2 I describe the Burmese variants of the Ideologies of the Superior Male and the Dangerous Female, which raise seemingly insoluble problems for a theory of cultural internalization. To address those problems, in Chapter 3 I discuss the standard theories of cultural internalization viewed as a process. Finding them wanting with respect to both cultural internalization in general and the internalization of these ideologies in particular, I propose an alternative theory. Because cognition and motivation are the crucial variables of this theory, and because desire is the key concept of any theory of motivation, in Chapter 4 I explicate the meaning of that concept. It is impossible, however, or so I argue, to explain all cultural internalization by reference to conscious cognition and motivation alone, especially in regard to the two cultural ideologies with which we shall be concerned. In Chapter 5 I discuss the acquisition of unconscious desires and beliefs and their expression in psychological defense mechanisms, and I explicate the significance of culturally constituted defense mechanisms for

10 : INTRODUCTION

cultural internalization. Some anthropologists claim that these psychological processes are symptoms of psychopathology and that their employment as explanatory concepts therefore entails a conception of culture as pathological. I address these claims in Chapter 6. Having developed a theory of cultural internalization in the foregoing chapters, I return in Chapter 7 to the Ideologies of the Superior Male and the Dangerous Female and argue that their internalization is best explained by means of this theory. This explanation is addressed to their internalization by male actors exclusively because it is not clear, for reasons described in Chapter 2, whether the ideologies are also internalized by females. In Chapter 8 I summarize the main theoretical points of the book and draw some implications that go beyond its focus on cultural internalization.

2 Males and Females in Village Burma

The Social System of Male-Female Relations

Although the cultural ideologies of the Superior Male and the Dangerous Female are frequently discrepant with, if not the opposite of, the social system of male-female relations, this is especially so in Burma. But before describing the Burmese variants of these cultural systems, it is important to describe the Burmese social system of male-female relations. Some of the following description is based on published sources, both historical and ethnographic, but most of it is based on fieldwork that I conducted in 1961-1962 in the Upper Burma village I call Yeigyi and in the surrounding villages. Consequently, although this description may be presumed to hold for village Burma generally, it applies especially to these villages in Upper Burma. The ethnographic present for this description is the period of my fieldwork. Burmese women probably occupy a higher social status than any other women in Asia. Indeed, until the dramatic changes in the status of women in the West in the past fifty years, Burmese women enjoyed a degree of economic, legal, and social equality that arguably was unsurpassed either in Asia or in Europe and North America. In the village productive economy—mostly wet11

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rice agriculture—the participation of males and females is more or less equal. Men do the plowing and planting, women the transplanting and weeding, and both the harvesting. In the nonagricultural economy, in which achievement rather than ascription is the basis for recruitment to economic statuses, men are predominant in craft occupations and women in retail trade (as they are in much of Southeast Asia). A few women are highly successful entrepreneurs in both the manufacturing and the importing sectors of the urban economy, and others are equally successful in the professions of medicine, college teaching, and the like. In the legal system, too, women are pretty much the equals of men. For example, women may own property in their own name; the family estate is inherited by both sons and daughters; and husband and wife own all property jointly. Similarly, females, like males, may enter freely into marriage, and wives, like husbands, may initiate divorce. Indeed, in some respects, women have the upper hand in these matters. It is the girl's hand, not the boy's, that is sought in marriage, and it is the bride, not the groom, who receives a marriage payment (for an extended analysis of Burmese marriage payments see Spiro 1976). But that is not all. Burma is remarkably free from the antagonism between the sexes found in, say, Papua New Guinea (Poole and Herdt 1982) and from the male sexual coercion that is pervasive in lowland South America (Gregor 1990) and many other societies. Social interaction between men and women in Burma is marked by an uncommon degree of freedom and joviality, including sexual banter (Spiro 1977: 216-218). In addition, Burmese women are spared numerous afflictions suffered by women both to the west of Burma (India and the Middle East) and to the east (China). The veil, purdah, child betrothal, female infanticide, female genital mutilation, footbinding, suttee, prohibition of widow remarriage, and the like are all absent from Burma, as are other tribulations, such as those caused by male machismo and protest masculinity (e.g., Gilmore 1990), male intimidation, and sanctioned or unpunished male rape (e.g., Gregor 1985; Sasson 1992,1994).

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Female equality in all these matters is not a modern innovation, as the testimony of early European observers indicates. One early commentator (Symes 1800: 328) reports that men and women "have as free intercourse with each other as the rules of European society admit." Indeed, their intercourse, as another commentator indicates, was very free. "The female branches of the family are not recluses here, neither are they reserved or shy in their manners; they form a constituent part of domestic and public society.... The wife of a judge or governor is often seen at his side, assisting in the decision of cases; and the wives of viceroys and other high officers are often permitted to hold their own courts, and decide independently on petitions presented to them. Women of all ranks enjoy a high degree of freedom and appear abroad unveiled whenever they choose" (Hough 1826: 88). Although this quotation implies that in the past, wives of high officials held high office themselves, it is more likely that then, as now, their political roles were extrastructural. Structurally, women are and (perhaps with a few exceptions) were subordinate to men in the political domain, as in the other core domains of Burmese society—religion (Buddhism) and the family. By cultural prescription the exercise of authority (awza) is a male prerogative, so any social status endowed with authority is, by cultural ascription, a male monopoly. Hence, all political offices, from chief of state to village headman, are typically open only to males. It is still useful to note some exceptions to this generalization. The hereditary office of village headman passed from father to son, but in the absence of a son, a daughter could succeed the father (Mya Sein 1938). There is also at least one recorded case (in the fifteenth century) in which a daughter, the famous Shinsawbu, succeeded her father to the throne (Harvey 1925: 117 ff.). The structural subordination of females is as marked in religion as in government. Both as a social institution and as a cultural system, Buddhism is of overriding importance in Burmese society (Spiro [1970] 1982), and in the entire social structure the most prestigious status is that of Buddhist monk. A monk is called a hpoungyi, a person with "great hpoun" And because this

14 : MALES AND FEMALES IN VILLAGE BURMA

spiritual essence is attributed to males alone, recruitment to the Buddhist monastic order is restricted to males. Women can become nuns, but nuns have low prestige in Burma. The subordinate position of females in both the formal political system and the normative religious system does not tell the whole story regarding the status of women either in politics or in religion. Women, being barred from political office, rarely exercise political authority, but they often wield considerable political influence and power. In the first place, they often exert influence over the behavior of their officeholding husbands. This may occur from the lowest level of government (with wives of village headmen) up to the highest level (as with Supayalat, the last queen of Burma, who exerted considerable influence over her consort, King Thibaw). Second, wives of government officials, because of their husbands' structural position, may exercise considerable extrastructural power in their dealings with their husbands' subordinates. It is a well-known fact—and I myself have witnessed instances—that judicial decisions often depend on the size of the gift that a litigant offers to the wife of a magistrate or judge. Moreover, given her presumed influence over her husband, the wife of an official is treated with considerable respect and deference. In the religious domain there is one role—that of shaman—in which women enjoy great influence, even structurally. An achieved status, the shaman (nat kadaw) is the ritual specialist in the Burmese spirit cult, a religious system that exists side by side, if somewhat uncomfortably, with Buddhism (for a detailed description of shamans and the spirit cult, see Spiro 1974). Because Buddhism, an otherworldly religion, does not specialize in the mundane problems of human life (illness, cattle loss, barrenness), the gap is filled by the spirit cult, which attributes these problems to the action of a class of spirits called nats. By trafficking in spirits, shamans (so it is believedjcan prevent the occurrence of these problems and remove them after they occur. In consequence, although shamans have low, if not negative, prestige, they have considerable influence over their clients in these matters. Shamans may be either male or female, but virtually all are female. Nor is

MALES AND FEMALES IN VILLAGE BURMA : 15

their number inconsiderable—even small villages have at least one shaman—and the reputations of some of them extend to many parts of the country. In the third core institution of Burmese society, the family, it is necessary again to distinguish the formal from the informal sexual hierarchy. Although in the formal structure the husband has authority over the wife, in the informal structure the wife wields considerable power and influence over the husband. The husband's authority is manifested not only instrumentally—the wife cooks and serves his food, washes and irons his clothes, and so on—but also symbolically, which is much more important. For example, the husband is designated "the lord [nat] who lives in the front part of the house," and although he may not actually live there, his authority in the house is manifested in other symbolic ways. The eastern, "noble" side of the house—the side where the shrine for the Buddha is kept—is reserved for the husband (and other males), whereas the western, "ignoble" side is reserved for the wife (and other females). Similarly, if a house has more than one room, the floor of the eastern room is made of long (superior) planks, whereas that of the western room is made of short (inferior) ones. Most significant perhaps is the symbolic homage that the wife periodically pays the husband by kneeling before him and touching her forehead to the ground. Known as shikkhou, this ritual is otherwise performed only by commoners before royalty; religious devotees before the Buddha, monks, and pagodas; and children before parents and teachers. It may now be observed, however, that despite their superordinate position in the formal structure of the family, husbands are typically subordinate to their wives in the informal structure. As is the case elsewhere in Southeast Asia (e.g., Brenner 1995; H. Geertz 1961; Jay 1969), although the husband, by virtue of his status as a male, has authority over the wife,, it is the wife, by virtue of her influence, who most frequently has power over the husband. This is the view of the Burmese themselves, as well as the impression of foreign observers, both early and late. One nineteenth-century commentator held that "women rule the roost in

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Burma" (Forbes 1878: 56); an early twentieth-century observer claimed that the wife "is the predominant partner" in the marriage (Hall 1913: 239). These remarks are echoed in the observations of a contemporary ethnographer about two villages in Upper Burma. "In theory and in public the husband is supposedly dominant, but this dominance is so tenuous, so indefinite and ambiguous that its social visibility is virtually nil" (Nash 1965: 253-254). That the wife is the dominant partner in the village marriages that I studied is supported by three kinds of data: informants' reports, behavioral observations, and psychological findings. Informants of both sexes view the wife, not the husband, as the dominant partner in the marriage. To be sure, when the residents of Yeigyi, the village in which I lived, were asked to identify the dominant partner in their own marriage, they usually named the husband (in accordance with the normative ideology described below) But when the same respondents were asked to name the dominant spouse in other marriages, they usually named the wife. This finding was replicated when, in two other villages, the village elders were asked to identify the dominant spouse in the marriages in their village; and it was replicated yet again when a panel of villagers, two men and two women, were asked to identify the dominant spouse in a randomly selected sample of marriages. In the random sample, however, the wife was identified as the dominant partner in only a bare majority of the marriages, so some additional comments might be useful. In Burmese marriages, including those characterized by my village panel as husband dominated, the wife holds the purse strings—as is true in most of Southeast Asia (e»g., Brenner 1995: 23; H. Geertz 1961:123; Blanchard 1958:436; Jay 1969: 92; Steinberg 1959: 79). If the husband needs or wants spending money, he must ask his wife for it. Although by Western, let alone Middle Eastern (e.g., Strick 1990:101), standards, such a marriage would surely be characterized as wife dominated, that is not the case here. In short, many of the marriages designated by the village panel as husband dominated would be characterized by the cultural standards of other societies as wife dominated.

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The wife's control of disposable family income offers important insights into the relationships between village spouses. As the men view it, the women hold the purse strings because a man expects his wife to assume the financial responsibility in their marriage. The women, however, view this arrangement as a mark of the husband's dependency on the wife. Men, so the women claim, are irresponsible—somewhat like children; were it not for the wife's control of the family income, the husband would squander the family resources on other women, gambling, and drink. (Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, this is the view of men and women alike [e.g., Peletz 1995: 95-96].) As the women view it, then, the wife holds the purse strings out of enlightened self-interest. But the wife is not motivated by self-interest alone. She is also motivated, so some women say, by her compassion for the husband: if the husband squandered the family's financial resources, he would have to work all the harder to support his family, and the wife wishes to spare him that burden. It is hardly necessary to comment on the condescension implicit in the women's attitude or on their perception of men as dependent on their wives. (Their condescension is not as marked as that of the Javanese wives described by Brenner [1995: 35-36] and Jay ]1969: 92]). Besides controlling her husband's expenditure of money, the wife often controls many other aspects of his behavior, including the type of clothing he wears, the kind of food he eats, the friends he brings home, and the places where he spends his time away from home and the frequency with which he does so. It must be stressed, however, that the wife's dominance is virtually always subtle. A blatantly dominant wife would be intolerable to most men—her behavior would be taken as a sign that the husband had lost his authority—and such a marriage almost invariably results in divorce. Publicly and even privately the wife shows her husband the deference that his structural authority requires. Subtle or not, the wife's dominance reflects the fact that the husband, like the Spanish husband discussed by Gilmore (1986: 230), is dependent on her both instrumentally and emotionally. As an urban woman put it, the husband expects his wife to be sister, friend,

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and mother all in one, and in her role as mother he expects her to be nurturant, thereby permitting him to be dependent. I would argue that these behavioral measures of the wife's domination are a manifestation of deep-seated emotional attitudes found in husbands and wives alike. These attitudes may be inferred, first, from the emotional salience of one of the cultural ideologies described below, whose basic theme is female domination of males. They may be inferred, second, from the findings of the projective tests administered to the villagers. In their responses to the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), men and women alike told stories in which men have little control over women. The men's stories portray women as difficult to control or please and men as relatively helpless at coping with female infidelity or desertion (Steele, n.d: 4). Similarly, the Rorschach protocols suggest that the males are "especially anxious about mothers and other females" and that the males are characterized by a "lack of independence from female or maternal figures" (5). They also suggest that in many ways females are psychologically "more powerful than males" (6). I propose, then, that what might be viewed from one perspective as the husband's domination by the wife might be viewed from another perspective as his dependence on her. This proposal is supported by the TAT findings, which indicate that males possess strong "dependent and nurturant needs" (Steele, n.d.: 16). I am not proposing that the dependency need of Burmese males is stronger than that of other males—it is probably stronger, for example, in Japanese (Doi 1973) and Javanese (H. Geertz 1961; Jay 1969) males—but it is strong enough; and, as in many other societies (including Japan and Java), it is the wife who is expected to satisfy this need. Let me summarize this discussion of the relationship between males and females in the village social system. First, across all domains men are structurally superior to women in regard to authority (awza) and charisma (hpouri). That is, the statuses that either require or are marked by these two characteristics are, by cultural prescription, male monopolies. Hence, men alone occupy these statuses—not because of superior achieve-

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ment but because by cultural ascription the condition of being male is the necessary qualification for recruitment to them. Second, for other ascribed statuses—those for which these two characteristic are not germane—women are more or less the structural equals of men. Third, across all domains, when status recruitment is a function of achievement, women are frequently the equals of men, and sometimes they surpass them. Fourth, in some domains, notably politics and the spirit cult, women have considerable power and influence—structural in the latter domain, extrastructural in the former. Finally, though formally subordinate to men in the domestic domain, informally women dominate and control them. Moreover, women achieve their superordinate position because typically men are psychologically dependent on them. The Cultural Systems of Gender

For any domain, but especially for relations between the sexes, every culture, including Burmese culture, consists of many different and often conflicting propositions. Hence, I wish to emphasize that the cultural propositions that make up the two cultural systems described below—the Ideologies of the Superior Male and the Dangerous Female—constitute only one set within the total range of cultural propositions that govern the relations between the sexes in village Burma. I have singled out this narrow set for four reasons. First, the propositions that compose the first of these cultural systems are inconsistent with or counter to the social system of male-female relations, a state of affairs at odds with the traditional conception of the relation between social and cultural systems, according to which cultural systems are both "models of" and "models for" the social system (C. Geertz 1973: 93-94). The inconsistency constitutes a strong challenge to the dominant conception of cultural reproduction. (This problem has been noted by others as well, e.g., Barth 1987: ch. 11.)

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Second, the propositions composing the second cultural system are not only highly threatening to the male actor but also empirically undemonstrable or else demonstrably false, so the internalization of this system represents a strong challenge to any theory of cultural internalization and hence of cultural reproduction. Third, both cultural systems are ideologies, and because a cultural ideology is a type of cultural system with special properties (as we shall see later), these systems pose a special problem for such a theory. Finally, most of the propositions composing these two cultural ideologies have an astonishingly wide cross-cultural distribution, so any valid explanation for their internalization must be applicable not only to Burma but to many, if not most, other human societies as well (including North American and European societies). Before describing these ideologies, let me introduce two caveats. First, the propositions that compose the ideologies were culled piecemeal from both traditional texts and the statements of (mostly male) villagers. Their organization into two analytically distinct and internally integrated cultural systems is my own construction. If the ideologies also constitute systems for the villagers, they probably do so at an unconscious level—not in the sense that a repressed idea is said to be unconscious but in the sense that a grammar is said to be unconscious. Second, Burmese cultural norms did not permit me, a male, to explore sexual and gender issues with other than a small number of atypical females. To the extent that my description of these ideologies is based on verbal reports rather than traditional texts, it mostly reflects the views of males. The Ideology of the Superior Male Males, according to the cultural ideology of the Superior Male, are superior to females because of their sexual anatomy and hpoun. The Burmese regard the penis as a "noble" organ, a "golden flower," and the vagina as "ignoble" and polluting. Hpoun, an ineffable psychospiritual essence that is possessed only by males (and a

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famous female disciple of the Buddha), is usually translated as "glory" but is perhaps more accurately glossed as "charisma" (although Anderson [1990] explicitly rejects this gloss for the analogous Javanese concept). Since males alone are born with hpoun, they are innately higher than females intellectually, morally, and spiritually. The intellectual superiority of males is attested to by Burmese ethnopsychology. Intelligence is determined by (among other things) the size of the intestines. Whereas the male intestine is thirty-five yards in length, the female intestine is only thirty-one. The lower intelligence of women is perhaps best summed up in the well-known Burmese proverb "If a woman had no nose, she would eat excrement." The moral superiority of males is evinced by the alleged prevalence among females of three moral defects: greed, "evil practices, and lust. A newspaper columnist described the first defect very well: "Women are never satisfied with their gold and silver ornaments, however valuable they may be. Although they may be worth hundreds of thousands of kyat [the Burmese currency], they still want more. This is the nature of women. They are full of greed" (Bahosi, November 13,1961). That females are prone to evil practices is taught by a few traditional texts. According to the Dhammathat, a compendium of Burmese customary law, these practices include consuming intoxicating liquor, loitering about the entrance to the house, habitually visiting others, making their husbands angry, neglecting domestic duties, and taking lovers (Maung Maung 1963: 50). Taking lovers is not only an evil practice but also an expression of female lust, the third moral defect of females. Although males regard the libido as the most powerful of all biological drives, they also, in accordance with Buddhist teachings, regard it as a base drive. If Buddhist monks are moral virtuosos because of their ability (among other things) to control their sexual passion, females are morally defective because their sexual appetite, like that of premodern Western women (e.g., Shorter 1982: 12-13), is insatiable.

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The last proposition is taught by a variety of traditional texts, both sacred and secular. Among the former, the Culla-Paduma Jataka is perhaps the most prominent because it is the basis of a famous drama in the repertoire of the Burmese classical theater. This Jataka tale recounts the story of a princess who falls passionately in love with and seduces a man who has no arms, legs, nose, or ears. In the drama one of the characters accounts for the seemingly bizarre behavior of the princess by observing that the strength of the female libido is "as wide as the ocean and as intense as a roaring fire" (Htin Aung 1937: appendix V). The Lokaniti, a compendium of Burmese secular lore, is equally insistent on this point, asserting that a woman's sexual passion is eight times stronger than a man's (Sein Tu 1962: 355). The spiritual superiority of males is attested to by their special place in Buddhist teaching and practice. The Buddhist initiation ceremony (hsimbyu) and induction into the Buddhist monastic order (sangha) are both restricted to males. Moreover, rebirth as a male is a sine qua non for the attainment of the three highest levels of spiritual achievement—sainthood, Buddhahood, and nirvana. In addition to proclaiming the superiority of males, this cultural system draws a practical moral from that putative fact: because males are nobler than females, it is only proper that they should have authority over them. As in southern Europe (e.g., Saunders 1981), husbands should have authority over wives, who in turn should serve and obey them. The duties of the wife are summarized in the Dhammathat: "rising from bed before the husband rises; retiring to bed after he has done so; taking his instructions for her day's work; carrying out his behests according to his wishes; speaking to him in a pleasant and affectionate way; and providing against the inclemencies of weather for the husband's comfort" (Maung Maung 1963: 50). To summarize, the Ideology of the Superior Male consists of two elements, one descriptive, the other normative. Descriptively, this cultural system proclaims that males are innately superior to females. Normatively, it proclaims that because of their superior-

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ity, it is the males' right to exercise authority over females, and the females' duty to remain subordinate to them. The Ideology of the Dangerous Female According to the cultural ideology of the Dangerous Female, females possess two sets of characteristics that pose a dangerous threat to males, one moral, the other sexual. Construing each set as a subsystem, I shall designate one the Ideology of the Morally Dangerous Female and the other the Ideology of the Sexually Dangerous Female. Among the moral defects attributed to females, treachery is especially prominent. In the words of a well-known proverb, women are one of the "four things that cannot be trusted"; the others are thieves, rulers, and the boughs of trees. According to another proverb, women are one of the "three crooked things"; the other two are Brahmins and rivers. And according to The Lokaniti (1962: 279), women, like fire, water, serpents, and royal kinsmen, "should be approached with great circumspection; for they may take life in an instant." The same sentiments are expressed in the sacred texts of Buddhism. Consider, for example, the following quotations from the Andabhuta Jataka: Tis nature's law that rivers wind; Trees grow of wood by law of kind; And, given opportunity, All women work iniquity. (The Jataka 1:151) A sex composed of wickedness and guile, Unknowable, uncertain as the path Of fishes in the water—womankind Hold truth for falsehood, falsehood for the truth! (155) Female treachery is dangerous, among other reasons, because it is deployed to usurp the males' legitimate right of domination and control. If women cannot achieve power over men by fair means, they may resort to foul ones, including witchcraft, as in the case of medieval Christianity (McLaughlin 1974: 254-55). She may, for

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instance, insert a betel nut in her vagina, grind it up after it has absorbed her vaginal secretions (preferably menstrual blood), and then feed it to her husband with his meal. Because the husband thereby loses much of his power, her control over him is assured. Most often, however, she can achieve the same result by means of her sexual allure. Like the wife in ancient Greece (Reik 1957: 64), the Burmese wife need only employ her "sexual wiles"—tradition enumerates no fewer than forty—to entice her husband into subjugation. That being so, it is prudent for a man to heed such proverbs as "Don't show affection to your wife lest she take advantage of you" and "A woman is like an ox; one should not display affection to either" (Maung Maung 1963:11-12). The epitomization of the sexually enticing, male-subjugating female is represented by a class of female spirits known as ouktazaun. Because of sins committed in a previous existence, these spirits must guard the buried treasure of the future Buddha. To escape this lonely fate, some of them assume the guise of an alluring woman and entice a man to fall in love with them. Should the unfortunate male, unable to resist the spirit's attraction, have sexual intercourse with her, he will die and must then share her task. Even if he resists her enticements, however, he leads a living death because his sexual obsession drives him mad (Spiro 1967: 174-194). This constellation of beliefs, without its Buddhist trappings, is not only similar to the traditional European belief in succubi but is virtually identical with the "widow ghosts" belief reported for northeast Thailand (Mills 1995). That the threat of widow ghost attacks represents, according to Mills, "an expression of [villagers'] sense of vulnerability in their dealings with the wider society" and of their questioning of "the moral authority of change, or 'progress/ as defined by the dominant or 'modern* Thai culture" (249) is an example of the current "political economy" interpretation of gender ideologies. According to the Ideology of the Sexually Dangerous Female, women's sexuality is intrinsically as well as potentially harmful to males, for females possess three dangerous sexual characteris-

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tics; an extraordinarily powerful libido, a polluting vagina, and sexual allure. According to Burmese ideology, as in the ideology found in medieval Europe (Kramer and Sprenger 1971), the powerful female libido, besides indicating the moral inferiority of females, drives women to sexual infidelity, which jeopardizes male authority and control. This thesis in enunciated in any number of traditional texts, including Paduma, a play taken from Thejataka. When Paduma's wife seduces her physically grotesque lover, Paduma's friend Crocodile attempts to console him. "It is the habit of women to fall in love with any man that they can see. They are ready to cling to any man as husband; they are attracted as by a magnet. Just as the ocean is ever receiving the great rivers and various streamlets, without turning away one, a woman is ready to welcome all men, whether they be old, or sick, or poor, or bad" (Htin Aung 1937: 225). In a final speech, Paduma himself proclaims that the libido of women is so strong that "they will [even] kill their rightful husbands the moment they want a new lover. Their lust blinds them. . . . They receive all, just as a roaring fire receives all rubbish.... One is more certain of one's ability to drink up all the waters of the ocean, than of the faithfulness of one's wife" (231). A similar view is expressed in The Lokaniti. All rivers turn out to be winding All forests are full of kindling All women, given a secluded place, End by sinning. (Sein TU 1962: 233) Buddhist teachings are no different from these secular teachings. Consider, for example, the following passages from the Andabhuta Jataka. You couldn't be certain of a woman, even if you had her inside you and always walked about with her. No woman is ever faithful to one man alone. (Thejataka, 1:154) As greedily as cows seek pastures new, Women, unsated, yearn for mate on mate. (155)

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Females are even more sexually dangerous because of their sexual anatomy. The vagina is polluting, so any contact with it is a threat to a male's well-being. Vaginal discharges, particularly menstrual blood, are especially dangerous. Still, unlike women in many societies, Burmese women are not secluded for the duration of their menstrual periods. Although direct contact with the vagina endangers a man's physical strength and sexual potency, even indirect contact is sufficient to endanger his spiritual power (hpoun). Thus, since the head is the most sacred part of the body, if a woman's genitalia chance to be higher than a man's head—if she stands, for example, while the man is sitting, or if she is in the upper room of a house while he is in a lower room—his hpoun can be seriously diminished. Because hpoun is located in the man's right shoulder, it may also be diminished by a woman's touching that shoulder or even by her standing to his right. Any object that has been in contact with the female genitalia is also dangerous. It is dangerous for a man to use a toilet or a bathroom that is also used by a woman, to touch a woman's sarong, or to walk beneath a clothesline on which her sarong is hanging. Similarly, as among the Egyptian Bedouin (Abu-Lughod 1986), a man is endangered if his sarong is laundered or ironed together with a woman's or placed on a shelf or in a closet with a woman's. Finally, females are sexually dangerous because of their sexual allure. Women are sexually desirable, and sex is man's strongest desire, so men wish to have sexual intercourse with them. If even indirect contact with the vagina is harmful for a male, however, direct contact is all the more so, and penile penetration of that polluting organ is the most harmful of all. It constitutes a threat to a man's physical strength, his sexual potency, and his spiritual power all at once. That is the reason for the well-known admonition of the Buddha to a monk who had resumed intercourse with his former wife: "It were better for you, foolish man, that your male organ should enter the mouth of a terrible and poisonous snake than it should enter a woman. It were better for you, foolish man, that your organ should enter the mouth of a black snake,

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than it should enter a woman. It were better for you, foolish man, that your male organ should enter a charcoal pit, burning, ablaze, afire, than it should enter a woman" (The Book of the Discipline, pt. 1, p. 36). In this regard, Burma, viewed comparatively, is hardly an extreme case. Among the Etoro, a tribal group in Melanesia, female sexuality is so dangerous that men are prohibited from having sexual relations with women for as many as 260 days a year (Kelleyl976:43-49). Sexual intercourse is dangerous for males not only because of female physiological and anatomical characteristics but also because of the males' own sexual physiology. Because semen is believed to be the source of male power, both physical and spiritual, and because the supply of semen is held to be limited, each act of sexual intercourse diminishes a man's power. This is a very widespread belief, one strongly held by Western physicians until the twentieth century, which is one of the reasons they opposed "excessive" masturbation (Bottero 1991). In the modern world, it remains especially salient in India (Alter 1994; Carstairs 1957: 84; O'Flaherty 1973: 261-279). According to the Ideology of the Dangerous Female, males can seldom avoid some kind of harm caused by women. According to one of its subsystems (that of the Morally Dangerous Female), women are harmful to men intentionally; because of their treachery (including sexual treachery) they are a threat to male domination and control. According to the other subsystem (that of the Sexually Dangerous Female), even the most benign women harm men unintentionally; their sexuality makes them willy-nilly a threat to male physical, sexual and spiritual power. Now that two cultural systems governing male-female relations in Burma have been described, we are confronted with two questions, one empirical, the other theoretical: To what extent, if any, are these systems internalized? and, If they are internalized, how might we explain their internalization? Before addressing these questions, it is important to document my oft-repeated contention that both systems have a wide, if not universal, distribution. When the systems are situated in a cross-cultural context, it

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becomes evident that they are not uniquely Burmese but are variants on widespread human themes. Recognition of this fact will necessarily influence, if not determine, the kind of theory required to explain their internalization. A Comparative Perspective There are widespread cross-cultural parallels to the two Burmese ideologies. Let me present a small sample. The sample is nonrandom in that it is mostly confined to certain culture areas—Europe, South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Melanesia—in which I have had a special interest. It is opportunistic in that within these areas it includes only those examples that, for one reason or another, attracted my attention. The Ideology of the Superior Male That males are superior to females intellectually, morally, and spiritually, is proclaimed by cultural ideologies in numerous societies in many parts of the world, including Spain (Brandes 1981) and southern Europe generally (Saunders 1981), medieval Europe (Kramer and Sprenger 1971), China (Hsu 1971), Thailand (Potter 1977), Malaysia, specifically Negeri Sembilan (Peletz 1995), India (Kapadia 1966), Egypt, specifically among the Bedouin (AbuLughod 1986), Morocco (Dwyer 1978; Rosen 1978), and the Muslim Middle East generally (Patai 1971; Strick 1990), and New Guinea, among the Manam (Lutkehaus 1982) and Bena Bena (Langness 1974). Especially striking are proverbs regarding female inferiority that are reminiscent of the Burmese proverbs previously quoted—for example, these proverbs from the Druze, a religious minority in the Middle East: "A woman is like a hen, she sees only what is in front of her," and "Ten women equal one man" (Strick 1990:176). As in Burma, ideologies of male superiority frequently include the proposition that since males are superior to females, they ought to be dominant over them. As well as being virtually uni-

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versal in peasant societies (Michaelson and Goldschmidt 1971), this proposition is also found in New Guinea, among the Bena Bena (Langness 1974), Brazil, among the Mundurucu (Murphy and Murphy 1974), Java (H. Geertz 1961; Jay 1969), Sri Lanka (Ryan 1953), India (Mandelbaum 1970), France (Rogers 1975), Spain (Brandes 1981), Greece, among the Sarakatsani (Campbell 1964), and southern Europe generally (Saunders 1981) and the Muslim Middle East (Mernissi 1975; Sabbah 1984). The prevalence of this proposition in Latin America is so well known that it requires no documentation here. The contradiction that we observed in Burma between the Ideology of the Superior Male and behavior in the domestic domain, in which males have authority but females have power, is found in many other societies, including Greece (Friedl 1967), Java (H. Geertz 1961; Jay 1969: Brenner 1995), Spain (Gilmore and Gilmore 1979), Portugal (Hollos and Leis 1985), France (Rogers 1975; Rapp 1975; Segalen 1983), Italy (Cornelisen 1976), and southern Europe generally (Saunders 1981) and among the Kafyar of Nigeria (Netting 1969), the Swahili of Mombasa (Swartz 1982b, 1983), and the Mundurucu (Murphy and Murphy 1974). In addition, Sanday (1981) and Whyte (1978) report the same finding in their large-scale cross-cultural statistical studies. What Fftedl, one of the first scholars to report this inconsistency, wrote in her study of Greece can be said to hold more generally for all these societies. Since "pragmatically [the family] is the most significant social unit," male domination in the public domain hides the "reality" of female domination in the family (1967: 97). Various observers have confirmed this in specific cases. Kafyar males "erect a considerable symbolic edifice" to proclaim their superiority, but it is a "poor defense" when they encounter women in the daily domestic round. The male can only fall back on his physical difference and the "symbol of his power," the penis. But that is not entirely comforting, because "behind this brave assertion whispers the psyche of his society, the mythic presentiment, that perhaps she has that, too" (1969:1045). Similarly, among the Swahili of Mombasa men are normatively viewed as dominant,

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but women can control the men because men are emotionally dependent on them (Swartz 1982b, 1983). Women are likewise "inferior in the ideology of Mundurucu men, [but] they are also threatening Women once held power and can regain it if male vigilance is relaxed. . . . They are denied formal authority, but it is conceded that they have potential power" (Murphy and Murphy 1974: 111). Throughout southern Europe, too, it is because males are dependent on females that women hold "behind-thescenes power ... in family and society" (Saunders 1981: 459). In the case of Burma's Southeast Asian neighbors, the pattern of male authority and female power is widespread. In Java, even though Islam supports an extreme patriarchal ideology, "the wife makes most of the decisions; she controls all the family finances, and although she gives her husband formal deference and consults with him in major matters, it is usually she who is dominant. Strong-willed men may have a relationship of equal partnership with their wives, but families actually dominated by the man are exceedingly rare" (H. Geertz 1961: 46). In this regard, Southeast Asia seems to stand in dramatic contrast with South Asia and the Middle East, in which, according to most observers, husbands are dominant not only in ideology but also in reality (see Ryan [1953: 157-158] for Sri Lanka, Mandelbaum [1970: 74-79, 85-87] for India, and Mernissi [1975] and Bouhdiba [1985: ch. 13] for the Middle East). Suppressed though the South Asian and Middle Eastern woman may be as a wife, she emerges triumphant as a mother. Nowhere in Southeast Asia is the mother elevated, as she is in India and Sri Lanka, "to a realm of near-worship by beholden and adoring males" (Ryan 1953: 157-158), let alone to the status of divinity itself. In India and, to a lesser extent, Sri Lanka she is represented in the powerful mother goddesses (Obeyesekere 1984: 444). Although mother goddesses are not found in Islam, in Middle Eastern societies, there is a veritable "cult of the mother" (Bouhdiba 1985: 214). Indeed, because the mother "constitutes the pivot and epicentre of life," Bouhdiba characterizes the Middle East as the "kingdom of the mothers" (225).

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The Ideology of the Dangerous Female That women are untrustworthy—that they use guile and deceit to control and dominate men—is a widespread male belief, found in China (Feuerwerker 1975), Nepal (Bennett 1983), Tibet (Gielen 1985), Thailand (Kirsch 1982), ancient and modern India (Singh 1967; Carstairs 1956), Sri Lanka (Ariyapala 1956), medieval Europe (Gold 1985; Kramer and Sprenger 1971), sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France (Segalen 1980; Hunt 1970), Spain (Brandes 1980, 1981; Pitt-Rivers 1954, 1966; Douglass 1984), Greece, among the Sarakatsani (Campbell 1966), southern Europe generally (Saunders 1981), ancient Israel (Phillips 1984), the ancient Middle East (Phillips 1984), and the modern Middle East (Mernissi 1975). The Burmese variant of this ideology looks moderate when placed in this comparative perspective. In ancient India, for example, women were depicted in the Maitreyani Samhita as "on a par with dice and drink, a major social evil, the spirit of untruth, the genius of darkness" (Singh 1967: 74-75). These sentiments were echoed—and magnified—by Manu, the great Indian lawgiver. "Woman is as foul as falsehood itself. When creating them, the lord of creatures allotted to women a love of their beds, of their seat and ornaments; impure thoughts, wrath, dishonesty, malice and bad conduct" (75). In Sri Lanka, the traditional view of females, as expressed in some central texts, is summarized thus by Ariyapala (1956: 301302). "Women deceive the men, therefore they are a delusion. They cannot be relied upon, then they are like a mirage. They are a mine of danger, sorrow and illness. . . . They are never satisfied with the number of men they have. . . . Their thirst for sensual pleasure, ornament and decoration can never be satiated.... They are the cause of all ills, and embrace men for their own gains. . . . They are always looked upon as full of wiles, which are said to be 64 in number. . . . They are whirlpools in the ocean of life, a taproot of the creeper of craving, a door open to purgatory." In Islam, the views of the great imam, Ali, are still very much

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contemporary, as Bouhdiba (1985) has shown. Women, according to Ali, "cause great anxiety. The most virtuous among them are libertines. But the most corrupted among them are whores! . . . They have three qualities particular to miscreants: they complain of being oppressed, whereas it is they who oppress; they make oaths, whereas they are lying; they pretend to refuse men's solicitations, whereas they desire them most ardently. Let us beg the help of God to emerge victorious from their evil deeds. And preserve us in any case from their good ones" (Bouhdiba 1985:118). In contemporary Andalusia, the "traditional way of thinking about women," which is still very much alive, is summed up, according to Pitt-Rivers (1966: 68), in the following quotation from the seventeenth-century priest Father Joseph Haro. "Women have naturally the ambition to attain command and liberty, and they wish to invert the order of nature, attempting (even though it may involve the greatest cruelties) to dominate men." Brandes (1981: 218) puts this Andalusian view even more strongly. In the Spanish town of San Bias, "it is a curious paradox [that although] women are restrained and restricted by their society, men nonetheless feel severely threatened by them, or at least they are encouraged by their ideology to feel so. The male ideological posture accords women considerable superiority. It is an ideology that reverses the state of affairs that exists in the realm of actual behavior. Women are portrayed as dangerous and potent, while men suffer the consequences of female whims and passions." In seventeenth-century France, too, "it was held that women used craft and deception to gain the upper hand over their husbands while ostensibly they continued to go through all the conventional rituals of submission" (Hunt 1970: 74). In contemporary Greece the Sarakatsani believe that a "woman has a natural predisposition to evil. Her powers of sexual attraction are of a supernatural order. Even unconsciously she may lure a man to disaster without a glance or gesture" (Campbell 1966: 156). In southern Europe generally, "women are often likened to the devil, or are thought to have close relations with him. Evilness is sometimes considered to be the very nature of women, as suggested by the

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Piedmontese proverb 'from the sea comes salt, and from the woman comes evil/ . .. Trouble is certainly the work of women: 'There is no mess in the world that doesn't have a woman behind it.' ... Female sexuality is dangerous, powerful, and anxietycreating" (Saunders 1981: 445). That the vagina is dangerous to males, a salient conception in the Burmese ideology, is equally salient among the Hagen (Strathern 1972) and Sambia of New Guinea (Stoller and Herdt 1982), the Mehinaku of Brazil (Gregor 1985), and the Shan of Thailand (Tannenbaum n.d.) and in northeast Thailand generally (Mills 1995), India (Kakar 1978), Iran (Baraheni 1977), the Middle East (Bouhdiba 1985), many parts of Africa (Ardener 1973), southern Europe (Lederer 1978), and modern Western societies generally (Horney 1932), as well as in earlier periods—in medieval Europe (Kramer and Sprenger 1971), Greece (Phillips 1984), Egypt, and North Africa. In many of these societies, the vagina is viewed as more dangerous than it is viewed in Burma, and male reactions are all the more fearful. In India, for example, "the menace implied in the female genitalia may become concrete, magnified in horrific imagery [in legends and myths]—a chamber full of poison, causing death in the sexual act, or jaws lined with sharp teeth" (Kakar 1978: 92). Among the Sambia, males avoid not only the vagina, both directly and indirectly, but also the paths and places frequented by females so as to prevent the "woman's lethal body, body fluids or other products, smells and glances being absorbed into a man's food, possessions or insides" (Stoller and Herdt 1982: 38). Because the vagina is dangerous, in many societies, including Burma, contact with a woman's skirt is dangerous. Here I might instance such New Guinea groups as the Enga (Meggitt 1964), Maring (Buchbinder and Rappaport 1976), Hagen (Strathern 1972), and Bena Bena (Langness 1974), as well as Egyptian Bedouin (Abu-Lughod 1986), Thai (Thitsa 1980; Mills 1995), and Gypsies (Okely 1975). For the same reason, in many societies, as in Burma, it is dangerous for the vagina to be higher than a man's head. This is true among the Maring (Buchbinder and Rappaport 1976),

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Etoro (Kelley 1976), and Bena Bena (Langness 1974) of New Guinea, the Shan of Thailand (Tannenbaum), and the Thai (Thitsa 1980; Mills 1995), among others. The conception that the vagina is repulsive is found among the Mehinaku of Brazil (Gregor 1985), the Zuni (Kenagy 1982), and the Jains of India (Goonasekere 1986) and in modern Western societies (Kubie 1937), as well as Iran (Baraheni 1977) and many other parts of the Middle East (Bouhdiba 1985). Jain monks, for example, view the vagina as "a spittoon which is good enough only for spitting and vomiting into" (Goonasekere 1986:102). In Iran the aversion to the vagina is so strong that it leads to a preference for anal intercourse; consequently, the female exists "to satisfy the homosexual whims of the man"; in effect, she is "turned into a sodomized boy" (Baraheni 1977: 47). Elsewhere in the Middle East this aversion motivates the males' insistence that female pubic hair be shaved; and shaving the pudenda "means rediscovering the boyish girl in the very temple of femininity" (Bouhdiba 1985: 204). The conception that menstrual blood is dangerous is found among the Enga (Meggitt 1964), Hagen (Strathern 1972), and Bena Bena (Langness 1974) of New Guinea, the Mehinaku of Brazil (Gregor 1985), the Cherokee (Fogelson 1990), the Shan of Thailand (Tannenbaum n.d.), the Thai (Thitsa 1980), Gypsies (Okely 1975), Egyptian Bedouin (Abu-Lughod 1986), and orthodox Jews ("Niddah," 1905), and in China (Ahern 1975), Nepal (Bennett 1983), India (Kakar 1978; Shweder 1985), Spain (Brandes 1980) and other modern Western societies (Deutsch 1944), and, in fact, throughout the world (Buckley and Gottlieb (1988). Motivated by fearful conceptions of the vagina, the conception of sexual intercourse as dangerous is widespread. It is found among the Maring (Buchbinder and Rappaport 1976), Hagen (Strathern 1972), and Sambia (Stoller and Herdt 1982) of New Guinea, the Mehinaku (Gregor 1985), and the Zuni (Kenagy 1982) and in China (Feuerwerker 1975), Thailand (Thitsa 1980), India (Carstairs 1967; Edwards 1983; Kakar 1987,1989; O'Flaherty 1973, 1980), Sri Lanka (Obeyesekere 1981), ancient Greece (Phillips

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1984), seventeenth-century Rrance (Hunt 1970), Spain (Brandes 1980), the United States (Masters and Johnson 1966), and the West more generally (Homey 1932; Lederer 1968). That the female libido is virtually insatiable is a cultural proposition found throughout the world (Manson 1994: ch. 4). More specifically, it is found in Thailand (van Esterik 1982), ancient India (Kapadia 1966), contemporary India (Roy 1975; Kakar 1978), Nepal (Parish 1987), Java (H. Geertz 1961), Malaysia, specifically Kelantan (Nash 1974) and Negeri Sembilan (Peletz 1995), medieval Europe (Kramer and Sprenger 1971), sixteenth-century France (Segalen 1980), Spain (Douglass 1984; Brandes 1980,1981; Dreissen 1983), and, more generally, in pre-nineteenth-century Europe (Shorter 1982; Stone 1979), and many Christian societies (Ruether 1974), as well as among the Sambia (Herdt 1981), the Bena Bena (Langness 1974), the Tïobrianders (Malinowski 1929) of Melanesia, and the Zuni (Kenagy 1982), and, in the Middle East, in ancient Israel (Phillips 1984), Iran (Vielle 1978), and Morocco (Dwyer 1978; Rosen 1978) and, more generally, among Middle Eastern Muslims (Mernissi 1975; Sabbah 1984; Berger 1964; Antoun 1968; Patai 1971) and the Druze (Strick 1990). In many of these societies this proposition is held in a more extreme form than it is in Burma. In the Muslim societies of the Middle East, the female is "the polarization of the uncontrollable, a living representative of the dangers of sexuality and its rampant disruptive potential. . . . The whole Muslim social structure can be seen as an attack on, and a defense against, the destructive power of female sexuality" (Mernissi 1975: 13-14). Again, according to a widely known fifteenth-century Muslim text, woman is never sated nor exhausted by copulation . . . . If one copulates, it seems, night and day, for years and years with a woman, she never reaches the point of saturation. Her thirst for copulation is never assuaged. . . . [Indeed] there are numerous young women... who desert their native land, exiling themselves in far countries in order to assuage their [sexual] desires and pursue their quest for [sexual] pleasure. They do

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not hesitate in their mad quest to destroy the reputation of their family, to trample on all that is sacred, to soil the family honor, and even sometimes to go as far as murder. (Sabbah 1984: 27, 34) In the view of many scholars, such Middle Eastern customs as purdah, infibulation, and Pharaonic (female) circumcision constitute attempts by males to control the otherwise uncontrollable sexuality of females (Iglitzin and Ross 1980; Wikan 1982; Eickelman 1981; Morsy 1978). Again, just as the "fantasy world of Hindu men is replete with the figures of older women whose [sexual] appetites debilitate a man's sexuality" (Kakar 1978: 94), and just as in Ttobriand fantasies "sexually rabid women" go so far as to rape and devour their own sons (Malinowski 1929:422-423), so, too. in pre-nineteenthcentury Europe, women were said to possess a "devouring sexuality" and were characterized as "furnaces of carnality" (Shorter 1982: 12-13). In this connection, Richard Burton writes, "Of women's unnatural, insatiable lust what country, what village does not complain" (Stone 1979: 495), to which Stone comments that Burton "was doing no more than repeating the conventional wisdom of the age." In many societies, as in Burma, the insatiable female libido is believed to lead women into infidelity. This belief is found, for example, in Spain (Brandes 1980,1981), medieval Europe (Kramer and Sprenger 1971), seventeenth-century Rrance (Hunt 1970), Java (H. Geertz 1961), Malaya (Hyman n.d.), Sri Lanka (Ariyapala 1956), and the Muslim Middle East (Berger 1964) and among the Druze (Strick 1990) and the Bena Bena (Langness 1974). The view of woman as a temptress who controls men by her feminine wiles is found in most of the societies referred to above, but no more so than in Western societies, where it can be traced as far back as Greek and Hebrew antiquity. In a late phase of Greek civilization, the female body was transformed "into an organ of danger and terror and the sexual attraction of women [was turned] into a malicious temptation" (Reik 1957: 64). In ancient Israel, the

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second-century Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs expresses a similar theme. "Pay no heed to the beauty of women... for evil are women, my children; and since they have no power or strength over man, they use wiles by outward attractions. . . . Women are overcome by the spirit of fornication more than men, and in their hearts they plot against men.... For a woman cannot force a man openly, but only by a harlot's bearing she beguiles him" (Phillips 1984: 49). Are These Cultural Systems Internalized?

We may now return to a question raised earlier: : To what extent, if any, are these cultural systems internalized? Although the many comparative examples leave little doubt that both systems are internalized in the societies referred to, to adduce evidence for that contention in the case of such a large and heterogeneous group would be an enormous task. In addressing this question I shall focus on Burma, with only passing references to other societies. Although I have no precise quantitative data, I am reasonably certain that both systems are internalized by the great majority of the males both in Yeigyi, the village that was the focus of my research, and in the adjacent villages, which I studied less intensively. Whether the systems are internalized by females is examined later. I shall begin with the Ideology of the Superior Male, dealing first with its descriptive dimension (the claim that males are superior to females) and then with its normative dimension (the claim that males have the moral right to dominate and control females). A powerful measure of the village males' internalization of the descriptive dimension of this ideology is their readiness to assent to what is, to our minds, its reductio ad absurdum—the maxim that "even a male dog is superior to a human female." It is not clear whether they construed this maxim as a trope or took it literally, but in either case, when I challenged the notion of male superiority, males frequently responded by quoting it. Less dramatically, if more frequently, its internalization is evinced by the

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responses of males when I asked them to account for differences I had observed between their behavior and that of the females. Thus, for example, women rarely engage in political and religious discussions because, the men say, their knowledge of such matters is limited owing to their lower intelligence. In a way reminiscent of medieval Christian theology (McLaughlin 1974: 255), men also attribute women's stronger belief in spirits, witches, and other supernatural matters to their lower intelligence. The Bahosi columnist quoted previously echoes this explanation: "A woman is a woman after all. However developed she may be mentally, she cannot escape the snare of deception." That the men also internalize the normative dimension of this cultural system is evinced in interviews in which they repeatedly stressed that the paramount duty of a woman is to serve her husband and satisfy his needs. She should have his meals prepared when he returns from the fields, see that his clothes are washed and fresh, and generally make his welfare her concern. Above all, she should respect him and obey his wishes. A few men said that a husband had the right to beat his wife if that was required to guarantee his authority, but I neither observed nor heard of such an incident. The most important evidence for their internalization of the Ideology of the Morally Dangerous Female consists of the assumption that when misfortune befalls a man and other causes are ruled out, the misfortune was caused by female treachery (usually by means of magic). That some men believe their wives have intruded themselves into their bodies, whence they are working witchcraft on them; that other men believe they have been seduced by lifethreatening spirits in the guise of sexually enticing women; and that virtually all the villagers (including the women) are convinced of the reality of these experiences—these are unambiguous measures, I submit, of their internalization of this ideology. (For descriptions of these experiences, see Spiro 1967: chs. 9-10). Evidence for the men's internalization of the Ideology of the Sexually Dangerous Female is abundant both in belief and in deed. That they internalize the propositions regarding the inten-

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sity of the female libido is perhaps most importantly evinced by their conviction that women are sexually insatiable. Although they themselves, they say, are sexually satisfied by a single act of intercourse, females, they claim, require at least three successive acts, and even then they are not satisfied. That is the reason, the men say, for a certain wedding custom: immediately following the nuptials, the groom's friends strengthen his penis by feeding him eggs and milk. That males internalize the propositions regarding the dangerous vagina is also a matter of both belief and deed. The most important behavioral evidence consists of their anxious compliance with the many culturally prescribed avoidances of the vagina, including avoiding sex with a menstruating woman, avoiding touching (or even looking at) the female genitalia , and making sure that no woman is either higher than or to the right of them. Their internalization of these propositions can be gauged by their firm conviction of the dangerous effects of vaginal pollution. The following example is as good as any. During the famous pagoda festival in Kyause, an otherwise dry river adjacent to the town (miraculously) flows to satisfy the needs of the pilgrims and their oxen for water. If, as sometimes happens, the river runs dry, that is because, so the men assured me, a woman had stepped across it, and her vagina had thereby polluted the river. The men's internalization of the proposition that sexual intercourse is dangerous (because of the polluting vagina and semen loss) is best evinced in deed. According to the self-reports of a sample of village men from whom I elicited descriptions of their sexual behavior, foreplay is brief and coitus is rapid. The sexual behavior of exorcists, whose traffic with malevolent supernaturals is a dangerous business, is even more circumspect: they suspend sexual activity altogether. The fear of female sexuality for any and all of the above reasons is documented for other societies as well. In India, to take but one example, "there is a secret conviction among many Hindu men that the feminine principle is ... treacherous, lustful and rampant with an insatiable, contaminating sexuality. This dark

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imagery breaks though in such proverbs as 'Fire is never satisfied with fuel, the ocean is never filled by the rivers, death is never satisfied by living beings and women are never satisfied with men'" (Kakar 1978: 93). Lest it be assumed that all these male beliefs, fears, and anxieties regarding female sexuality disappear with industrialization, urbanization, and secularization, the following passage by an American psychiatrist is worth pondering. "So we [modern Western males] do not fear women? then why so attracted to the complicated substitutes, to the love of men and boys and little children and what not else? then why the rapists and the wife-beaters and all those who are potent only with a woman defective or somehow inferior? why the elusive bachelor, the absentee husband and the ivory-tower hermit? then why no more taming of the shrew, and why the obedience to Mom?" (Lederer 1968: 283). The foregoing discussion of the internalization of the Burmese variants of the Ideologies of the Superior Male and the Dangerous Female is restricted to village males because, to my regret, I have few data on their internalization by females. Despite the crosscultural prevalence of these ideologies, little is known about the extent to which they are internalized by women. The two exceptions that I am aware of are Gillison's (1993) study of the Gimi, a people in the eastern highlands of New Guinea, and Peletz's (1995) description of the Malays of the state of Negeri Sembilan, both of whom report that females strongly internalize both ideologies. That I have little information regarding their internalization by Burmese village women is owing to cultural norms that prevented me, as a male, from discussing sexual matters with females. Still, for those readers who have a substantive interest in Burma and Southeast Asia, as well as those with a theoretical interest in this question, let me record what little information I have and offer my impressions and speculations. Most women with whom I discussed the Ideology of the Superior Male agreed that males are spiritually, if not morally and intellectually, superior to females. Thus, they said, it is altogether

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proper that males alone are eligible to become Buddhist monks, to attain Buddhahood, and to achieve nirvana. Their conviction that males are spiritually superior is one reason that virtually all village women said that they wished to be reborn as males in future incarnations. Nor is the belief in the spiritual superiority of males confined to untutored village women. According to Daw Mi Mi Khaing, the well-known author of The Burmese Family and The World of Burmese Women and one of the most westernized women in Burma, "There is no doubt in our minds. Spiritually, a man is higher than a woman. This is just not an abstract idea belonging to religious philosophy. Conviction of it enter[s] our very bones" (1961; see also Mi Mi Khaing 1984:16). Not only do village women acknowledge the spiritual superiority of males, but some of them accept the most extreme expression of male superiority, the apothegm that even a male dog is superior to a human male. When I remarked to Daw Kyi that she, at least, did not accept this dictum, she reacted—much to my astonishment—with visible anger. "But of course it is true," she responded. If the most sophisticated and certainly the most independent woman in the village of Yeigyi believes this to be true, we could plausibly assume that less sophisticated women believe it, too. I have no evidence to support that assumption, but there is much evidence that many village women internalize the highly negative cultural propositions about the vagina—particularly that it is dangerous and dirty. When a village woman becomes extremely angry with a man, she may as an ultimate gesture of her ire, raise her skirt to her knees. Hinting that she might expose her genitals is intended to arouse his fear. In the past, women reportedly did more than hint: they raised their skirts all the way (G. Brown 1925: 135). That many village women believe the vagina is dirty is evinced in a number of ways. If a woman wishes to speak derisively about another woman, she refers to her as a cunt. My village neighbor, a woman in her sixties, complained for all to hear that "these two

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cunts"—her granddaughters who lived with her—did nothing but eat and sleep. Similarly, women (like men) may vent their anger at a man by accusing him of cunnilingus or by challenging him to perform cunnilingus on her. Both are extreme insults. Although educated urban women may not use such expressions, many of them (according to female informants in Rangoon) nevertheless believe that the vagina is dirty because of its secretions, and in consequence they perceive themselves as dirtier than males. Village women, too, have negative attitudes toward vaginal secretions. While working in the paddy fields during the harvest season, when women and men work side by side, I not infrequently heard an angry woman respond to the snide remark of a man with such invectives as "dirty cunt licker" or "eater of cunt excrement" or "eat my cunt shit." Interestingly, the association of the vagina with dirt and feces is also found in societies that do not possess a formal ideology of the ignoble vagina, including, for example, the Zuni (Kenagy 1982) and middle-class white Americans (Kubie 1937). Again, the association of the vagina with anality is prominent among Western males who have an emotional aversion to the vagina (Horney 1932: 354; Greenacre 1968: 49). Although village males regard menstrual blood as polluting, I do not know whether this view is shared by females or whether it influences the females' negative attitudes toward the vagina, as it does in some other societies. The Bena Bena women of New Guinea (Langness 1974: 191) and high-caste Hindu women of Nepal, both of whom are reported to internalize cultural ideologies that denigrate the vagina, associate its denigration most especially with menstruation. Indeed, the Hindu women—in an expression reminiscent of the Burmese maxim—say that during their menstrual periods "we become like female dogs" (Bennett 1983: 215). The conscious attitudes of these women are not dissimilar from the unconscious attitudes of Western women without such ideologies. Generalizing from clinical data, Hélène Deutsch reports that Western women often unconsciously construe men-

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struation as a result of "being torn and dismembered internally" (1944: 150). Similarly, Theresa Benedek reports that "[Western} women connect menstruation with ideas of mutilation. Even mature women may dream about bloody acts which they commit or which are committed upon them about the time of menstruation" (1973: 218). Deutsch and Benedek being psychoanalytic psychiatrists, their clinical observations may have been influenced by preconceived psychoanalytic notions regarding females' castration fantasies. But even nonpsychiatric physicians have recorded correspondent findings. According to some estimates, premenstrual tension is the most frequent condition for which American women consult physicians. In some cases, their symptoms have an organic basis, still, as many as 90 percent of American women reportedly suffer from some form of dysmenorrhea (premenstrual syndrome) that has no organic basis (Shuttle and Redgrove 1978: 47). The gynecologist Valerie Jorgensen has remarked that "nearly 80% of the complaints which are seen in routine gynecologic practice have a strong psychosomatic component. One of the most frequent psychological complaints is that of vaginal discharge. The discharge usually defies any description . . . and therefore seems to defy cure [The patient] uses the discharge as a way of saying, 'Doctor, something is wrong with me because I feel unhappy as a woman/ . . . This patient asks you only to listen to her symptoms, provide symptomatic relief, and allow her to ventilate her fears while you support her emotionally through the changes she must make" (1973: 609). Considering these various ethnographic and medical reports, we might speculate that the negative attitudes of many Burmese village women toward the vagina are influenced by negative attitudes toward menstruation. Whether or not this is so, it is evident from this mostly speculative discussion that virtually every question that might be asked regarding women's internalization of the Burmese ideologies of sex and gender is still to be answered.

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The Problem Restated

That males in a large sample of human societies internalize two cultural systems that do not correspond to the social system of male-female relations, are contradicted by the facts on the ground, are factually untrue, or arouse much anxiety constitutes, I submit, a challenge to any theory of cultural internalization. Consider the case of Burma. Although the Ideology of the Superior Male admittedly corresponds to some important aspects of the social system of male-female relations, in some critical aspects it is the opposite of this system; and other discrepancies are even more pronounced in the case of the Ideology of the Dangerous Female. The Ideology of the Morally Dangerous Female is discrepant with the social system of male-female relations in virtually all respects to the best of my knowledge: the propositions that females employ treachery, including witchcraft and magic, to usurp the males' right of dominance do not correspond at all to the actual behavior of Burmese females. Similarly, the propositions constituting the Ideology of the Sexually Dangerous Female are discrepant with the biological facts of sex in virtually all respects: the harmful properties that Burmese attribute to the vagina, menstrual blood, and the like do not correspond at all to their objective properties. Considering that most of the propositions making up these cultural systems are either demonstrably false or empirically undemonstrable, on what possible grounds are they internalized by the males? Considering further that the propositions making up one of these cultural systems are highly threatening to, and arouse strong anxiety in, the males, then why in the world don't males simply reject them or, short of that, acquire them as cultural clichés? These two cultural systems, or others very similar to them, are prominent throughout much of the world, which makes these questions all the more challenging. Because the regnant theories of cultural internalization are, in my view, incapable of meeting the challenge or providing an adequate account of cultural internalization generally, the next four chapters are devoted to the explication of a theory that can do both.

3 Cultural Internalization Conscious Desires and Beliefs

Classical Theories of Cultural I nternal ization

Because three prominent theories of cultural internalization already exist, the need to formulate yet another stems from my belief that these theories are not only problematic but incapable of explaining the internalization of cultural systems of the type described in the previous chapter. Before formulating an alternative theory, let us examine the three "classical" theories: the Marxist, socialization, and cultural determinist theories. According to classical Marxist theory, the culture of any group legitimizes its social system (especially social stratification). There can thus be no single explanation for cultural internalization; rather, the explanation varies as a function of social class. Because the social system serves the "interests" of the ruling class—notably, wealth, power, and privilege—it is these interests that motivate the members of this class to internalize cultural systems (e.g., Alexander 1982; McMurtry 1978). Most social actors, however, are members of the "exploited" classes, to whose interests the social system is inimical and for whom cultural internalization hence constitutes "false consciousness" (e.g., Marcuse 1964; Worsley 1982: 44-45). This explanation clearly cannot apply to them. In their case, Marxist theory (and a few other theories) invokes other 45

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sociological explanations, such as consensual validation and the coercive power of the state. According to classical socialization theory, the social system serves the adaptive needs of the group (not merely the interests of the ruling class). Since cultural systems ensure the stability of the social system, compliance with them is a functional requirement of any society. That requirement is best satisfied if the cultural systems are internalized, and this in turn requires motivation. Motivation is achieved as a consequence of childhood socialization (e.g., Munroe, Munroe, and Whiting 1981; Whiting and Child 1953). Socialization produces motivation for cultural internalization by means of various techniques of social reinforcement— techniques that reward children for complying with cultural norms and values and that punish them for violating those norms and values. As a result of such social conditioning, cultural systems are internalized because children—in the memorable phrase of Erich Rromm-learn to "desire what objectively is necessary for them to do" (Rromm 1944: 381; italics in original). Unlike Marxist and socialization theories, the theory of cultural determinism repudiates any motivational account of cultural internalization. Because, according to this theory, culture and culture alone forms the cognitions, constructs the motives, and shapes the emotions of social actors (e.g., C. Geertz 1973; Kleinman and Good 1985; Lutz 1988; Lynch 1990; Rosaldo 1984; White and Kirkpatrick 1985), cultural novices possess no noncultural beliefs, desires, or emotions that might either interfere with or facilitate cultural internalization. Because "there is only one reality, and it is culturally constituted from top to bottom" (Ortner 1984:153), the transmission of cultural systems is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for their internalization. Although these three theories of cultural internalization have dominated this field of inquiry, each is problematic in some critical respects. These problems are particularly evident when the theories are applied to the internalization of the Burmese Ideologies of the Superior Male and the Dangerous Female. Considering that in some important ways Burmese men are dominated by

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women, it would be difficult to argue in accordance with Marxist theory that males internalize the Ideology of the Superior Male because it legitimizes their domination of females (although it does legitimize their formal authority over women). Similarly, since the Ideology of the Dangerous Female arouses their fear and anxiety, it would again be difficult to argue that males internalize this system because it serves their interests. The socialization theory fares no better. In that males are socialized to internalize the Ideology of the Superior Male, we would expect them to dominate the females, but in some crucial respects the opposite is the case. And since the internalization of the Ideology of the Dangerous Female is sexually and emotionally dysfunctional for the males, its internalization impugns the functionalist claims of this theory. The cultural determinist theory encounters similar difficulties. Although the Ideology of the Superior Male proclaims the males' right to dominate and control females, males are subordinate to and dependent on females in the domestic domain. It would appear, then, that at least some male motivations and behavior patterns are shaped by noncultural determinants. Admittedly, some of their emotional reactions to females—their concern about female infidelity, their anxiety about the vagina, and the like—are consistent with the Ideology of the Dangerous Female. Rrom this it might be concluded, (in accordance with the theory, that the transmission of the ideology is a sufficient condition for its internalization. Such a conclusion would be premature. If even nonthreatening cultural propositions are often acquired as clichés, or perhaps even rejected outright, how is it that cultural propositions as threatening as those composing the Ideology of the Dangerous Female are internalized by the males merely because they are transmitted to them? Is it not more likely that other determinants—of the kind stressed, for example, in the socialization theory—better account for their internalization? This is all the more likely when we consider that these same males reject or else acquire as clichés some of the central doctrines of Buddhism (Spiro [1970] 1982: sec. II), even though the doctrines are not threatening

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and even though Buddhism is Burma's most important cultural system. Because these and similar problems are also encountered in applying the three theories to other cultural systems, let me propose what I shall call the psychological preadaptation theory, which, in effect, constitutes an updating of culture-and-personality theory (e.g., Devereux 1978; Hallowell 1955; Kardiner 1945; La Barre 1970; Whiting and Child 1953). The proposed theory shares some features of each of the classical theories but differs from them in other respects. I shall state the common features and then explicate them. First, though agreeing with the claim that the transmission of cultural systems is a necessary condition for their internalization, the psychological preadaptation theory rejects the cultural determinist claim that it is also a sufficient condition. Second, in agreement with the Marxist and socialization theories, the psychological preadaptation theory holds that the internalization of cultural systems requires not only that the systems be transmitted but also that cultural novices be motivationally or cognitively predisposed ("psychologically preadapted") to internalize them. Third, though holding with the Marxist and socialization theories that for a few cultural systems the novices' predispositions can be explained by reference to their interests or their socialization, respectively, the psychological preadaptation theory contends that for many other cultural systems the former theories neither recognize nor account for the novices' critically relevant predispositions. A Model for the Construction of Private Beliefs

Because the term culture almost reflexively arouses a conventional mind-set that impedes new understandings, I propose to explicate the psychological preadaptation theory of cultural internalization by first examining the process by which actors construct private beliefs. The conditions that stimulate the construe-

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tion of private beliefs must be distinguished from the conditions under which they are held to be true. Consider, for example, our beliefs regarding such mundane objects as water, ice, the sun, apples, grass, and human beings. The construction of our beliefs— water is wet, ice melts, the sun rises in the east, apples fall from trees, grass is green, humans are bipedal—is typically instigated by our encounters with or experience of these objects. Typically, moreover, we hold these beliefs to be true on the basis of having induced them from these encounters and experiences. The construction of such beliefs is externally instigated and empirically grounded. Although the construction of these beliefs is instigated by an external, not an internal, stimulus, such as a wish or a desire, the beliefs may subserve some wish or desire after their construction. After the construction of the belief that apples fall from trees or that ice melts, we, motivated by the wish for safety, may refrain from sitting under apple trees when the fruit is ripe or from skating on ice when the temperature rises above the freezing point. That being so, I call these beliefs beliefs of practical knowledge. By contrast, the belief that grass is green or that humans are bipedal does not subserve any wish or desire—none, at any rate, that is of practical value. I call such beliefs, therefore, beliefs of pure knowledge. Since externally instigated beliefs, whether of pure or of practical knowledge, describe some object, condition, event, regularity, or state of affairs, I call them descriptive beliefs. Unlike these beliefs, whose construction is externally instigated, the construction of many other beliefs is internally instigated, that is, they are instigated by some wish or desire. I shall characterize their construction as motivationally instigated. Like externally instigated beliefs, they, too, may be classified as beliefs of either practical or pure knowledge. Let us begin with the former type. Suppose that, concerned about my dwindling assets, I desire to reduce my gasoline expenses, and suppose that to satisfy that desire I form the aim of driving to work by the shortest possible

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route. Suppose, moreover, that after experimenting with a variety of alternative routes, I discover from the readings on the odometer and the gas gauge what I believe to be the shortest route. Having constructed this belief, I subsequently follow that route when driving to work, thereby satisfying the desire that instigated its construction (the desire to reduce my expenses). Notice that although the construction of this belief was motivationally instigated, I hold it because it is empirically, not motivationally, grounded; that is, I hold it because its truth has has beeti empirically established by my mileage and fuel consumption. Virtually all other motivationally instigated beliefs of practical knowledge are also empirically grounded because their construction is motivated by some desire that requires action for its satisfaction. That is, they are constructed not because the belief itself satisfies the desire but because the belief designates the appropriate action by which it might be satisfied. My desire to reduce my automobile expenses is satisfied not by my belief that such-andsuch route is the shortest way to my office but by following the route designated by the belief. Because motivationally instigated beliefs of practical knowledge, unlike externally instigated ones, designate a course of action for satisfying a desire, they are not merely descriptive but also directive (to borrow a term from D'Andrade [1990a], who, however, employs it somewhat differently). That directive beliefs are empirically grounded is now perhaps self-evident, for were they not, the action they designate would not satisfy the desire that motivates their construction. If my belief that suchand-such route is the shortest way to work was not empirically grounded—if, instead, it was empirically false—then compliance with the belief would not satisfy my desire to reduce my expenses; that is, it would be a belief not of practical but of impractical knowledge. In contrast, the construction of motivationally instigated beliefs of pure knowledge is instigated by desires that are satisfied not by an action but by a belief. In other words, for desires of this type the belief is not a means for their satisfaction; rather, the be-

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lief itself satisfies the desire. I call such beliefs descriptive beliefs of pure knowledge. Suppose that, motivated by self-esteem, a scholar desires to believe that her scholarship is of great distinction, or suppose that a father, similarly motivated, desires to believe that his son is a talented athlete. Suppose, moreover, that they both construct their desired beliefs. Because the construction of the beliefs constitutes the action by which they are satisfied, I call descriptive beliefs of this type consummately. Typically, consummatory beliefs, like directive ones, are held to be true on empirical grounds. Although a scholar may desire to believe that she is a scholar of some distinction, she usually does not construct such a belief unless it is justified by her research accomplishments. Similarly, although a father may desire to believe that his son is a talented athlete, normally he does not construct such a belief unless it is justified by his son's athletic achievements. The construction of a consummatory belief is usually the product of a three-step process. The first step consists of the formation of an aim, that is, a projected course of action—for instance, a research program,—by which the scholar hopes to satisfy her desire. The second step consists of action in the external world—for instance, the actual conduct of research—that achieves her aim. Should this action produce evidence of her having achieved the aim—for instance, research publications of importance—the third step consists of action in the actor's internal world, that is, the modification of her self-representation to correspond to her accomplishments. This is a critical step because it is the modification of the actor's self-representation that leads to the construction of her desired belief. If the desire for a consummatory belief is peremptory (to use Klein's [1967] term)—that is, if the need to satisfy the desire is imperative—then such a belief may be constructed by the modification of the actor's self-representation alone, even without (or without sufficient) empirical justification. To be sure, the actor usually offers some plausible grounds for the belief, but

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they, patently, are rationalizations. In the event, the construction of a consummatory belief is not only motivationally instigated but also motivationally grounded. I call consummatory beliefs of this type beliefs of powerful emotional concern. Such beliefs are held to be true not because of compelling evidence that they are but because of a compelling need to believe that they are. (This will be recognized as William James's [(1897) 1956] "will to believe/') Thus far I have distinguished three paradigms for the construction of private beliefs: (1) beliefs whose construction is both externally instigated and empirically grounded, (2) beliefs whose construction is motivationally instigated but empirically grounded, and (3) beliefs whose construction is both motivationally instigated and motivationally grounded. There remains a class of beliefs that does not appear to fit any of these paradigms. I am referring to beliefs that are both painful and false and whose construction hence seems neither externally nor motivationally instigated, nor empirically or motivationally grounded. This class includes, but is not restricted to, paranoid and phobic beliefs. That anyone would possibly construct such painful beliefs, even though they are false, is paradoxical enough; that such beliefs are strongly resistant to change and often impervious to therapeutic efforts magnifies the paradox. As it happens, the paradox is more apparent than real, for beliefs of this type are a special instance of consummatory beliefs whose construction is both motivationally instigated and motivationally grounded. They are a special instance in that the motivation is unconscious. As clinical evidence indicates, their construction is motivated by the unconscious desire to prevent an even more painful, but unconscious, belief from entering consciousness, for so long as the former belief is regnant, the latter remains unconscious. We can see a classic example of this process in the case of Little Hans (S. Freud {1909] 1971), whose conscious fear of horses prevented the more painful unconscious fear of his father from entering consciousness.

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Table 3.1 Explanatory Paradigms for the Construction of Private Beliefs 1. Externally instigated beliefs a. Empirically grounded b. Motivationally grounded (empty class) 2. Motivational ly instigated beliefs a. Empirically grounded b. Motivational ly grounded

Let me summarize. Privately constructed beliefs may be explained by two sets of variables: (1) the conditions that stimulate their formation, and (2) the conditions for holding them to be true. As represented in Table 3.1, each set of variables can take two values. Thus their construction may be instigated by (1) an external object or event ("externally instigated") or (2) a desire ("motivationally instigated"). If a belief is externally instigated, it is held to be true because it has been experientially established ("empirically grounded"). If it is motivationally instigated, it is held to be true because (a) it is empirically grounded or because (b) the actor has some need to believe that it is true ("motivationally grounded"). The combination of these sets of variables, together with their independently varying values, generates four logically possible paradigms. Only three, however, are empirically instantiated, one—beliefs whose construction is externally instigated and motivationally grounded—being an empty class. The three empirically instantiated paradigms constitute the basis for the above typology of privately constructed beliefs. This typology, together with these paradigms, is schematically summarized in Table 3.2. The better to show the relevance of this analysis of privately constructed beliefs for the internalization of cultural propositions, let me emphasize some of the features of the typology. As indicated in Table 3.2, privately constructed beliefs—with only one exception, nonconsummatory beliefs of pure knowledge— satisfy some desire, although only those that are motivationally

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Table 3.2 Typology of Privately Constructed Beliefs 1. Descriptive beliefs a. Beliefs of practical knowledge: externally instigated and empirically grounded b. Beliefs of pure knowledge 1. Nonconsummatory: externally instigated and empirically grounded 2. Consummatory a. Beliefs of ordinary emotional concern: motivationally instigated and empirically grounded b. Beliefs of powerful emotional concern: motivational ly instigated and motivational ly grounded 2. Directive beliefs a. Beliefs of practical knowledge: motivational ly instigated and empirically grounded

instigated are constructed with that intention. These beliefs (with that one exception) may be said to be functional for the actor. Since beliefs of practical knowledge, whether descriptive or directive, satisfy a desire by guiding action, their functions are either adaptive or adjustive. On the other hand, since consummatory beliefs of pure knowledge themselves satisfy a desire, their functions may be characterized as ego integrative. (For an analysis of these three types of functions, see Kluckhohn and Murray 1953: ch. 1.) Again, except for descriptive beliefs of practical knowledge, whose functions, though recognized, are not intended, the functions of the other types are generally both intended and recognized. In the case, of a few consummatory beliefs whose construction is motivated by an unconscious desire, these functions are unconsciously intended, hence not recognized (see Spiro 1961). This model for the formation of privately constructed beliefs can help us understand the internalization of cultural propositions (and cultural systems) as culturally constituted beliefs.

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Cultural Internalization: The Psychological Preadaptation Theory 7s the Cultural Novice a Tabula Rasa? In the analysis of privately constructed beliefs, it was important to distinguish the conditions that instigate their construction from the grounds for their construction. Similarly, in the analysis of culturally constituted beliefs it will be important to make two analogous distinctions. First, we must distinguish the conditions that instigate the acquisition, that is, the learning, of cultural propositions, from the conditions that instigate their internalization, that is, the belief that they are true, proper, or right. With respect to their internalization, we must distinguish the conditions that instigate their internalization from the conditions under which their internalization is achieved. Taking these distinctions as our point of departure, I shall argue that although by definition cultural propositions are acquired as a consequence of their social transmission—that is, their acquisition is socially instigated— their transmission, though necessary, is not sufficient to instigate their internalization. (One exception is noted below.) To argue instead, in accordance with the theory of cultural determinism, that the transmission of cultural propositions is both necessary and sufficient for their internalization is to assume that cultural novices are empty organisms whose minds are tabulae rasae. On that assumption, all cognitions and desires are culturally constituted, making cultural novices "empty containers] for the products of group mentality," as Wolfgang Kohler (1937) put it in his critique of cultural determinism (quoted in Hallowell 1976: 203). In short, cultural novices are passive recipients of their cultural heritage. This assumption was rejected by Sapir more than seventy years ago on grounds that can hardly be improved upon today. In his rejoinder to Kroeber's classic formulation of cultural determinism (Kroeber 1917), Sapir wrote: "It is always the individual that really thinks and acts and dreams and revolts.... It seems to

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me that it requires a social [i.e., cultural] determinism amounting to a religion to deny to individuals all directive power, all culturemoulding influence" (A. L. 1917: 442). Sapir was addressing the issue of social action, not cultural internalization. Nevertheless, the grounds for rejecting the claim that virtually all cognitions and desires are culturally constituted are the same for both, although each also has its own special ground. In the case of cultural internalization, the special ground is that prior to their acquisition of culture, cultural novices possess not only biologically acquired desires but also exponentially acquired desires and beliefs. When cultural propositions are transmitted to them, the novices are usually active agents, not passive recipients, in the internalization process. Cultural novices are typically children, who, beginning at birth, and prior to their acquisition of culture, undergo a wide range of social experiences. These intense social (but precultural) experiences constitute, according to some theorists at least, a determinative influence on personality development. This sweeping claim admittedly is debatable, but a great deal of evidence supports the more moderate claim that from these experiences children acquire a variety of desires and construct any number of beliefs (e.g., Tiiriel 1994: 22). These desires and beliefs form the basis for many perduring motivational dispositions and cognitive orientations. Although in my judgment this moderate claim is well founded, it is not necessary for the present discussion. Children's other initial desires, besides their biologically acquired ones, and all their initial beliefs are not culturally, but experientially, constituted. That is, they are constructed by the children themselves from their own (usually social) experiences. I call these experientially acquired desires and beliefs precultural. An abundance of ethnographic evidence makes it possible to aver that when cultural propositions are transmitted to cultural novices, in some cases these propositions (1) are capable of satisfying the novices' precultural desires and (2) correspond to their precultural beliefs, whereas in other cases they (3) are irrelevant to, or else thwart, the novices' precultural desires and (4) are

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discrepant with their precultural beliefs. If either of the first two conditions obtains, it is highly likely that the cultural proposition will be internalized by the cultural novices because the novices are psychologically preadapted, either motivationally or cognitively, to internalize the proposition. On the other hand, if either of the latter two conditions obtains, it is most likely that such a proposition is acquired only as a cliché, if it is not rejected altogether. The concept of psychological preadaptation is analogous to the concept of biological preadaptation as the latter is used in evolutionary theory (Simpson 1950: 235-237; Dobzhansky 1957: 369—370), from which it has been borrowed. This concept is hardly foreign to anthropological theory, where it is a critical concept in acculturation theory. It has long been established (Beals 1953) that cultural elements of social group A are borrowed by social group B just in case they are cognitively consonant with the indigenous culture of B or else satisfy some heretofore unsatisfied or poorly satisfied desire of its members. If neither is the case, then typically these foreign cultural elements are not borrowed by B, or if they are, they are reinterpreted in accordance with its indigenous culture or with the desires and beliefs of its members. In emphasizing the critical importance of psychological preadaptation in the process of cultural internalization, I have merely taken a thesis that is virtually axiomatic in the study of acculturation (the process by which social actors internalize elements of a foreign culture) and extended it to the understanding of enculturation (the process by which cultural novices internalize elements of their indigenous culture). By making this extension, I am arguing that the filtering function performed by precontact beliefs and desires in the process of acculturation is performed, analogously, by precultural beliefs and desires in the process of enculturation. To explicate this argument, it is important to note that cultural propositions (the cultural elements with which we are concerned) comprise more than one type, and the principles that govern their internalization (like the principles that govern the construction of private beliefs) vary according to their type.

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Types of Cultural Propositions As with private beliefs, we may distinguish two broad types of cultural propositions, which I shall again designate descriptive and directive. (In large measure, these types parallel Swartz's "descriptive" and "procedural" understandings [Swartz and Jordan 1980: ch. 2].) Unlike with directive private beliefs, however, it is necessary to distinguish two types of directive propositions, which I shall designate prescriptive and optional, respectively. Because directive propositions of the optional type are already familiar to us from the discussion of private beliefs, I shall begin with directive propositions of the prescriptive type (which in large measure parallel Swartz's "evaluative understandings"). Prescriptive propositions mandate action. That is, they enjoin the performance of certain acts ("Love your neighbor as yourself"; "Share with the poor"), and they prohibit the performance of others ("Do not steal"; "Do not commit adultery"). In other words, directive propositions of the prescriptive type are propositions of moral obligation. Directive propositions of the optional type do not mandate action; instead, they guide action. That is, they designate the acts by means of which desires are satisfied ("A successful rice crop is achieved by irrigating the paddy fields"; "Nirvana is attained by the practice of meditation"). Like their analogous privately constructed beliefs, optional propositions are propositions of practical knowledge. Descriptive propositions neither mandate nor guide action, although they sometimes have important implications for both. Instead, they assert culturally proclaimed truths ("Jesus died for our sins"; "Light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles per second"). Like some, but not all, privately constructed descriptive beliefs, descriptive propositions are propositions of pure knowledge. Since cultural propositions are embedded in cultural systems, typically they are transmitted not in isolation but together with the other propositions that constitute such a system. For example, the descriptive proposition "Jesus died for our sins" is transmitted

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as part of a constellation of propositions, both descriptive and directive, that collectively compose the cultural system of Christianity. Although a self-proclaimed Christian might claim to accept the truth of—that is, may have internalized—all of the doctrines of Christianity, in fact he might have acquired its prescriptive propositions only as clichés. Rather than becoming bogged down in the complexity of entire cultural systems, in the following admittedly schematic analysis, I shall elucidate the principles of cultural internalization by applying them to cultural propositions alone. I shall argue that whereas cultural propositions are acquired as a consequence of their social transmission—that is, their acquisition is socially instigated—their internalization is governed mutatis mutandis by the same principles that govern the construction of private beliefs: with one exception, they are internalized if and only if their internalization is motivationally instigated, and they are empirically, cognitively, or motivationally grounded. It is only when these conditions are met that cultural propositions are reproduced. Internalization of Descriptive Propositions As propositions of pure knowledge, descriptive cultural propositions, like descriptive private beliefs, are either consummatory (they satisfy a desire) or nonconsummatory. Although in the latter case, their internalization is not motivationally instigated, they may still be internalized if, like externally instigated descriptive beliefs, they are empirically grounded. For example, although cultural novices may have no particular desire to know the chemical composition of water, when the scientific proposition that water consists of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen is transmitted to them, they usually internalize this proposition on the grounds that its truth has been, or they believe that it has been, empirically established. To be sure, not they but previous generations of scientists established its truth, but should they doubt its truth, they can put it to the empirical test themselves. Unlike with nonconsummatory propositions, the internaliza-

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tion of consummately propositions is motivationally instigated. As propositions of pure knowledge» their internalization is motivated by desires that require a belief, not action, for their satisfaction. Their internalization is itself the means by which such a desire is satisfied. Consequently, although their internalization is often empirically grounded, it may also, as with the construction of consummatory private beliefs, be cognitively or motivationally grounded. The most prominent consummatory propositions whose internalization is empirically grounded are scientific propositions; indeed, it is precisely because they are empirically grounded that it is often assumed that they are nonconsummatory. Although that is true with respect to some scientific propositions, in most cases their internalization is motivationally instigated, and by strong emotions to boot. Thus, if the internalization of a scientific proposition is instigated by the desire for knowledge (rather than the desire, for example, to earn a good grade or to satisfy a graduation requirement), then it is motivated by curiosity; and—as anyone who has observed the exploratory behavior of a child or, for that matter, that of a scientist, can testify—curiosity can be a powerful emotion indeed. For Tomkins (1962), a distinguished expert on emotion, curiosity—what he calls interest—is one of the nine "primary" affects. That the internalization of many scientific propositions is emotionally motivated is evinced by still other considerations, including the fact that often emotions are the critical determinant in their acceptance or rejection. Consider, for example, the frequent observation that scientific theories may be passionately held and, if challenged, passionately defended, or that theoretically anomalous findings may be forced into a procrustean conceptual bed to make them conform to a strongly held theory. Although the internalization of scientific propositions is often motivationally instigated, that does not mean, as is sometimes claimed, that they are internalized even if they are not empirically grounded. Emotional involvement may motivate individual scientists to propose or accept a theory whose empirical support is problematic, but the

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normative rules of science as a cultural institution usually ensure that such a theory will not survive the critical scrutiny of fellow scientists unless it is empirically grounded. A second type of consummatory proposition is one whose internalization is cognitively, rather than empirically, grounded. To illustrate this type let me turn from scientific to religious propositions. Suppose, for example, that a religious doctrine proclaims that the gods are just but not merciful. Suppose, too, that as a consequence of socialization experiences, children form the belief that parents are also just but not merciful. In the event, it is highly likely that they will internalize this proposition because, as cultural novices, they are cognitively as well as motivationally preadapted to internalize it—or so I shall argue. Suppose now that a group of children with the same kind of parents (just but not merciful) are taught that the gods are neither just nor merciful. Although the children acquire this doctrine, it is unlikely that they will internalize it, for though they are motivationally preadapted to believe in the existence of gods, they are neither motivationally nor cognitively preadapted to internalize a doctrine that postulates gods of this type—or so I shall once again argue. To explicate the rationale for these two arguments, let me begin with the not unwarranted assumption that parents—some to a greater, others to a lesser degree—fulfill the dependency needs of their children. As a consequence of having dependency needs fulfilled, children form a conception of, and acquire the desire for, superparent figures—"gods"—who also perform such a nurturing function, but with much greater efficiency and predictability than their parents ever performed it. Granting this suggestion, I propose that the children in the first group internalize the doctrine that the gods are just but not merciful because they are preadapted, both motivationally and cognitively, to internalize it. They are preadapted motivationally because its internalization satisfies their desire for nurturant, superparent figures. Although they would no doubt prefer that the gods be both just and merciful, this doctrine does not satisfy their desire completely; still, it

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satisfies it enough, and besides, they are also cognitively preadapted to internalize it. In brief, as a consequence of their experience with their parents, this group of children does not learn that parents are both just and merciful; rather, they learn that they are just but not merciful. Since children's conceptions of their parents—and, by extension, parent figures—are formed long before any religious doctrine is transmitted to them, for this group of children the doctrine that the gods are just but not merciful, is, I submit, cognitively compelling. That is so because the characteristics that it attributes to the gods (superparent figures) correspond to the characteristics that, based on their experience, these children already attribute to their parents and parent figures. Notice, however, that this doctrine is cognitively compelling not because, like scientific propositions, it is empirically grounded, but because, given the children's experience with their parents, it is cognitively grounded. That is, the fact that their parents are just but not merciful does not constitute evidence for the belief that the gods also possess these characteristics; rather, it creates an expectation that they do. Because the doctrine confirms the expectation, its internalization may be said to be cognitively grounded. We may now perhaps better understand why it would be unlikely for the second group of children to internalize the doctrine that the gods are neither just nor merciful. Although it is hardly conceivable that anyone, child or adult, would be motivated to internalize such a grim doctrine, if the doctrine was empirically or cognitively compelling, it might be internalized nonetheless. The doctrine, however, has neither type of support: it is not empirically confirmed by any evidence known to the children, nor does it correspond to their experientially acquired conception of their parents and parent figures. It is much more likely, therefore, that it would be either acquired as a cliché or else rejected altogether. The third type of consummately proposition is one whose internalization is motivationally grounded. To illustrate this type,

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let us consider once again the religious example. Suppose, according to the theology of some group, that the gods are both just and merciful, and suppose that parents in the group (like parents in the two previous groups) are just but not merciful. In the event, although this doctrine, like the previous doctrine, is neither empirically nor cognitively supported, it is highly likely that it would be internalized because, unlike the previous doctrine, its internalization is motivationally compelling. Even though their parents are not merciful, these children, like those in the other groups, might be expected to form the desire that they would be merciful. In the event, this doctrine corresponds to their conception of not their actual but their ideal parents and parent figures. That being the case, it is likely that—like Martin Luther and his followers—they will be strongly motivated to believe that the doctrine is true. In that case, its internalization is not only motivationally instigated but also motivationally grounded. To be sure, the children in the first two groups would also be motivated to believe that the gods are both just and merciful. If they do not construct such a belief, it is not because they do not have the desire, but because they do not have the option—not, at any rate, a culturally provided one. Their culture does not include a doctrine of this type. They could invent such a doctrine, but only a religious virtuoso, like Luther, has the courage and the capacity to do so. To summarize, if a consummatory proposition is internalized even though its internalization is neither empirically nor cognitively grounded, it is internalized because it satisfies an especially strong desire; and if that is the case, then (like a few privately constructed consummatory beliefs), it is a proposition of powerful emotional concern. Hence, the finding that the empirical refutation of propositions of this type does not weaken, and may even strengthen, their salience (Festinger 1956) is only apparently paradoxical. Although these propositions are cognitively dissonant with the actors' experience, they are affectively consonant with their emotional needs.

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Internalization of Directive Propositions The two types of directive propositions—optional and prescriptive—are very different, so I shall deal with them separately. The internalization of optional directive propositions, like the internalization of descriptive propositions of the consummatory type, is motivationally instigated. Since these optional directive propositions are, however, propositions of practical (not pure) knowledge, their internalization is motivated by a desire that requires action (not a belief) for its satisfaction. These propositions designate such action. Unlike consummatory propositions, then, they are internalized only if they are empirically grounded. If they were not empirically grounded, the action they designate would not satisfy the instigating desire. Consider, for example, the Burmese proposition that a successful rice crop requires that paddy fields be irrigated. This not only states a causal relation between a successful harvest and irrigation but also conveys a directive, but optional, message: it informs farmers that if they desire to harvest a successful rice crop, they must irrigate their paddy fields. If a farmer possesses such a desire, he is motivated to acquire any cultural proposition that he has reason to believe might guide his efforts to satisfy that desire. When this particular proposition is transmitted to him, he is motivated to acquire it because he knows that countless previous generations of Burmese paddy cultivators have successfully adopted it. Because directive propositions satisfy desires not by being acquired but by being implemented, the farmer, after he acquires the proposition, complies with its directive—that is, he irrigates his paddy field. If his efforts are rewarded by abundant harvests—if the proposition is empirically established by his own experience, in addition to the experience of his predecessors—he internalizes the proposition as a cognitively salient (and culturally constituted) belief. If, on the other hand, irrigating the fields has no effect on his harvests, he would be highly likely to discard the proposition. Taking this example as paradigmatic of directive propositions of the optional type, we may say that their acquisition is socially

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instigated (i.e., instigated by their transmission), and their internalization is motivated (by some desire); but their internalization is achieved just in case their implementation satisfies the desire. In short, they are internalized because they are motivationally instigated and empirically grounded. When these conditions are met, there is a strong likelihood that these propositions will be reproduced. This claim is nothing more than the standard anthropological explanation for the reproduction of directive propositions of this type insofar as they govern subsistence domains. I have expressed the explanation in different terms, and below I also extend its application to other domains. The standard explanation might be expressed as follows. Because optional directive propositions that govern subsistence domains are instrumental in filling biological needs (for food, shelter, protection, and the like), their reproduction is a functional requirement for the survival of any social group. If these propositions are transmitted from one generation to the next—that is, if they are reproduced—it is because they have been empirically established by the historical experience of the group. Were that not the case, either the propositions would not have survived, or the group would not have survived (unless the propositions were replaced by others). This explanation for the reproduction of optional directive propositions has been applied only to subsistence domains because of the traditional anthropological assumption that only biologically acquired needs and desires can be precultural. On the assumption adopted here, that socially (i.e., experientially) acquired needs and desires can also be precultural, a similar explanation for the reproduction of these directive propositions can be applied to any domain. I shall return to this thesis. Directive propositions of the prescriptive type do not merely guide action: they mandate it. They enjoin the performance of certain acts and proscribe the performance of others. In either case, compliance with the proposition is mandatory. Let us compare them with directive propositions of the optional type. Op-

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tional propositions convey the following message: "Given the desire d, it is expedient to perform the act a because a is an efficient means of satisfying d." Prescriptive propositions, in contrast,, convey the following message: Whether or not a satisfies d—indeed, even if a frustrates d—it is necessary to perform a because a is morally correct. In short, directive propositions of the optional type are pragmatic, whereas those of the prescriptive type are ethical. Having distinguished directive propositions that enjoin action from those that are merely optional, I must also distinguish those that proscribe action from cultural taboos. Although taboos are often erroneously conflated with cultural proscriptions, they are, if anything, more properly construed as optional. Consider, for example, the Burmese cultural taboo on sex with a menstruating woman. This taboo, like any other, is based not on the ethical premise that such an act is morally wrong but on the expedient premise that it has harmful consequences. Let me make two observations. First, the term internalization does not refer to the conviction that for prescriptive propositions they are factually true (as it does in the case of other cultural propositions). Rather, it refers to the conviction that they are morally right. Second, whereas the internalization of other cultural propositions can be explained by the model developed for the construction of private beliefs, this is not the case for prescriptive propositions; there are, after all, very few privately constructed prescriptive beliefs. The internalization of prescriptive propositions does conform, however, to the psychological preadaptation theory. The first condition for the internalization of prescriptive propositions is that cultural novices (children) evoke approval and other forms of reward for complying with the injunctions of parents and parent figures, and disapproval and other forms of punishment for violating their injunctions. From these experiences children construct a cognitive schema of the form My parents approve of me for performing acts alt a2,... an, and they disapprove of me for performing &/, b2', . . . bn'. Because children possess

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a strong need for approval, especially from persons to whom they are emotionally attached and upon whom they are dependent, the construction of this schema is the first step in the process that leads to the internalization of cultural prescriptions. Having constructed this schema, the child complies with parental injunctions (many of which are cultural prescriptions) because the child is motivated by a powerful desire to do so. This is no more than a first step because if compliance with cultural prescriptions is motivated by the desire to obtain the approval of others, it is a measure of the acquisition of these propositions, not a measure of their internalization. Internalization requires the belief that that one ought to comply with them, not that it is expedient to do so. According to some theorists at least, this belief requires that the child introject his or her mental representation of the parent, a process by which the parental representation is invested with authority (e.g., Sandier and Rosenblatt 1962). Introjection is the second step in the process that leads to the internalization of cultural prescriptions. If the parental representation is introjected, the parent is represented as someone who holds up standards of conduct, including cultural prescriptions, and rewards or punishes the child for compliance or noncompliance with them. As a consequence, the child internalizes these prescriptions, heretofore only acquired, for now he or she believes that they are morally binding because the parental introject—the superego, as it is usually called—signals that they are. That signal is experienced by both children and adults in three ways: (1) through guilt, or moral anxiety, aroused by the desire to violate a cultural prescription, (2) through remorse (experienced as a painful lowering of self-esteem) aroused by its actual violation, and (3) through well-being (experienced as a heightening of self-esteem) aroused by compliance with the prescription (cf. Sandler and Rosenblatt 1962). When or if the child achieves this step of introjection, the cultural prescriptions are the moral standards of not only his or her culture but also his or her own standards.At this point, the cultural prescriptions may properly be said to have been internal-

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ized. That is, compliance is now motivated not only by the approval or disapproval of others (by externally administered social sanctions) but also—and much more critically—by the approval or disapproval of the child (by self-administered psychological sanctions).1 It should be emphasized that the internalization of prescriptive propositions does not in itself ensure that they will be uniformly followed. While compliance satisfies the desire to win the approval of the superego, violation may occur because of a more powerful countervailing desire. As a wise man once put it, "The superego does not prevent you from sinning; it only makes you suffer if you do." If the foregoing argument is valid, the acquisition of prescriptive propositions is—as I proposed—socially instigated, but their internalization is motivationally instigated and empirically grounded. Prescriptive propositions may be said to be internalized only when the cultural novice has learned that compliance with them satisfies the pressing need to incur the approval and avoid the disapproval of the superego. And only if this occurs is there a strong likelihood that these propositions will be reproduced. 1. If this analysis is valid, the conventional, long-standing dichotomy between "shame cultures" and "guilt cultures" must surely be rejected. Ihie, in many societies actors may experience no guilt about violating an ethical prescription, but typically that applies only to those prescriptions that are not internalized. That there are societies in which no ethical prescriptions are internalized—societies in which the actors experience neither guilt nor remorse—is a proposition for which, to my knowledge, there is no evidence. In any event, if my analysis of the internalization of prescriptive propositions is valid, we would expect that actors internalize ethical prescriptions transmitted by parents and other significant figures and acquired in early childhood. In support of that expectation it might be noted that even for shame cultures I know of no report that compliance with the prohibition on parent-child incest, for example, or with the prohibition on parricide is motivated only by shame. Conversely, even in guilt cultures ethical prescriptions acquired in later life are often not internalized; and consequently compliance with those prescriptions is a function of social sanctions (shame), not guilt. Recent reports of widespread corruption in American society—in the government, on Wall Street, in the military scientific laboratories, the electronic church—are perhaps sufficient to lay the contrary notion to rest.

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Summary and Conclusions

Because culture is too global a concept for the analysis of cultural internalization, I have employed the cultural proposition as the unit of analysis. Having proposed that cultural ideas, norms, and values are represented in the mind in the form of propositions and having suggested that, as a consequence of their internalization, cultural propositions become the personal beliefs of cultural novices, I was able to elucidate the internalization of these culturally constituted beliefs by employing the principles that govern the formation of privately constructed beliefs as a model. Since there is more than one type of cultural proposition, it seemed reasonable to assume that no single explanation could account for the internalization of all. That being so, our first task was to develop a typology of cultural propositions. This typology, which was based on the analogous typology of private beliefs, is represented in outline form in Table 3.3. For all these types, it is important to distinguish the instigation for their acquisition from the grounds for their internalization. Whereas their acquisition is instigated by social transmission, their transmission alone is not sufficient to account for their internalization. Just as for private beliefs it is necessary to distinguish the conditions that instigate their construction from the conditions under which they are held to be true, so, too, for cultural propositions it is necessary to distinguish the conditions that instigate their internalization from the conditions under which these propoTable 3.3 Typology of Cultural Propositions 1. Descriptive propositions: propositions of pure knowledge a. Nonconsummatory b. Consummatory 1. Ordinary emotional concern 2. Powerful emotional concern 2. Directive propositions a. Optional: propositions of practical knowledge b. Prescriptive: propositions of moral obligation

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Table 3.4 Comparison of the Construction of Private Beliefs with the Internalization of Cultural Propositions Prívate Beliefs

Cultural Propositions

1. Conditions that instigate their construction a. External b. Motivational

1. Conditions that instigate their internalization a. Social b. Motivational

2. Grounds for construction a. Empirical b. Motivational

2. Grounds for internal ization a. Empirical b. Motivational c. Cognitive

sitions, now transformed into culturally constituted beliefs, are held to be true, proper, or right. These comparisons are schematically represented in Table 3.4. Different combinations of these conditions constitute three paradigms that explain the construction of the various types of private beliefs, and mutatis mutandis they also explain the internalization of cultural propositions, with however one addition. According to these paradigms, cultural internalization may be (1) socially instigated and empirically grounded, (2) motivationally instigated and empirically grounded, (3) motivationally instigated and cognitively grounded, or (4) motivationally instigated and motivationally grounded. As indicated in Table 3.5, for cultural propositions to be internalized (with the exception of nonconsummatory descriptive propositions), the cultural novice must be motivationally preadapted to internalize them. This means that the acquisition of a cultural proposition is instigated by a desire and that its internalization is achieved just in case the proposition itself, or the action that it designates or prescribes, satisfies the desire. Table 3.5 also indicates that for most propositions, if the desire is satisfied, it is because the proposition is experientially confirmed, in which case its internalization is empirically grounded. For two types of descriptive propositions this empirical constraint does not apply. Since cultural novices are not only motivationally

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Table 3.5 Classification of Types of Cultural Propositions According to the Paradigms of Internalization Paradigm for Internalization

Type of Cultural Proposition

1. Culturally instigated and empirically grounded

Descriptive: nonconsummatory

2. Motivationally instigated and empirically grounded

Descriptive: consummatory (ordinary emotional concern) Directive: optional and prescriptive

3. Motivational ly instigated and cognitively grounded

Descriptive: consummatory (ordinary emotional concern)

4. Motivational ly instigated and motivational ly grounded

Descriptive: consummatory (powerful emotional concern)

but also cognitively preadapted to internalize consummatory propositions of ordinary emotional concern, their internalization is instead cognitively grounded. If, however, the consummatory proposition is of powerful emotional concern, the proposition itself satisfies the desire once it is internalized; in this case, its internalization is motivationally grounded. Whether this typology of cultural propositions and the suggested explanatory paradigms for their internalization will be widely adopted remains to be seen. But whatever the typology, no single paradigm is capable of explaining the internalization of all types of cultural propositions. That is one of the differences between the psychological preadaptation theory and the classical theories of cultural internalization, which, it may be recalled, treat all cultural propositions as if they were of only one type. That, however, is not their only difference. Of the three classical theories, the psychological preadaptation theory differs most importantly from the cultural determinist theory. Whereas the latter claims that cultural internalization is socially instigated and culturally grounded, the psychological preadaptation theory contends that this paradigm explains only the acquisition of cultural propositions, not their internalization. The

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cultural determinist claim stems from the conception of cultural novices as tabulae rasae, who bring nothing precultural (whether biological or experiential) to their initial encounters with culture. According to the psychological preadaptation theory, however, they bring a storehouse of biologically acquired desires, on the one hand, and experientially acquired desires and beliefs, on the other, both of which critically facilitate and impede the internalization process. Although the psychological preadaptation theory also differs from the classical Marxist and socialization theories, in certain respects it is also similar to them. This is not surprising, for they also are preadaptation theories. The psychological preadaptation theory is similar to the classical Marxist theory in that the latter, in its application to the ruling class, also stresses the importance of desire as a critical variable in the internalization process. It differs from Marxist theory on four counts. First, it recognizes a wide range of desires, not only material interests. Second, it stresses the importance of cognition as well as motivation in the internalization process. Third, it emphasizes childhood experience as the critical, though not exclusive, determinant of the cultural novices* desires (and cognitions). Finally, though not denying the importance of adult experience, it does not regard social class as the special locus of that experience. The psychological preadaptation theory is similar to the socialization theory in that both stress the critical importance of childhood experience for cultural internalization, but it differs in three important respects. First, according to the psychological preadaptation theory, childhood experience is a critical determinant of not only precultural desires but also precultural beliefs, which, in some cases, are the more important for cultural internalization. Second, while stressing the critical importance of childhood experience as the determinant of such desires and beliefs, it does not single out socialization practices as a special determinant. Third, it recognizes that in some cases adult experiences are their critical determinant. Finally, in contrast to both the Marxist and the socialization

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theories, the psychological preadaptation theory maintains that cultural internalization is motivated not only by conscious desires (and beliefs) but by unconscious ones as well. This claim is particularly important in regard to the cultural ideologies of gender and sex described in the previous chapter. For example, since the propositions that make up the Ideology of the Dangerous Female are highly threatening, it is difficult to believe that anyone would be motivated (as all three theories would propose) to internalize them. This difficulty is compounded by the realization that most of these propositions are empirically undemonstrable, if not demonstrably false. The difficulty can be overcome, however, if it is recognized that action, including mental action—the kind involved in cultural internalization—is motivated not only by conscious desires but also and sometimes even more importantly by unconscious ones.

4 The Concept of Desire

Conscious Desire

Desire is a motivational concept that, together with certain other concepts, accounts for volitional action. Action, as I am using that term, refers not only to physical action (e.g., driving a car) and social action (e.g., disciplining a child) but also to mental action (e.g., internalizing a cultural proposition). If to desire something is to want something, then volitional action—according to the theory of action employed here—is motivated by the desire to fill a need or else to express, or to avoid the arousal of, a sentiment. I shall reformulate this later. Needs and Sentiments A need, as I use that term, refers to any event, condition, or state of affairs that an actor feels is necessary for personal physical or psychological well-being. That feeling arouses in the actor the desire to fill the need, that is, to achieve such an event, condition, or state of affairs. If sex or power, love or dependency, is a need, the actor's feeling that it is necessary for his or her well-being arouses the actor's desire for sex or power, love or dependency. The desire to fill a need does not always lead to the decision to do so—often the desire is suppressed—but if it does, the decision 74

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arouses the desire to perform some act that will achieve that end. Depending on the actor's culture, the need for power or for dependency might, for example, arouse the desire to practice sorcery or to propitiate the gods, respectively. A sentiment, as I shall use that term, refers to an emotion together with the object (the person, thing, or event) toward which the emotion is directed. If love, anxiety, respect, envy, compassion, fear, hatred, admiration, lust, and reverence are examples of emotions, then love for dogs, anxiety about World War III, respect for learning, envy of a rival, compassion for the poor, fear of cobras, hatred of communism, admiration of Islam, lust for a woman, and reverence for nature are examples of sentiments. A pleasurable sentiment arouses the desire to express it, whereas a painful sentiment arouses the desire to avoid experiencing it. A love for dogs arouses the desire to express that love, whereas a fear of cobras arouses the desire not to experience that fear. Since, however, sentiments are expressed and their arousal is avoided by means of action, a love for dogs might arouse the desire to feed them, just as the fear of cobras might arouse the desire to avoid the reptile house in a zoo. Since a need refers to an event, condition, or state of affairs that an actor feels is necessary for his well-being, and a sentiment refers to an emotion together with the object to which it is directed, it follows that if action is motivated by the desire to fill a need or to express or avoid experiencing a sentiment, then emotions are the core motivational variables. Though not a widely held thesis, it has been proposed by at least a few anthropologists (e.g., D'Andrade 1987), psychologists (e.g., Tomkins 1962), and psychoanalysts (e.g., Demos and Kaplan 1986) and enjoys at least some support. I shall return to this thesis below, but first it is important to deal with two questions that might be raised about my claim that virtually all desires that motivate action are aroused by, or related to, sentiments and needs. First, sentiments and needs are internal stimuli, so why, one might wonder, have I ignored external stimuli for action? Second, given that I have focused on internal stimuli, why have I omitted reference to biological drives, the most frequently discussed internal stimuli?

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I have not attended to external stimuli on two related accounts. In most instances, external stimuli possess motivational properties insofar as they arouse a sentiment or a need, in which case, however, it is the desire to express or avoid experiencing the sentiment or to fill the need that motivates action. Thus, the perception of a sexually attractive woman is motivational to a heterosexual man because she arouses the desire for sex; the aroma of cooked food is motivational to a hungry child because it arouses the desire to eat; the announcement of a clothing sale is motivational to a recently promoted employee because it arouses the desire to purchase a new wardrobe; and an empty chair in an otherwise full lecture hall is motivational to a would-be lecture goer because it arouses the desire to occupy it. Another reason for my not attending to external stimuli is that the desires they arouse are usually momentary and situational, whereas my concern here is with perduring desires—those that constitute relatively enduring motivational dispositions—for they alone are germane to motivational issues of social and cultural relevance. I have in mind such issues as why social actors believe in Allah, comply with the rule of cross-cousin marriage, internalize ideologies of female inferiority, offer almsfood to Buddhist monks, practice cannibalism on their neighbors, and are committed to the goal of success. This brings me to the second question raised above: Why, given my focus on internal stimuli, have I paid no attention to the concept of biological drives? This inattention does not mean that, following the current fashion, I reject this concept. On the contrary. Given that our species is a product of biological evolution, it would be folly to deny that human beings possess biological drives. Rather, my inattention to this concept reflects my wish to restrict my theoretical terms to experiential concepts, such as sentiments and needs, even though, in my view, many of them are derived from or instigated by drives. For my present purpose it is irrelevant whether any or all sentiments and needs are universal, on the one hand, or culturally variable, on the other. Either view is compatible with my purpose.

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It is, however, my personal view that many, perhaps most needs are universal, whereas many sentiments are culturally variable. A need may be universal for any number of reasons, some because they are products of evolutionary selection, hence biologically acquired (e.g., the needs for food, sex, dependency, or attachment); others because they are the products of invariant features of human social life, more especially the primary institution of the family, hence exponentially acquired, most probably in early child development (e.g., the needs for achievement, nurturance, or selfesteem). In considering my thesis that sentiments are highly variable, it is important to distinguish the emotional component of a sentiment from its object. Since the capacity for emotional arousal and the conditions under which emotions are aroused (but not necessarily expressed) are, in my view, the products of evolutionary selection, I argue—along with a few psychological specialists (e.g., Izard et al. 1984; Scherer and Ekman 1984; Tomkins 1962) but in opposition to a few anthropological specialists (e.g., Lutz 1988; Lynch 1990; Rosaldo 1984)—that most emotions are universal. For example, to the best of my knowledge everywhere the thwarting of a desire arouses anger or frustration, not love, and that the loss of a loved one arouses sadness, not joy. It is also my view, however, that the objects toward which emotions are directed are in large measure exponentially, not biologically, acquired, hence variable. Across cultural groups and across individuals within the same group, a variety of different persons, events, or things may be the objects of one and the same emotion, just as one and the same person, event, or thing may be the object of different emotions. In short, it is highly likely that whereas emotions are universal, sentiments are variable. Whatever my personal views on the distribution of needs and sentiments (whether universal or variable) and their modes of acquisition (whether biological or experiential), neither issue is relevant for my present purpose. My purpose is not to offer a catalogue of human needs and sentiments—which is not possible given the present state of knowledge—nor again to offer an account

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of their acquisition, though that may be possible. Rather, my purpose is to delineate the relation of needs and sentiments to desires and the relation of desires to volitional action, and here the evidence is unambiguous: both relations are highly variable. Wishes and Aims I have proposed that action is motivated by the desire to express or avoid the arousal of a sentiment or by the desire to fill a need but that a particular need n or a particular sentiment s does not arouse the desire to perform one act a only. Thus, the need for power might arouse the desire to practice sorcery, and the love for dogs might arouse the desire to feed them. The ambiguity in these statements is deliberate, and it follows from two considerations, one empirical, the other theoretical. The empirical consideration consists of the elementary observation that across cultural groups and across individuals within the same group, one and the same sentiment s and one and the same need n might arouse the desire to perform not a single act a but a variety of acts alt a 2 ,... an. For some actors the love for dogs might arouse the desire to feed them, whereas for others that same sentiment might arouse the desire to breed them, paint them, work for the SPCA, or practice veterinary medicine. Similarly, for some actors the need for power might arouse the desire to practice sorcery, but for others it might arouse the desire to hold political office, direct a program of genetic engineering, perform the role of a Melanesian Big Man, change students' beliefs, or control the members of their family. But if a particular sentiment s or a particular need n can arouse the desire d to perform alf... an, then it may be inferred that across cultural groups and across individuals within the same group, d can be satisfied by any and all of these acts. That inference is consistent with and predictable by theoretical expectations. Since volitional (unlike either impulsive or instinctual) action is intentional action, and since intention implies choice, then it is a reasonable expectation that the sentiment s might be expressed and

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the need n might be filled by the performance of any and all the acts comprising a l f . .. an. Consequently, if an actor desires to perform a1 in particular, that desire represents a choice—either privately constructed or culturally constituted—among a variety of potential acts. If the desire to perform a particular act is an aim, we can say that volitional action represents the implementation of an aim. But since an aim represents a choice among a variety of potential acts, a particular sentiment s1 or a particular need n1 is not necessary for the choice of a particular aim m1 because—both across groups and across individuals within the same group—m1 might be motivated by a variety of sentiments or needs. Although for some actors the aim of feeding dogs, for example, might be motivated by a love for dogs, for other actors the same aim might be motivated by admiration, reverence, or compassion for them or by curiosity about their eating habits. (Since the latter consideration is not germane to the present argument, I shall not discuss it here.) To complicate the picture even more, consider that desires are satisfied not by action itself but by some event, condition, or state of affairs that is achieved by action. If the particular event, condition, or state of affairs that an actor desires to achieve is a wish, the desire to express a particular sentiment or to fill a particular need is satisfied by \hefulfillment of the wish. Having already defined a need as an event, condition, or state of affairs that an actor feels is necessary for personal physical or psychological wellbeing, I should explain that the difference between a wish and a need is only apparently trivial. Virtually all needs—whether for sex or power, love or dependency—are filled by a transaction with some person or thing. For social and cultural novices almost any person or thing will do, but for socialized and enculturated actors only a few particular persons and things can satisfactorily serve that function. The need of some actors for power arouses the desire to dominate others (not things), and their need for dependency arouses the desire to be nurtured by gods (not persons). Because a wish consists of a desire to achieve not just any kind of

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event, condition, or state of affairs but a particular kind—it is evident that a wish is not a need but is instead aroused by one. Although the fulfillment of a wish is achieved by action, and action represents the implementation of an aim, a particular need or sentiment is not sufficient for the choice of an aim because one and the same need or sentiment may arouse not one but a variety of wishes. Consider two actors, A and B. IfA's need for power, np, instigates the aim of practicing sorcery, that is because, for A, np (whether privately constructed or culturally constituted) arouses the wish to dominate others, and for A, that wish is fulfilled by harming them. If, however, for B, np instigates the aim of directing a program of genetic engineering, that is because, for B, np arouses the wish to dominate nature, and for B that wish is fulfilled by modifying the nucleus of cells. Similarly, if .A's love for dogs, ld, instigates the aim of feeding them, that is because, for A, that sentiment arouses the wish that dogs enjoy good health, and for A the proper or desirable means of fulfilling that wish consists of feeding them. If for B, however, ld instigates the aim of breeding dogs, that is because, for B, that sentiment arouses the wish for canine survival and, for B the proper or desirable means of fulfilling that wish is to breed them. Based on this analysis of wishes and aims, let me reformulate my initial claim that volitional action is motivated by the desire to express a sentiment or to fill a need. Since the desire is satisfied by the fulfillment of a wish, which in turn is fulfilled by the implementation of an aim, the desire instigates the construction of an aim. The choice of an aim is, furthermore, determined by the expectation that its implementation will fulfill the wish. The desire to express a sentiment or to fill a need is, then, the impetus for the performance of an act, and the fulfillment of a wish is the goal—the intention or purpose—of its performance.1 1. Because the motivational orientation adopted here is clearly psychoanalytic in a general way, I want to acknowledge my debt to Robert Holt (1976) and George Klein (1976) for first calling my attention to the motivational importance of the wish in psychoanalytic theory, even though I do not employ that concept here in its technical psychoanalytic usage. I do not, however, share their view that we can discard the concept of biological drives, which they see

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Having added the concept of a goal to our ever-expanding lexicon of motivational concepts, I should note that for some theorists the concept provides a sufficient explanation for action. In assessing the possible motivational value of culture, cognitive anthropologists have argued that if cultural systems (or, as they say, cultural models) are construed as cognitive schemata, they may "function as goals, and so have motivational force" (D'Andrade 1990a). That force, it has been argued (Quinn and Holland 1987; Strauss 1992), is sufficient to instigate action. That cultural systems may function as goals is a thesis with which I agree; I disagree, however, that a goal, cultural or otherwise, is a sufficient explanation for action. Such a parsimonious model of motivation has many advantages—it does not, for example, clutter up the motivational picture with the excessive conceptual baggage from which my complex model suffers. It also, however, has one critical disadvantage: it does not explain why goals possess motivational value. That is, it accepts that actors desire to achieve goals without explaining why. The model proposed here is complex precisely because it attends to that question. According to my model, an actor may take any condition, event, or state or affairs as a goal just in case its achievement is expected to fulfill some wish. Consequently, a goal possesses motivational value because by fulfilling the actor's wish, a goal satisfies the desire to express a sentiment or to fill a need. That is the case, I might add, whether the goal is a cultural system or any other kind of goal. To elucidate the differences between the parsimonious and the complex models, let us consider an example in which a cultural system functions as a goal. Suppose that we want to explain the motivation of an American actor A for studying surgery. An ethnographer, or A himself, who says that A is motivated by the high social status of surgeons presumes that for A the American cultural system of success functions as a goal. The same cultural system does not function as a goal for as outmoded. As an anthropologist, I believe that one obvious concomitant of human biological evolution is that humans, like other mammals, possess innate drives, including the sexual and aggressive drives that Rreud singled out.

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all Americans because, according to the complex motivational model proposed here, the achievement of high status is a wish for A, though not for all Americans; and it is a wish because the achievement of high status fills A's need for self-esteem. If it did not fill that need, the cultural system of success would not function as a goal for A, because A would not have internalized it as a wish. This explanation raises two questions. Since the need for selfesteem is presumably universal, why did A decide to fill this need by the achievement of a high-status profession and not choose some other goal? And given this decision, why did A choose surgery rather than, say, the judiciary? Both questions can be answered, according to our model, only by reference to another need or needs or to another sentiment or sentiments. For the sake of brevity I shall attend to just the second question. Were it proposed that A chose to become a surgeon, not a judge, because the practice of surgery satisfies not only A's wish for self-esteem but also As desire to heal, to amass wealth, or to conquer a personal anxiety about death, these explanations would invoke the concept of a need. Alternatively, were it proposed that the practice of surgery also enables A to express compassion for the ill, to confirm his identification with his physician father, or to sublimate unconscious aggression, these explanations would invoke the concept of a sentiment. In sum, although goals—whether culturally constituted or privately constructed—are critical motivational variables, their motivational properties can be understood only by reference to wishes, sentiments, and needs. To put it technically, neither the concept of a goal nor that of a wish, sentiment, or need is sufficient to explain the motivation for action; rather, the concepts are individually necessary and jointly sufficient. Goals explain why actors perform one act rather than another; wishes explain why they choose particular goals; sentiments and needs explain why they are motivated to act at all.2 2. This claim poses an obvious methodological problem for anthropological fieldwork. Although the investigation of goals and, for the most part, wishes can be pursued using conventional techniques of anthropological inquiry, the in-

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Figure 4.1 The Causal Sequence for Sentiments, Wishes, and Aims

My final observation is that although wishes, sentiments, and needs may, taken together, explain action, they are not capable of predicting it. Why? Because neither the relation of sentiments and needs to wishes nor that of wishes to aims is invariant. Both sets of relations, with a few exceptions, are culturally and experientially established, and both culture and experience are highly variable. Consequently, the causal sequence postulated by our motivational model is best conceptualized not as a linked chain (e.g., sentiment or need -* wish —> aim —> action) but as a branching tree, as is shown in Figure 4.1. Because one and the same sentiment or need may arouse a diversity of wishes, and because each wish may arouse a diversity of aims, every successive branching of the tree reduces the predictability of action from an antecedent sentiment or need. Given sufficient knowledge of an actor's life history, it is possible in principle to postdict wish 1 from aim 1, and need 1 or sentiment 1 from wish 1; but to predict aim 1 from wish 1, let alone from need 1 or sentiment 1, before A's history has unfolded is virtually impossible. vestigation of sentiments and needs requires techniques that are conventionally employed by clinical psychology and psychiatry. Anthropologists can readily resolve this problem by borrowing and adapting these techniques. A few have done so, but crossing disciplinary boundaries makes others very nervous.

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At the group level, the best predictor of action is knowledge of a group's culture in the detail possessed by a competent member of the group. That is because it is a condition of social order that actors be able to anticipate the behavior of their fellows, and in large measure, culture performs that function by constraining or prescribing, at each branching of the tree in Figure 4.1, the range of permissible behavioral variability. In short, in any social group only a limited number of acts are culturally permitted or prescribed for the fulfillment of any wish, and only a limited number of wishes are culturally permitted or prescribed for the expression of a sentiment or the filling of a need.3 The concept of desire is pivotal. According to my initial formulation, desires are aroused by sentiments and needs: a sentiment arouses a desire to express the sentiment or else to avoid its arousal, whereas a need arouses the desire to fill the need. Since, however, desires are satisfied by the fulfillment of a wish, whose fulfillment is achieved by the implementation of an aim, that initial elliptical formulation was reformulated: a sentiment or a need arouses a wish (the desire to achieve a particular event, condition, or state of affairs, i.e., a goal), and the wish in turn arouses an aim (the desire to perform a particular act for the achievement of the goal). In short, sentiments and needs arouse two types of desires: the desire to achieve something (a wish) and the desire to do something (an aim), the latter being a function of the former. This discussion of motivation puts to rest the argument of those theorists who say that motivational explanations for action are circular and hence explain nothing. It is apparent from the previous discussion, however, that this argument misconstrues motivational 3. If certain human sentiments and needs are universal—the product of a common evolutionary history and the common characteristics of group life— and wishes are in large measure culturally variable, human motivation could be said to possess both universal and parochial dimensions. The universal sentiments and needs found in any human group might then be said to constitute the pan-human dimension of motivation, whereas the parochial wishes found in a particular group might be said to constitute the "national character" dimension. Unfortunately,motivational theorists have tended to stress one of these dimensions while ignoring or denying the other.

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explanations. Rather than saying that actors perform some act a because they desire to perform a, motivational explanations say that they perform a because they desire to achieve goal g. Such an explanation may be wrong, but it is hardly circular. In addition, the model proposed here says that actors desire to achieve g because g is a wish whose construction is instigated by a sentiment or a need, from which, moreover, neither the wish nor the goal is deducible. When we look at motivation from a psychodynamic perspective, the error in claiming that motivational explanations are circular will become even more apparent. According to that perspective, an actor may seek power, for example, not from a desire for power but from a desire for sex; conversely, the actor may seek sex from a desire for power, not sex. Psychodynamic explanations, however, depend on the notion of unconscious desires. Unconscious Desire

Cognitive scientists now accept that mental life is predominantly unconscious and that conscious thoughts and representations are activated by external events and internal processes (Mandler, 1996). Here, however, I am using the expression unconscious desire in the restricted sense of a conscious desire (whether a wish or an aim) that has been repressed. Desires or any other type of ideation are repressed because they are psychologically threatening for the actor and hence arouse some painful affect (anxiety, fear, guilt, etc.). I shall focus on desires that are threatening because they are in conflict with an actor's moral standards. One reason for choosing this focus is that according to the theory of the actor employed here, no normal actor is immune from intrapsychic conflict between some desires and some moral standards. For normal actors, morally conflictual desires are psychologically threatening. If psychologically threatening desires are repressed, we would expect to find unconscious, morally conflictual desires in any society, whatever its social structure and whatever its culture. Another reason for this focus is that I am concerned with unconscious

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desires insofar as they are relevant for cultural internalization, and morally conflictual desires are especially relevant to that concern. That cultural internalization may be motivated by morally conflictual desires, whether conscious or unconscious, is a hypothesis that, with a few exceptions, is neither attended to nor required by the three classical theories of cultural internalization. Those theories hold that as a consequence of socialization and enculturation, the desires of social actors are typically congruent with the moral standards of their culture. The cultural determinist theory holds this view because it conceives of cultural novices as empty containers, all of whose content is supplied by culture. The Marxist and socialization theories hold this view for other reasons. Although Marxist theory maintains that intragroup conflict ("class struggle") is inevitable in stratified societies, it does not allow for much intrapsychic conflict—none, at any rate, that is culturally implicated. Since culturally relevant desires are connected to material interests (interests with respect to wealth, privilege, and power), and since culture serves the interests of the ruling class, the members of this class would not be expected to experience much moral conflict between their desires and their internalized cultural standards. To be sure, such conflict might be expected in the exploited classes, but inasmuch as they internalize the moral standards of their culture out of "false consciousness," it is infrequent in their case as well. The socialization theory holds that actors experience little conflict between their desires and their culturally constituted moral standards because if the socialization process is successful, they, by definition, desire to do what they are culturally expected to do. Only if their socialization goes wrong do they experience intrapsychic conflict of this type, but that happens mainly in situations of rapid change or anomie. In sum, since the classical theories of cultural internalization hold that social actors typically sustain a more or less harmonious relation between their personal desires and their culturally constituted moral standards, those theories have no need for the con-

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cept of unconscious, morally conflictual desires. Let us turn directly, then, to the psychological preadaptation theory, for which that concept is indispensable. In the interest of brevity, I shall focus on conflictual desires aroused by sentiments, not needs. Some sentiments, such as fear of dogs, are emotionally painful, so actors who possess them have the conscious desire to avoid arousing them. To understand the formation of unconscious desires, we shall examine a class of sentiments which, though not emotionally painful in themselves, arouse painful emotions. Suppose, for example, that a son hates his father—a sentiment that may not be emotionally painful for him (although it is for others). Suppose, moreover, that he not only hates his father but also loves him; or suppose, alternatively, that he does not love him but that his hatred violates his moral value of filial piety. Under either condition, the sentiment itself becomes morally conflictual; and because it is now a threat to the son's self-representation as a moral person, it arouses the painful emotion of guilt, or moral anxiety. If hatred of the father arouses guilt because it is morally conflictual then a fortiori so will any desire (a wish or an aim) that it might instigate. Even if the sentiment is not morally conflictual, it is highly likely that the wish or aim that it arouses will be. If hatred arouses the wish for the father's death, for example, it is very likely that the wish will arouse guilt, even though the sentiment itself may not do so; but if the wish does not arouse guilt, the aim—for example, killing the father—almost certainly will. Unlike some painful emotions whose arousal can be avoided by physical action—the fear of dogs, for example, can be avoided by avoiding dogs—that is not the case with regard to guilt. Thus, the guilt aroused by hatred of the father cannot be avoided simply by avoiding the father because the sentiment is present in the mind whether the father is physically present or not. Its arousal can be avoided only by mental action, such as rationalization or repression. Since rationalization construes the sentiment as nonconflictual, and repression removes it from conscious awareness, the former extinguishes the guilt, whereas the latter renders it unconscious.

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Rationalization can take many forms. For example, even while accepting the imperative of the moral standard, the actor might construe the sentiment as consistent, not in conflict, with the standard. Alternatively, though accepting that they are in conflict, he might adduce some extenuating circumstance that justifies the sentiment or makes the application of the standard inappropriate in this case. Again, he might invoke a competing standard that he construes as taking precedence over this one. Since any of these cognitive maneuvers renders the sentiment nonconflictual, the actor's guilt is extinguished. If, however, the sentiment remains morally conflictual, guilt can be avoided by repression—by removing it from consciousness. Since, as a consequence of this cognitive maneuver, the actor is not aware of harboring the sentiment, he is also unaware of the guilt that it arouses. Let us turn now from morally conflictual sentiments to morally conflictual desires. Although it might be assumed that the guilt they arouse might be avoided by the simple expedient of renouncing them, in fact it is not so simple. Consider, for example, a morally conflictual aim. While renunciation of the aim might extinguish the actor's guilt, it also thwarts the actor's desire to express the sentiment that instigates the aim, thereby thwarting the fulfillment of the wish. But since the thwarting of a wish arouses the painful emotion of frustration, the renunciation of a morally conflictual aim extinguishes one kind of emotional pain only to produce another. To cope with this dilemma, the actor might either rationalize the aim or repress it. In principle, rationalization is the more effective strategy, for by construing an aim as nonconflic tual, the actor can both implement it and fulfill the wish with moral impunity; in short, the actor can avoid frustration and guilt alike. In practice, however, rationalization may not be an effective strategy. Some morally conflictual aims (such as the aim of killing the father) are virtually impossible to rationalize; and even if they can be rationalized, they may still arouse a painful emotion—not guilt but anxiety, and not on moral grounds but on grounds of expediency. Thus, if an aim is morally conflictual because it constitutes a willful violation of a cultural prescription, its implemen-

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tation (if discovered by someone else) might be expected to evoke some form of punitive social sanction. Since the intention of implementing the aim would evoke the expectation of such a sanction, the intention would also arouse anxiety, which would most likely motivate the renunciation of the aim. Once again the avoidance of one painful emotion (anxiety) is purchased at the price of another (frustration). Although repression also produces problematic consequences, on balance it is the more effective strategy for coping with the guilt aroused by morally conflictual desires. By removing such a desire from consciousness, the actor can avoid the conscious awareness of both guilt and frustration. To understand that claim we must explore the vicissitudes of repressed desires.

5 Cultural Internalization Unconscious Desires and Beliefs

Repression

Because repression protects an actor against painful affects, it, like a class of other unconscious cognitive operations, is called a mechanism of psychological defense, or, more concisely, a defense mechanism. This term is unfortunate, because mechanism usually implies something mechanical, automatic, or involuntary, something like a physiological reflex, which is neither motivated nor cognitively mediated. Because, however, defense mechanisms are complex cognitive operations, none of these adjectives is appropriate, and it would be better perhaps, and certainly less misleading, to call them coping ego behavior, as Haan (1977) and Theodore Kroeber (1963) do. Nevertheless, I retain the conventional term because it is much too entrenched to be readily dislodged. Although defense is a central concept in psychodynamic theory, there are important conceptual differences among psychodynamic theorists regarding the mechanisms of defense (cf. Blum 1985; A. Freud 1936; Sandier 1985; Vaillant 1977; 1986; Nesse and Lloyd 1992; Singer 1990). The following analysis of defense mechanisms is not consensual, therefore, and although it is importantly influenced by Suppes and Warren (1975), it departs from their analysis in some respects. 90

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As noted in the previous chapter, repression serves the defensive function of protecting an actor from painful affects by operating not on the affects themselves but on the ideation—sentiments, needs, desires, and beliefs—by which they are aroused. This formulation served well enough as a first approximation, but to understand the cultural relevance of repression, it must now be reformulated with greater precision. Sentiments, needs, and desires are known to actors only as they are represented in their minds; and because they are semiotically mediated, words and images are their representational medium. If the medium consists of words, they are represented— as Suppes and Warren (1975: 406) observe—in the form of propositions, a proposition being defined as "the sense or meaning of a sentence." Thus, for example, love for one's father might be represented by the proposition "I love Father." If this sentiment arouses the wish to be with Father and the aim of traveling to his Chicago home, these desires might be represented by the propositions "I want to be with Father" and "I want to fly to Chicago," respectively. From these examples, it will be observed that the propositions that represent sentiments (and needs), as well as the desires (wishes and aims) that they instigate, take the form actoraction-object (action referring not only to physical and social but also to psychological action—feeling, thinking, believing). The morally conflictual sentiments, needs, and desires discussed in the previous chapter are also represented by propositions of the form actor-action-object. Thus, for example, hatred for the father might be represented by "I hate Father," and if this sentiment arouses the wish for his death and the aim of killing him, these desires might be represented by "I wish that Father was dead" and "I want to kill Father," respectively. If sentiments, needs, and desires are represented in prepositional form, repression and the other defense mechanisms do not operate on the sentiment, need, or desire itself but (as Suppes and Warren stress) on the proposition by which it is represented. Although for convenience' sake I may sometimes speak of the repression of a sentiment, need, or desire, this expression should be

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taken as elliptical for the repression of the proposition that represents a sentiment, need, or desire. To simplify the following discussion, I shall discuss the repression of morally conflictual desires (wishes and aims) only. Moreover, I shall assume that if an aim is morally conflictual, it is because it was instigated by a morally conflictual wish. That being so, an actor with such an aim is confronted with a twin dilemma. If he complies with his moral standard and renounces the aim, he avoids guilt; but since his wish is thereby thwarted, the avoidance of guilt is purchased at the cost of frustration. If, however, he implements the aim, thereby fulfilling his wish, he avoids frustration; but since its implementation violates his moral standard, he suffers remorse (the painful emotion aroused by action that violates an actor's moral standards). To cope with this twin dilemma, the actor might repress the morally conflictual wish. Since he thereby has no interest in the aim, this strategy not only extinguishes the guilt aroused by the wish but also precludes the remorse that would have been aroused by the implementation of the aim. Repression, however, does not remove the wish from the mind; it just removes it from conscious awareness. Hence, although the actor does not experience the wish, that is not because he does not possess it; rather, he is not aware of possessing it. Since a wish, though unconscious, seeks fulfillment, and since its fulfillment is achieved by the implementation of an aim, the aim is also removed from conscious awareness. In short, repression does not extinguish the conflict between a wish or aim and the moral standard that prohibits their fulfillment or implementation, respectively. Instead, repression renders this intrapsychic conflict unconscious. The Vicissitudes of Unconscious Conflict

If, following the repression of a morally conflictual wish, the conscious desire to comply with the moral standard remains stronger than the unconscious desire to fulfill the wish, the repression barrier remains intact, and the repressed wish and aim remain un-

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conscious. Since the repressed aim is not implemented, the wish is thwarted, and the actor is frustrated. Nevertheless, on balance this vicissitude of unconscious conflict is more adaptive than not, for at least four reasons. First, the wish is unconscious, so even though it is thwarted, the frustration is not consciously experienced. Second, because the wish and the aim are under constant repression, the actor is protected from the conscious awareness of guilt. Third, and for the same reason, the actor is protected from the remorse he would experience were he to implement the aim. Finally, if the moral standard is an internalized cultural prescription, he is also protected from the social sanction that might attend the implementation of the aim. These adaptive functions notwithstanding, repression has had its critics (e.g., N. O. Brown 1959; Marcuse 1955), and it is useful to address their criticism. To the extent that repression protects society from the carrying out of socially destructive aims, it is socially adaptive. The critics admit this. But it is psychologically maladaptive, they say, because it causes neurosis and neurotic symptoms. In short, repression may be bad for mental health. This criticism is misconceived, however, for it is not frustration but perduring intrapsychic conflict that causes neurosis, and it is not repression but incomplete repression that causes symptoms. These observations lead us to the second vicissitude of unconscious conflict. If, because of mounting frustration, an unconscious wish becomes peremptory, the threshold for frustration tolerance is lowered, and the repression barrier is concommitantly weakened. Should the wish threaten to reenter consciousness but be prevented from doing so by a strong repression barrier, it may be fulfilled unconsciously, either by means of a symptom or, alternatively, by means of what I shall term a defense mechanism of the second type. Let us examine these alternatives in turn. Sometimes a morally conflictual wish—a sexual wish, for example—arouses guilt not only, or not primarily, because of the actor's conscious belief that it is immoral but also because of an unconscious belief that it is dangerous. Since for such an actor it is not only this particular sexual wish that is dangerous but also

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any other, her intrapsychic conflict is neurotic. There is no form in which the wish might reenter consciousness without arousing guilt. If persistent (unconscious) frustration weakens the repression barrier, the wish may be fulfilled by means of a neurotic symptom. Phenomenologically, a neurotic symptom—whether hysterical (e.g., a tic), obsessional (e.g., a repetitive thought), or compulsive (e.g., a repetitive act)—is neither accompanied by wishful ideation nor experienced by the actor as wish fulfillment. Instead, it is experienced as painful, strange, and unintelligible and as foreign to the actor's self ("ego alien"). Viewed psychodynamically, however, the symptom is an expression of an unconscious intrapsychic conflict in which, by means of one and the same act, the wish is partially and unconsciously fulfilled, and the requirement of the moral standard is partially and unconsciously satisfied. Whereas the normal means of wish fulfillment consists of the implementation of an aim, a symptom is a distorted or abnormal means. The wish is therefore fulfilled only partially. Even then, it is fulfilled only unconsciously because the actor does not recognize that the painful and ego-alien act (whether somatic, mental, or physical) is an attempt to fulfill the wish. Similarly, the symptom satisfies the requirement of the moral standard only partially because even such a distorted fulfillment of the wish is a violation of the moral requirement; but fulfillment also entails considerable physical or emotional suffering, which constitutes intrapsychic punishment for the violation of the standard. Since the actor herself is not consciously aware of this meaning of her symptom, the moral standard is satisfied only unconsciously. In sum, a symptom, as Freud put it, is a complex "compromise formation" that attempts, however unsuccessfully, to cope with the demands of both parties to the neurotic conflict (S. Freud [1916-1917] 1971: 359). A third vicissitude of unconscious conflict consists of the reentry of the unconscious wish into consciousness, albeit in symbolic disguise, and its subsequent fulfillment by the implementation of the unconscious aim, also in symbolic disguise. Since both of these consequences are accomplished by defense mechanisms

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of the second type, in order to explain this vicissitude, it is necessary to describe the members of this type. Defense Mechanisms of the Second Type

Let us begin by distinguishing a psychological defense from a psychological mechanism of defense. The term psychological defense designates a function, the protection of an actor from the painful affects aroused by a threatening external or internal stimulus. The term mechanism of defense designates an unconscious cognitive operation that implements a defense. If a painful affect is aroused by an internal stimulus, such as a morally conflictual desire, this cognitive operation consists of a modification of the proposition by which such a desire is represented in the mind. In the case of repression, the modification consists of the removal of the proposition from consciousness. In the case of a defense mechanism of the second type, it consists of the transformation of this repressed proposition, a transformation being "a function that maps unconscious propositions . . . into conscious propositions" (Suppes and Warren 1975: 406). Since propositions that represent desires (and needs and sentiments) are of the form actor-action-object, such a mapping consists of replacing one or more of these variables of the unconscious proposition with a conscious substitute. To illustrate this process, let us take as an example the unconscious proposition that represents the sentiment of hatred for the father, and let us examine how this morally conflictual sentiment might be transformed by three defense mechanisms of the second type: displacement, externalization, and reaction formation. In the case of displacement, the unconscious proposition is transformed by replacing the object (e.g., "teacher" replaces "Father"). In the case of externalization, the proposition is transformed by replacing the actor (e.g., "Bill" replaces "I"). In the case of reaction formation, the proposition is transformed by replacing the act with its opposite (e.g., "love" replaces "hate"). As a consequence of these three transformations, the unconscious sentiment "I hate Father" is now consciously represented as "I hate teacher," "Bill

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hates Father," and "I love Father," respectively. In short, the sentiment reenters consciousness in symbolic disguise. Note that it is not the conflictual sentiment but the proposition that represents it that is transformed by these defense mechanisms. The sentiment itself is not transformed, so it remains conflictual. Nevertheless, these defense mechanisms perform their function of protecting the actor from a painful affect, for the sentiment consciously represented as nonconflictual is now also experienced as nonconflictual. That being so, one might object that defense mechanisms of the second type are redundant. What does it profit an actor to subject an unconscious proposition to the operation of such a defense mechanism when its function has already been performed by repression? If, however, we recall the other two vicissitudes of unconscious conflict, we can see that the redundancy is more apparent than real. Thus—to advert to our previous example of hatred of the father—the repression of this conflictual sentiment defends the actor from the affect of guilt, but only so long as repression continues. Should the repression barrier be weakened (say, because of an argument with the father), and were the sentiment then to reenter consciousness, this painful affect would be experienced once again. If the prepositional representation of this sentiment is transformed instead by a defense mechanism of the second type, it can reenter consciousness with emotional impunity. In short, defense mechanisms of the second type are not redundant, because, as Gill (1963:103) puts it, "the other [defense mechanisms] come into operation only after repression has failed." That is only one part of the answer to the question of redundancy, for if a desire (a wish or an aim) is repressed, a defense mechanism of the second type performs still another, and much more important, function. If, as a consequence of the frustration produced by repression, an unconscious wish presses for fulfillment, it may sometimes be fulfilled by the formation of a neurotic symptom. If, however, its prepositional representation is transformed by a defense mechanism of the second type, it can be fulfilled instead by the implementation of the unconscious aim,

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albeit in symbolic disguise. In short, the wish is now fulfilled by a normal, not an abnormal, means. To illustrate this process, let us suppose that hatred of the father instigates the wish to humiliate the father and the aim of fulfilling the wish by harassing him. Let us also suppose that the wish, the aim, and the sentiment, being morally conflictual, are all repressed. Let us suppose, moreover, that the unconscious propositions by which the wish and aim are represented are transformed by a defense mechanism of the second type—say, displacement. Finally, let us suppose that the object—"Father"—is replaced by the object "teacher." By means of this defense, the actor's hatred for the father is now consciously represented as hatred for the teacher; it is the teacher (not the father) whom he consciously wishes to humiliate, and consequently it is the teacher (not the father) whom he consciously aims to harass. Now he can implement his aim and fulfill his wish with emotional impunity. In harassing the teacher—for example, challenging his competence, criticizing his lectures, disrupting his classes, and the like—the actor fulfills not only his conscious wish to humiliate the teacher but also his unconscious wish to humiliate his father. This contention, admittedly, is hardly unobjectionable, and since it is critical for understanding the cultural relevance of defensive mechanisms of the second type, it is best addressed now. A defense mechanism of the second type does not operate on an unconscious wish (or sentiment) itself, but on the proposition by which it is represented in the mind. Although the proposition is transformed to reenter consciousness, the wish itself remains unchanged, and it continues to press for fulfillment. That being so, if the transformation of its prepositional representation is achieved by, say, displacement, then unconsciously the object of the conscious (transformed) proposition is a symbolic or disguised representation of the object of the unconscious proposition. In accordance with this argument, the actor in the previous example displaces his unconscious wish to humiliate his father onto a teacher because for him the teacher is an unconscious symbol of his father—a "transference object." That being so, his motivation

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for harassing the teacher is "overdetermined"; that is, it is motivated at one and the same time by his conscious wish to humiliate the teacher and by his unconscious wish to humiliate his father. The former wish, is fulfilled in actuality, whereas the latter is fulfilled symbolically, for the teacher, after all, is not his father but an unconscious symbolic representation of him. Taking this example as paradigmatic, let me summarize. If an unconscious wish threatens to reenter consciousness, but its prepositional representation is transformed by a defense mechanism of the second type, then this cognitive operation has not one, but two, consequences: a cognitive consequence, or "defensive thought," and a behavioral consequence, or "defensive act." Defensive thought refers to the transformed proposition that represents an unconscious wish as nonconflictual, thereby admitting it to consciousness in symbolic disguise. Defensive thoughts perform the function of protecting an actor from the painful affects he or she would suffer were the wish to reenter consciousness undisguised. In the case of a morally conflictual wish, the painful affect is guilt. Defensive act refers to the action whereby, as a consequence of the defensive thought, the unconscious aim is implemented, hence the unconscious wish is fulfilled, also in symbolic disguise. Defensive acts also perform the function of protecting actors from painful affects, which, in the case of a morally conflictual wish, include (1) the frustration actors would experience as a consequence of the persistent thwarting of a wish, (2) the remorse or (3) the social punishment actors would suffer were they to implement an aim, hence a wish, without disguise, and (4) the neurotic pain actors would suffer if, instead, they were to fulfill a wish by means of a neurotic symptom. It is now perhaps evident that if a morally conflictual wish has been repressed, it is not redundant to subject the repressed wish to the operation of a defense mechanism of the second type, as might have been supposed from the earlier discussion. By employing such a defense mechanism, actors can have their cake and eat it too. They can avoid the painful affect of guilt without

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suffering frustration, and they can fulfill a thwarted wish without suffering from remorse, social punishment, or neurotic symptoms. The conception of defense mechanisms of the second type explicated here is very different from the behaviorist conception, the one most frequently found in the social sciences. According to the behaviorist conception, these defense mechanisms consist of defensive acts but not defensive thoughts. Since they possess no cognitive or symbolic meaning, they are merely the vehicles for the "discharge" of peremptory drives. In the case of displacement, for example, the behaviorist conception holds that the choice of one substitute object rather than another is mostly opportunistic. That a teacher replaces the father as the object of an aggressive wish or that (at the group level) Jews have been a preferred object for scapegoating in Europe has no particular psychological meaning; any object will do, so long as it serves to reduce aggressive drive-tension. In short, according to the behaviorist conception, defensive acts are little different from neurotic symptoms, whereas according to the conception of defense mechanisms of the second type discussed above, they are very different indeed. I am not suggesting that the differences between symptoms and defensive acts are absolute. They do share one important characteristic. Defensive acts, like symptoms, are compromise formations. If employed to fulfill a morally conflictual wish, for example, they must do so without violating the actor's moral standards. That being so, the fulfillment of the wish is only partial—not, however, because a defensive act (like a symptom) is a painful means of wish fulfillment but because it does not fulfill the wish to the same degree as a nondefensive act. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that if the unconscious wish to humiliate the father is fulfilled by harassing a teacher, humiliating the teacher is nonetheless less satisfying than harassing the father. Defensive acts have negative functions, not just positive ones. Although displacing the aim of harassing the father onto a teacher is psychologically functional for the actor (not to mention physically functional for the father), it is hardly functional for the teacher. Similarly, if instead of displacing this aim onto the teacher,

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the actor were to project it onto the father, the actor would avoid the affect of guilt but would suffer from paranoid fear. I shall deal more extensively with the "net balance of [these] functional consequences" (Merton 1949) in a later chapter. Here I am concerned with positive functions alone because they provide the clue to the relevance of unconscious desires for cultural internalization. Culturally Constituted Defense Mechanisms and Cultural Internalization

To introduce the concept of culturally constituted defense mechanisms, let me begin by summarizing what has been said so far about psychological defense and the mechanisms of defense. A psychological defense designates a function, namely, protection from emotionally painful external or internal stimuli—needs, sentiments, desires, and beliefs. The mechanisms of defense are unconscious cognitive operations by which that function is performed. In this discussion I shall focus on emotionally painful desires (aims and wishes) and beliefs, beginning with the former. Formally, defense mechanisms can be classified into two types. The first, instantiated by the single mechanism of repression, protects an actor from the painful affect aroused, for example, by a morally conflictual wish by removing the proposition that represents the wish from conscious awareness. If the wish threatens to reenter consciousness, the unconscious (i.e., repressed) proposition may be subjected to a defense mechanism of the second type. Defense mechanisms of the second type consist of various unconscious cognitive operations that transform the unconscious proposition so that it reenters consciousness in an edited version called a defensive thought. The defensive thought not only protects the actor from the painful affect aroused by the unconscious proposition but also lays the groundwork for a defensive act, an act that fulfills the unconscious wish by implementing the unconscious aim in symbolic disguise. In the case of a morally conflictual wish, the defensive act protects the actor from two painful

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affects: the frustration produced by an unfulfilled wish and the remorse aroused were the wish fulfilled without disguise. Repression is effected only by means of the actor's personal psychological resources. Although defense mechanisms of the second type may likewise be effected in that manner, they are also effected by means of cultural resources. The transformation of an unconscious proposition might be be a matter of mapping it either into a proposition constructed by the actor or into a cultural proposition. In the former case, the transformed proposition, that is, the defensive thought, is privately constructed; in the latter, it is culturally constituted. If the defensive thought is privately constructed—that is, if it is the product of the actor's creativity, imagination, and the like—so is the defensive act. Similarly, if the defensive thought is culturally constituted, so is the defensive act. The performance of a social role, for example, might constitute the defensive act. We may now define culturally constituted defense mechanism to be a defense mechanism of the second type in which culture is employed as a resource for the construction of a defensive thought and the performance of a defensive act. Hence, a culturally constituted defense may be defined as a defense that is implemented by means of a culturally constituted defense mechanism. When, in the previous section, I introduced the concept of a defense mechanism of the second type, I began with privately constructed ones because they are more easily explained. I now wish to stress that culturally constituted defense mechanisms, at least in my view, are much more prevalent and, arguably, much more important, even though, with some notable exceptions (e.g., Devereux 1956; S. Ereud [1921] 1971; Hallowell 1955: chs. 10-11), they have received attention only recently (e.g., Singer 1990). The relative neglect of culturally constituted defense mechanisms may perhaps be explained by the fact that defense mechanisms of any type are discussed mostly in the psychiatric literature, which, understandably enough, focuses on pathological defense mechanisms, although they, too, may be culturally constituted (Jacobson 1967: 29-45). But there has been little systematic

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analysis of the cultural dimension of sublimation, either, even though it is universally regarded as a "healthy" defense mechanism and is virtually always culturally constituted. With that introduction to the concept of culturally constituted defense mechanisms, we may finally turn to the relevance of unconscious desires (whether wishes or aims) to cultural internalization. Thus, if a cultural system is employed to fulfill an unconscious wish or to implement an unconscious aim—that is, if it is employed for the construction of a culturally constituted defense mechanism—then the internalization of such a system is motivated by the unconscious desire. To elucidate this process, let us compare a culturally constituted defense mechanism with a privately constructed one as the means of satisfying the same unconscious desire. Should an actor possess the unconscious wish—for example, to harm his father—he may displace this wish onto a teacher (the defensive thought) and may then fulfill this wish by harassing the teacher (the defensive act). Because both the defensive thought and the defensive act are created from the actor's personal psychological resources, the defense mechanism of displacement by which he fulfills his wish is privately constructed. Let us suppose now that this actor is a member of a society in which witchcraft is a prominent cultural system. In that case, he may fulfill his unconscious wish to harm his fathet by employing this system as a resource for the construction of a culturally constituted defense mechanism. In the event, his internalization of this cultural system is motivated, if not in whole, then in part, by this unconscious wish. In accordance with the typology developed in Chapter 3, the cultural system of witchcraft may be said to consist of two types of propositions: (1) descriptive propositions and (2) directive propositions of the optional type. The former describe a category of malevolent persons (witches), real or imagined, who employ magical power (witchcraft) to harm their fellows, while the latter designate effective action for protection against their malevolent designs. If, as I have argued, cultural propositions are internalized just in case cultural novices are psy-

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chologically preadapted to internalize them, their preadaptation for the internalization of these witchcraft propositions is both cognitive and motivational. If infants and young children come to perceive the psychologically salient persons composing their microsocial world—usually, but not necessarily, the family—as hostile, or as both loving and hostile, then, whether the perception is accurate or distorted, they form conscious and unconscious fantasies of highly malevolent beings who possess both the power and the intention to harm. If they also perceive such persons as loving, they also form fantasies of highly benevolent beings who possess the opposite qualities, but these fantasies are kept separate from the fantasies of malevolent beings. Such children and the adults they become are cognitively preadapted to internalize the descriptive propositions of the witchcraft system because, I would suggest, the propositions correspond to their privately constructed fantasies. They are also motivationally preadapted to internalize the descriptive, as well as the directive, propositions, for insofar as the psychologically salient persons composing their microsocial world are also perceived as loving, the hostility they might feel for them is morally conflictual. Consequently, by internalizing both sets of propositions they are provided with a prepackaged category of malevolent persons whom they can hate, but also harm, with emotional impunity. Let us return to the example of the actor who represses his hatred for his father and his wish to harm him because the feelings are morally conflictual. If the hatred threatens to reenter consciousness, he might defend himself against guilt by employing the descriptive propositions of the witchcraft system to construct a defensive thought. This defensive operation is performed by mapping the unconscious proposition that represents his hatred into a descriptive proposition of the witchcraft system, which thereby transforms it in any number of ways, depending on the type of defense mechanism the actor employs. He might, for example, displace his hatred for his father onto a witch (a fantasized witch, or a person commonly believed to be a

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witch, or a person whom he himself perceives as one), in which case he then represents the witch, not his father, as the object of his hatred ("I hate the witch"). Alternatively, he might externalize his hatred onto a witch, in which case he represents the witch, not himself, as hating his father ("The witch hates Father"). Again, he might both both externalize and project his hatred onto a witch, in which case he represents the witch, not himself, as the agent of the hatred and himself, not his father, as its object ("The witch hates me"). If either of the two last defensive thoughts is chosen, the actor represents his father or himself as the target of the witch's hatred and thus acquires a powerful motive for hating the witch in return. In that case, the witch becomes an obvious target for the displacement of his unconscious wish to harm the father. He can fulfill this wish by employing the directive propositions of the witchcraft system for the defensive act. Depending on the options provided by the particular witchcraft system, he might bring an accusation of witchcraft against the putative witch, or perform a magical ritual to harm the witch, or hire a specialist to perform the ritual, and so on. But whatever the options, the actor's implementation of the directive proposition fulfills not only his conscious wish to harm the witch but also his unconscious wish to harm his father. Although the implementation of the directive proposition is consciously a culturally constituted act, unconsciously it is a culturally constituted defensive act. This example is perhaps sufficient to illustrate my twin theses that (1) unconscious desires may be of signal importance for the motivation of cultural internalization and (2) this is the case when cultural systems are employed for the construction of the culturally constituted defense mechanisms by means of which such desires are satisfied. That is, if the actor employs a cultural system to construct a defense mechanism to cope with the frustration produced by a repressed wish, its internalization may be motivated by that wish. This example illustrates a third thesis, which, though implicit in the example, has not yet been made explicit. If an aggressive

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desire is satisfied by direct, rather than defensive, action, such an act is harmful not only to its victim but also, if the actor is caught, to the actor. Alternatively, if the desire is satisfied by means of a privately constructed defense, it may not be harmful to the actor, but it is often harmful to the victim (as in the example of the displacement of an aggressive aim onto a teacher). If, however, the desire is satisfied by means of a culturally constituted defense (as in the witchcraft example), the very desire that is socially disruptive when satisfied directly or by a privately constructed defense becomes instead a powerful motive for cultural internalization and, in consequence, for cultural reproduction. Although we have been concerned with the importance of unconscious desires and culturally constituted defense mechanisms for cultural reproduction, these desires and mechanisms are no less important for social reproduction. Because the analysis of cultural reproduction applies, with minor differences, to social reproduction as well, a brief example will suffice. Suppose that the culture of some society valorizes success as an important goal, and suppose, moreover, that certain of its (optional) directive propositions encourage competition as a means of achieving that goal. Suppose, too, that in the economic domain the implementation of these propositions ranges from vying with competitors for market share to forcing them into bankruptcy, or that in the academic domain their implementation ranges from vying with rivals for graduate students to subjecting rivals' publications to criticism in scholarly journals. I suggest that these propositions are internalized by business executives and scholars, respectively, because by implementing the propositions—in short, by performing their respective economic and academic roles—they can fulfill important desires, including the following. First, by performing their roles, they fulfill their wish for economic and scholarly productivity, activities that, for them, are intrinsically desirable. And having internalized the cultural goal of success, they find that these activities are also instrumentally desirable as a means of fulfilling their wish for success. So far this example is fairly straightforward. Let us now sup-

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pose, however, that the prescriptive propositions of this culture prohibit the expression of aggressive action, and suppose, too, that these business executives and scholars have internalized this prohibition. We would therefore expect them to experience their aggressive wishes and aims as morally conflictüal and consequently to repress them. That being so, I would now suggest that their internalization of the directive propositions is motivated by conscious as well as unconscious wishes. Since the fulfillment of the wish for success is accompanied, if not accomplished, by victory over competitors and rivals, they can employ these directive propositions, if internalized, as a resource for the construction of culturally constituted defense mechanisms by which they can fulfill their unconscious aggressive wishes in symbolic disguise. That is, they can transform their unconscious, culturally prohibited aggressive wishes into conscious, culturally approved competitive ones. Consequently, by implementing these directive propositions they fulfill both wishes in one and the same act of economic or scholarly productivity. In sum, by means of this culturally constituted defense mechanism, unconscious wishes that might otherwise have motivated culturally prohibited antisocial action, instead motivate recruitment to culturally valued economic and academic statuses and the performance of associated roles, thereby contributing to, if not ensuring, the reproduction of these statuses and roles.1 1. This example—like any other in which cultural propositions are implemented through the performance of social roles—raises the question of sublimation, a defense mechanism not yet discussed. Psychologically, sublimation is best regarded as a subtype of displacement in which there is a modification not only in the object of an unconscious desire but also in its aim. The performance of business and academic roles might be construed either as the displacement of actors' unconscious aggressive desires or as the sublimation of those desires, depending on whether just the object or both object and aim are modified. If one of the actors' conscious aims is victory over rivals and competitors, the object of his unconscious aggressive desire has been modified, but his aim has not. To be sure, the rivals and competitors are not physically assaulted, but they do suffer other kinds of injury—economic (loss of customers and research grants) and emotional (humiliation and dejection)— and although those specific injuries may not be intended by the actor, still, they are hardly unanticipated. In the event, the performance of these roles

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Unconscious Beliefs

Unconscious ideation, I have said thus far, consists of any content of the mind that has been removed from consciousness or that— it may now be added—has never been admitted to consciousness because it is emotionally painful or arouses emotional pain. Among the painful emotions that motivate unconscious ideation, I have been primarily concerned with guilt. Here, for reasons that will soon become evident, I shall focus on anxiety. A desire or a belief arouses anxiety for the same reason that it arouses guilt: because such a desire or belief is threatening. In our discussion of unconscious desires, I focused on morally conflictual wishes, that is, wishes that are threatening because they are in conflict with an actor's moral standards. In turning now to unconscious beliefs, I shall focus on beliefs that are threatening because they thwart the fulfillment of a wish. Among these beliefs I have singled out two types that are especially germane for understanding the internalization of the Burmese cultural ideologies described in Chapter 2. One type consists of beliefs that thwart the fulfillment of a narcissistic wish, thereby frustrating the felt need for self-esteem. I shall call these beliefs narcissistically frustrating. The other consists of beliefs that thwart the fulfillment of a survival wish, thereby frustrating the felt need for self-preservation. I shall call them physically threatening. counts as culturally constituted displacement, not sublimation. If, however, the actor's aggressive aim remains unconscious while the conscious aim is economic or scholarly productivity, the economic or scholarly action counts as culturally constituted sublimation. If the unconscious aggressive aim threatens to reenter consciousness—as has been reported in the case of surgeons for whom surgery represents, among other things, the sublimation of an unconscious aggressive aim (Sandier and Freud 1985: 168)—the sublimation is in danger of collapse. Let us now distinguish displacement from sublimation in sociocultural terms. With displacement there is a modification in the object of an unconscious desire such that its aim is morally approved and the resultant behavior is socially acceptable. With sublimation there is also a modification in the aim of the unconscious desire such that the transformed aim is not only morally approved but morally valued', consequently, the resultant behavior is not only socially acceptable but socially desirable (cf. Vaillant 1986:110-117).

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Narcissistically Frustrating Beliefs In this discussion self designates one's own person, self-representation designates the person's mental representation of his or her self (i.e., the self as known to that person), and self-esteem designates the person's feeling regarding his or her self insofar as that feeling is based on his or her personal standards of merit or worth. If an actor forms a positive self-representation—one that represents his (or her) self as possessing characteristics that instantiate his standards of merit or worth—then he experiences a high level of self-esteem, a pleasurable feeling that is sometimes called healthy narcissism. Conversely, if he forms a negative self-representation— one that represents his self as possessing characteristics that fall far short of those standards—then he experiences a low level of self-esteem, a painful feeling whose limiting easels depression. A high level of self-esteem is produced by a strong correspondence between an actor's actual self-representation (the self as the actor believes it to be) and his ideal self-representation (the self as he would like it to be). A low level of self-esteem is produced by a weak correspondence between these two self-representations. Because healthy narcissism is (I assume) a basic psychological need, it arouses the wish for an actual self-representation that corresponds, to a greater or lesser degree, to one's ideal self-representation. This wish—let us call it a narcissistic wish—is normally fulfilled by the following process. Employing one or more characteristics of his ideal self-representation as a model, the actor forms an aim (a program of action) whose implementation is intended to modify his self in accordance with the model. If the implementation of the aim achieves the intended modification(s) and if, moreover, the actor believes this to be the case, in consequence of this belief he modifies his actual self-representation to correspond to the modification in his self. Since his actual selfrepresentation now corresponds to his ideal self-representation, this belief fulfills his narcissistic wish, thereby enhancing his selfesteem. I shall call such a belief narcissistically gratifying. If, however, the implementation of the aim fails to achieve the intended

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modification in his self and if the actor believes this to be the case, this belief thwarts his narcissistic wish, thereby lowering his selfesteem. I shall call such a belief narcissistically frustrating. Suppose, for example, that, motivated by the need for selfesteem, an actor forms the wish to become an accomplished poet, which in turn produces the aim of writing poetry of superior quality. If her poems are in fact of superior quality, and if she herself believes that they are, then by fulfilling her wish, this belief enhances her self-esteem. If her poems are mediocre, and if she herself believes that they are, then by thwarting her wish, this belief lowers her self-esteem. This finally brings us to our topic, narcissistically frustrating beliefs. To better comprehend why such beliefs are threatening, let us compare them with morally conflictual wishes. A morally conflictual wish constitutes a threat to an actor's ideal self-representation as a moral person and thereby arouses guilt or what might now be called moral anxiety. A narcissistically frustrating belief, however, constitutes a threat to an actor's ideal self-representation as a successful person and thereby arouses narcissistic anxiety. If anxiety is construed as a signal of danger (whether emotional or physical), a morally conflictual wish and a narcissistically frustrating belief arouse anxiety for opposite reasons. A morally conflictual wish arouses anxiety because the fulfillment of the wish is emotionally dangerous; that is, it incurs punishment from the superego, which is experienced as the painful emotion of remorse. A narcissistically frustrating belief, however, arouses anxiety because the continuous thwarting or nonfulfillment of a narcissistic wish is emotionally dangerous; that is, it leads to a disastrous deflation of self-esteem, which is experienced as the painful emotion of depression. If a defense mechanism is constructed to cope with anxiety, in the case of moral anxiety it operates on the conflictual wish, whereas in the case of narcissistic anxiety it operates either on the frustrated narcissistic wish or on the belief that thwarts its fulfillment. We can see these alternatives by returning to the actor whose wish to become a distinguished poet is thwarted by

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her belief that her poetry is mediocre. In the first place, she might renounce the wish, a defensive maneuver that protects her from narcissistic anxiety by rendering her indifferent to the quality of her poetry. Alternatively, she might repress the wish, which protects her from narcissistic anxiety by removing the wish from conscious awareness. Again, she might rationalize the quality of her poetry by attributing its mediocrity to some extenuating circumstance (a poor education, for example), which protects her from anxiety by absolving her of responsibility for the quality of her poems. Each of these defensive maneuvers is problematic. If the wish is renounced or if the belief is rationalized, the narcissistic anxiety might persist despite these defensive operations as long as the thwarted wish remains conscious. And if the wish is repressed, it might still break through (or threaten to break through) the repression barrier, in which case anxiety would be experienced once again. Given these considerations, the most effective defense against narcissistic anxiety is the disavowal of the narcissistically frustrating belief. Although repression and disavowal are similar in their effects—both keep threatening thoughts outside conscious awareness—they are different kinds of defense mechanisms. Repression removes a threatening thought from conscious awareness and prevents it from reentering consciousness, whereas'disavowal prevents the thought from entering consciousness from its very inception. If an actor disavows the belief that her poetry is mediocre, it is not,having registered this belief in her mind, that she then bans it from consciousness; rather, she bars it from conscious registry in the first place. Despite the differences between the operation of these two defense mechanisms, disavowed and repressed thoughts are similar in certain respects. Both are unconscious; they may threaten to enter consciousness under certain conditions; and both undergo various vicissitudes if they do. It is here that the similarities end. The vicissitudes of the repression of a morally conflictual wish are a function of the strength of the now unconscious wish. The

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vicissitudes of the disavowal of a narcissistically frustrating belief are a function not of the strength of the now unconscious belief but rather of the strength of the conscious narcissistic wish. This can be illustrated by our poet. Although her disavowal of the belief that she is only a mediocre poet protects her from narcissistic anxiety, it does not fulfill her wish to become a distinguished poet, so her need for self-esteem remains frustrated. That being the case, the disavowal of the frustrating belief is an effective defense only if her thwarted wish is of ordinary strength, for she might then satisfy her need for self-esteem by fulfilling some other narcissistic wish instead. Most of us are probably acquainted with actors who, having failed in their attempts to become successful poets, politicians, or scientists, satisfy their need for self-esteem by becoming successful chess players, teachers, or administrators. If our poet's wish to become a distinguished poet is peremptory, the adoption of any alternative means of satisfying her need for self-esteem will not succeed, for the fulfillment of the former wish and that wish only will satisfy the need. As a defense against the depression attendant upon its persistent frustration, in addition to disavowing the belief that her poetry is mediocre—a defense mechanism of the first type—she must also fulfill her thwarted wish; and this is achieved by subjecting the disavowed belief to a defense mechanism of the second type. In the case of a repressed morally conflictual wish, a defense mechanism of the second type consists of a social or physical act that fulfills the wish in symbolic disguise, thereby protecting the actor both from frustration and from remorse. Typically, social or physical action is also necessary for the fulfillment of narcissistic wishes, but it is not sufficient; such action is a means for the construction of a consummatory belief that, based on and empirically warranted by this action, fulfills the wish. If, however, a narcissistic wish is peremptory and its fulfillment is continuously thwarted, a consummatory belief may be constructed for its fulfillment even if its construction is not empirically warranted by any action (see Chapter 3).

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That is precisely how our poet fulfills her thwarted narcissistic wish when she subjects her disavowed belief that her poetry is only mediocre to a defense mechanism of the second type. Such a defense mechanism performs this function by transforming the disavowed belief I am a mediocre poet into the consummatory belief I am a superior poet. In short, the mental act of mapping the disavowed narcissistically frustrating belief into the narcissistically gratifying belief not only constitutes the defensive thought by which the former belief is admitted to consciousness but also constitutes the defensive act by which the peremptory narcissistic wish is fulfilled. Although such a defense mechanism is usually designated a denial in fantasy, this expression is confusing, so I shall call it wish-fulfillment in fantasy. Whatever the designation, this defense mechanism in one and the same mental act not only fulfills the thwarted narcissistic wish, thereby protecting the actor from the narcissistic anxiety aroused by the frustrating belief, but also defends the actor against the depression that would have been aroused by the continuous frustration of the need for self-esteem. Physically Threatening Beliefs If narcissistically frustrating beliefs arouse narcissistic anxiety because they are a threat to a person's self-esteem, then, because physically threatening beliefs are a threat to the self itself, they arouse what might be called bodily anxiety. Whereas narcissistic anxiety signals the emotional danger of depression, bodily anxiety signals the physical danger of bodily injury, from pain to maiming to death. Consider the physically threatening belief in the inevitability of one's death. Since it thwarts the peremptory wish for the continuity of the self, this belief understandably arouses strong anxiety, and in consequence it is usually repressed or disavowed, remaining unconscious until or unless an external stimulus brings it into conscious awareness. Suppose now that this stimulus consists of the message that one has cancer, and suppose that this

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message, together with the expectation that one's death is imminent, arouses strong anxiety. An actor might employ any number of defense mechanisms for coping with this anxiety. He might, for example, scrupulously comply with the therapeutic regimen prescribed by his physician in the belief that it will cure his illness. If he cannot entertain that belief, he might employ some other defense. He might acquire an obsession with nuclear war, thereby displacing his concern for personal danger onto this impersonal concern. Alternatively, he might rationalize his condition by convincing himself that having lived a long and good life, it is time to die or, conversely, that having suffered a miserable life, death is not so bad after all. These defense mechanisms are employed by an actor who accepts the reality of his cancer and the imminence of his death. If the defenses are not effective, he might instead deny that he has cancer and in consequence disavow the belief in his death. Such a defense is most effective if the cancer is in remission, but should the symptoms reappear, it is likely that the disavowed belief would enter consciousness. In the event, the actor might employ a defense mechanism of the second type to cope with the anxiety. Although in this case it is difficult even to imagine what a privately constructed defense mechanism might consist of, examples of culturally constituted ones are readily at hand. Suppose that the actor's religious tradition contains a doctrine of immortality, including the notion of eternal life in a heavenly abode. By internalizing this doctrine, he can allow the belief in his imminent death to enter consciousness and yet avoid anxiety by constructing the culturally constituted defense mechanism of wish-fulfillment in fantasy. To put it technically: by employing that religious doctrine as a resource, he can transform his emotionally threatening unconscious belief ("Death is the end of my mortal existence") by mapping it into an emotionally gratifying cultural proposition ("Death is the beginning of my immortal existence"). This culturally constituted defense, like all others, serves a dual, reciprocal function. On the one hand, by employing a reli-

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gious doctrine as a cultural resource for the construction of the defense mechanism, the actor uses a defense that fulfills a wish. On the other hand, because the defense serves this personal function, the wish motives the actor to internalize the religious doctrine, which serves the social function of cultural reproduction. To be sure, this particular example deals with an actor in extremis, but the same process occurs in the case of actors not dying from cancer. Summary and Conclusions

Let me summarize this lengthy and complex discussion of unconscious wishes and beliefs and their relevance, via culturally constituted defenses, for cultural internalization. If a wish is in conflict with an internalized moral prescription, it arouses guilt; and in defense against this painful affect, an actor may repress the wish. If a narcissistic or a self-preservative wish is thwarted by a threatening belief, then inasmuch as the thwarting of the wish arouses anxiety, the belief, not the wish, may be disavowed or repressed. Because the repression of a conflictuel wish, though defending the actor against guilt, causes frustration, the unconscious wish continues to press for fulfillment and threatens to reenter consciousness. Similarly, because the disavowal or repression of a frustrating belief, though defending the actor against narcissistic or bodily anxiety, does not fulfill the peremptory needs for selfesteem and self-preservation, it does not protect the actor from the depression and despair aroused by their persistent frustration. To cope with these painful affects, the unconscious wish and the unconscious belief alike may be subjected to a defense mechanism of the second type, which admits them into consciousness in symbolic disguise. But whereas the morally conflictual wish is then fulfilled by means of a defensive act, in the case of the narcissistic or self-preservative wish, the disguised belief itself constitutes the defensive act by which the wish is fulfilled. If a cultural system or one of its constituent propositions is available as a

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resource, the thwarted wish may be fulfilled not by a privately constructed defense mechanism but by a culturally constituted one. The internalization of the cultural system may be motivated, if not in whole, then in part, by these thwarted wishes. If cultural internalization is motivated by an unconscious morally conflictual wish, then (as in the witchcraft example) descriptive, but nonconsummatory, propositions are employed to disguise the thwarted wish, and directive, but optional, propositions are employed to designate the defensive act by which it is fulfilled. If, however, cultural internalization is motivated by a conscious wish that is thwarted by an unconscious belief, then (as in the religious example) descriptive, but consummatory, propositions are employed both to disguise the belief and to fulfill the wish. Culturally constituted and privately constructed defense mechanisms alike protect actors from painful emotions and enable them to fulfill thwarted wishes; moreover, they serve that function in a manner that protects society from the antisocial actions that might otherwise have been motivated by these wishes. But culturally constituted defense mechanisms serve other functions not served by privately constructed ones. Since they fulfill thwarted wishes by cultural means, these potentially disruptive wishes motivate both the internalization of cultural systems and the enactment of social roles. And by serving the latent function of cultural internalization, they also serve the latent functions of cultural and social reproduction. There remains one more functional difference between culturally constituted and privately constructed defense mechanisms, which concerns a personal, rather than a cultural or social, function. If a defense mechanism is privately constructed, it may sometimes be psychopathological, but if it is culturally constituted, it usually prevents psychopathology. To support this claim, let me illustrate the defense mechanism of wish-fulfillment in fantasy. Suppose that an actor is a member of some group g with a long history of persecution and that in consequence he believes g is an inferior group and that he—being a member of g and identifying with it—is also inferior. Suppose, too, that as a defense against

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the narcissistic anxiety aroused by this self-representation, he disavows this belief. Suppose, finally, that having been informed by God—or so he imagines—that g comprises God's chosen people, he satisfies his need for self-esteem by transforming this unconscious (narcissistically threatening) belief into the conscious (narcissistically gratifying) belief that g is a superior group and that consequently he, being a member of g, is a superior person. We can most likely agree that the actor has constructed both a fantasy (receiving a message from God) and a belief (g comprises God's chosen people) of grandiosity. But because he himself takes the fantasy as reality, it is an auditory hallucination; and because the belief is based on a hallucination, it is a delusion. Because hallucinations and delusions reflect a severe impairment in the capacity for reality testing, they are psychotic symptoms. Let me now propose a different scenario. Suppose that the notion that g comprises the chosen people of God is not a private construction of this actor but is instead a normative doctrine of g*s religious tradition that he acquired as part of his enculturation and internalized as a defense against narcissistic anxiety. Suppose, too, that this doctrine is enunciated in a sacred text believed to be divinely revealed. In this scenario the actor's defense is culturally constituted, not privately constructed. Once again we can most likely agree that in this case the actor and his belief are normal, not pathological. In the first place, the belief was not acquired from a hallucination but from a socially transmitted religious doctrine supported by the consentium gentium. In the second place, although the doctrine admittedly is grandiose, its truth is authenticated by a sacred text accepted not only by the members of g but also by their persecutors. None of this is meant to imply that the doctrine is true, only that the belief that is based on it, or any other belief based on a religious doctrine, is not a delusion. Indeed, even if the doctrine is false, it is not a delusion, because the belief is not produced by a hallucination, hence reflects no impairment in the actor's capacity for reality testing. In short, neither the actor nor his belief is pathological in any sense of that term.

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Taking this example as paradigmatic, we may say that culturally constituted defense mechanisms are not psychopathological; in fact, they prevent psychopathology. This view has its anthropological critics, who claim that far from preventing pathology, culturally constituted defense mechanisms are themselves pathological. Because some of these critics (e.g., Lutz 1988: 195-207; Kurtz 1991: 74-97) ignore or reject the notion of intrapsychic conflict, their criticisms are uninformed. One critic, however, is a distinguished psychoanalytic anthropologist (Obeyesekere 1990) who attributes special importance to such conflict, and his criticisms must be taken seriously. I shall address his criticisms in the next chapter.

6 Culturally Constituted Defenses and Psychopathology

Culturally Constituted Defenses and Neurotic Symptoms

In a recent critique of the concept of culturally constituted defenses and other concepts of psychoanalytic anthropology, Gananath Obeyesekere contends that their proponents "analyze symbolic forms on the model or analogy of psychopathology" and employ a "pathological model of culture" (1990: xvii). That is, they "postulate that, insofar as an isomorphism exists between personal and cultural defenses, so a similar isomorphism exists between [cultural] symbol and symptom" (19), if not, indeed, "a simple replication" (57). Consequently, the psychoanalytic anthropology of these authors has "made little change" in Freud's "basic orientation" that religion (and presumably culture in general) is a "neurotic repetition compulsion" (19).l These extraordinary charges share one characteristic: they are all mistaken. But because we are concerned only with culturally constituted defense mechanisms, I shall deal with these charges in respect to that concept alone. 1. This broadside is directed against Kardiner for the concept of "projective systems," Whiting for the concept of "systems of psychological security," Spiro for the concept of "culturally constituted defenses," Epstein for the concept of "defenses," and Devereux for the view that ethnic symbols do not provide "curative insight." The references that he cites are Kardiner 1946; Whiting 1961; Spiro 1965; Epstein 1979; Devereux {1956] 1980. 118

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A culturally constituted defense mechanism is a defense mechanism of the second type that fulfills an unconscious wish by employing a cultural system as a resource for the construction ofthat wish. Because a defense mechanism of the second type is the reverse of a neurotic symptom (see Chapter 3), if a cultural symbol system is employed for its construction, the defense mechanism can hardly be isomorphic with, or replicative of, a symptom. Even on the premise that defense mechanisms of the second type are symptoms, Obeyesekere's contention that psychoanalytic anthropologists employ a pathological model of culture would apply only to those instances in which culture is employed for the construction of a defense mechanism. Since, however, this is the case only when cultural internalization is unconsciously motivated, and since it usually is consciously motivated, culture is employed for defensive purposes only infrequently. That being so, the question before us is not whether psychoanalytic anthropologists conceive of culture as pathological but whether in the restricted case of culturally constituted defense mechanisms they conceive of cultural symbols as replications of neurotic symptoms or analyze them on the model of psychopathology. To evaluate the validity of these charges, we must determine what they might possibly mean. Specifically, what could it mean to say that the proponents of culturally constituted defense mechanisms analyze cultural symbols on the model of psychopathology? As far as I can see, it could mean one of two things. It could mean that if culture is employed for the construction of culturally constituted defense mechanisms, cultural symbols are employed to cope with psychopathology, and that is a demeaning function for culture to perform. Or it could mean that although coping with psychopathology is an entirely proper cultural function, when that function is performed by culturally constituted defense mechanisms, cultural symbols are employed as a pathological means for its achievement. To evaluate the validity of the first meaning, let us recall two points made in the previous chapter. First, a culturally constituted defense mechanism is a defense mechanism of the second type

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that employs culture as a resource for coping with intrapsychic conflict. Second, although intrapsychic conflict may range from neurotic conflict to the normal conflict of everyday life, defense mechanisms of the second type are typically constructed to cope with the latter. If a culturally constituted defense mechanism is constructed to cope with an unconscious conflict of everyday life, the claim that in such a case cultural symbols are employed to cope with psychopathology is wrong. Consider, for example, a morally conflictual wish, that is, a wish in conflict with an internalized moral standard that prohibits it. This type of conflict is normal on two counts. First, everywhere some wishes are culturally prohibited as a functional requirement of a viable social existence, so such conflict is probably not only universal but also socially desirable. Second, for social actors to have such a conflict indicates that they have internalized the moral prescriptions of their culture and have formed a superego. In short, they are not sociopaths but enculturated and socialized members of society. Let us assume now that an unconscious, morally conflictual wish threatens to reenter consciousness and that a culturally constituted defense mechanism is constructed to cope with the threat. Such a wish is a sign not of pathology but of normality, so the charge that in such a case cultural symbols are employed to cope with psychopathology can hardly be credited. This is not to say that culturally constituted defense mechanisms are never employed to cope with pathological conflict, for sometimes they are. Even then, however, Obeyesekere's charge that the proponents of culturally constituted defense mechanisms analyze cultural symbols on the model of psychopathology is unlikely to refer to the employment of these defense mechanisms to cope with psychopathology. He himself describes ethnographic cases in which cultural symbols are employed to cope with psychopathology of even the most extreme form. Hence, in making that charge, it is more likely that it is the second meaning that Obeyesekere has in mind—namely, that when psychoanalytic anthropologists say culturally constituted defense mechanisms are a means of coping

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with intrapsychic conflict, they are viewing cultural symbols as a pathological means of coping—in short, for them there is "an isomorphism, if not a simple replication, of [cultural] symbol and [neurotic] symptom" (Obeyesekere 1990: 57). If this is the meaning, Obeyesekere's charge is once again mistaken, as is perhaps evident from our discussion of the critical differences between symptoms and defense mechanisms of the second type in the previous chapter. Lest there be any ambiguity on this score, let me summarize that discussion. Whereas a neurotic symptom is the expression of an unconscious conflictual wish, a defense mechanism of the second type is a cognitive operation by which the prepositional representation of such a wish is transformed into a nonconflictual one. Moreover, in the case of a symptom, the wish does not achieve conscious representation, but in the case of a defense mechanism, it does, albeit in symbolic disguise. In consequence, a neurotic symptom is the polar opposite of a defense mechanism on every relevant dimension of wish fulfillment. Because a symptom is a cognitively unmediated attempt to fulfill a wish, instead of fulfilling the wish by the implementation of an aim (the normal means of wish fulfillment), the symptom does so by a partial, unconscious, and highly distorted (abnormal) means. Moreover, the symptom is experienced by the actor as painful, involuntary, and strange, or ego-alien; and, in large degree, the wish remains thwarted, and, to the same degree, the actor's frustration persists. Compare this with a defense mechanism of the second type. By admitting the unconscious wish into consciousness in a nonconflictual form, such a defense mechanism, unlike a symptom, allows the wish to be fulfilled by a normal means, that is, by the implementation of an aim (the defensive act). Furthermore, the defensive act, unlike a symptom, is experienced by the actor as pleasurable (not painful), as voluntary (not involuntary), and as ego-syntonic (not ego-alien). Because a defense mechanism of the second type is thus the very opposite of a symptom, it is misguided to claim that if culture is employed for its construction, there is an isomorphism,

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even replication, of (cultural) symbol and (neurotic) symptom. Indeed, if a culturally constituted defense mechanism is employed for coping with conflict, there is no need to construct a neurotic symptom (see Chapter 5). That Obeyesekere nevertheless views culturally constituted defense mechanisms as isomorphic with (neurotic) symptoms can be explained, I suggest, only by a misunderstanding of the vicissitudes of unconscious conflict. In the case of an unconscious conflictual wish, a defense mechanism of the second type (whether privately constructed or culturally constituted) copes with the conflict not by resolving it but by representing the wish as nonconflictual. It does not resolve the conflict because in the case of a morally conflictual wish there is no way of doing so short of renouncing either the wish or the moral prohibition, and in the case of a neurotically conflictual wish, it usually requires therapeutic intervention. Obeyesekere disagrees with the latter observation not only in regard to neurotic conflict but even in regard to pathological conflict of a greater magnitude. In his view, conflict of either type is resolved if cultural symbols are employed to cope with the conflict. Obeyesekere embraces the concept of culturally constituted defense mechanisms (without ever, however, using that term), but pace psychoanalytic anthropologists, he argues that they resolve conflict. Psychoanalytic anthropologists do not understand this, he claims, because they view cultural symbols as reflecting the "archaic motivations of childhood"; and because the "primary thrust of [their] analysis is on the regressive nature of the symbol system," they do not recognize its "forward-looking prospective or progressive character." In other words, they do not recognize that cultural symbols "permit [the actor] to move away progressively from the [archaic] sources of motivation" (Obeyesekere 1990:19). That cultural symbols serve this function is demonstrated, so he claims, by the ecstatic "priestesses" of Sri Lanka (Obeyesekere 1982,1990). As Obeyesekere records with uncommon sensitivity and insight, these women suffer severe emotional traumas prior to becoming priestesses (or, to use the more accurate term, shamans).

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In consequence, they develop symptoms of severe psychopathology. Their entry into their religious role, Obeyeskere argues, constitutes an attempt both to cope with their traumas and to fulfill their peremptory (mostly sexual, aggressive, and dependency) unconscious wishes—for which he provides convincing biographical detail. Obeyesekere is less convincing, however, when he further argues that in performing this religious role—which consists of encounters with, and possession by, gods and spirits while in trance and other dissociative states—the priestesses achieve "the transformation of symptom into symbol" and thereby resolve their conflicts, overcome their traumas, and achieve "a radical transformation of [their] being" (Obeyesekere 1990: 25). He says that because of this "work of culture," the "true reality" of the priestess "is her spiritual experiences with the gods in such ecstatic states as visions and trances" (12). Although her past traumas may be repeated in these experiences, this "act of repetition of the past is a transformation and transcendence of the past" by means of which "she overcomes her infantile terrors" (13,15). Although some observers, Obeyesekere remarks, might view the priestess's trances and visions as signs of "hysteria" or even "hysterical psychosis," such labels, he contends, are entirely misplaced. The first would be "meaningless" because the "'hysterical syndrome' has been totally transformed into a spiritual experience," and the second would be "completely inapplicable" because "what occurs here is not a psychosis but a spiritual experience" (13). This spiritual experience is made possible because the use of religious symbols, though viewed by psychoanalysis as regressive, is in fact progressive. Hence, when the priestess uses these symbols to cope with her conflicts, there is a "progressive movement of unconscious thought" that "involves the transformation of the archaic motivations of childhood into symbols that look forward to the resolution of conflict and beyond that into the nature of the sacred or numinous" (17). In other words, by means of these symbols, the priestess is able "to move away prospectively from [infantile] sources of motivation to another reality

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which she has defined for herself—a joyous existence and comportment with the gods" (19). These are extraordinary claims, and if I find them less than convincing, it is because Obeyesekere's rich and detailed descriptions of these priestesses (1982: 53-122; 1990: 3-28, 49-68) led me to the following, very different interpretations. In her spiritual experiences the priestess does not transcend her archaic motivations; rather, she fulfills them. Although these experiences may be spiritual, they are transitory psychotic episodes. Indeed, far from constituting a progressive use of symbols, these experiences signify a breakdown in symbolic functioning. Culturally Constituted Defenses and Psychotic Symptoms

Although defense mechanisms of the second type are typically the opposite of symptoms and even obviate the need to construct them, there are a few instances in which this is not the case. With a severe childhood trauma, leading to development arrest, or with pathological conflict of the kind characteristic, say, of paranoia, a defense mechanism does not preclude symptom formation; indeed, it may itself be a symptom. Thus, if a paranoid individual attempts to resolve her aggressive conflicts by projecting her aggression, this defense mechanism is itself a symptom—not of neurosis but of paranoia. And this is the case whether the projection is privately constructed (e.g., the aggressive wish is projected onto creatures from interplanetary space) or culturally constituted (e.g., it is projected onto a putative witch). That being so, I agree with Obeyesekere that the possessions and visions that characterize the spiritual experiences of the priestesses constitute attempts to cope with unbearable conflicts by means of religious symbols—that is, by means of a culturally constituted defense mechanism—but I believe these possessions and visions are episodic psychotic symptoms, not because religious symbols are regressive or because they reflect the archaic motivations of childhood but because (as Obeyesekere convincingly demonstrates) the priestesses have undergone severe traumas,

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whose pathological consequences are beyond repair, except perhaps by means of prolonged psychiatric intervention. Although religious symbols are not regressive, the ways in which the priestesses use these symbols to cope with their pathology is. Their use of these symbols does not resolve their pathological conflict; rather, it is a symptom of their conflict. Let us turn to an analogous example. Consider the American male who, struggling to cope with a narcissistic trauma, constructs the grandiose belief that he is Jesus. Such a case is not frequent—although three such persons were once co-residents in a Michigan mental hospital (Rokeach 1964) —but Sri Lankan priestesses are not all that frequent either. In any event, there can be little doubt that for such a male this culturally constituted belief not only fills a strongly frustrated need for selfesteem (and it does so consciously and ego-syntonically) but also provides him with a deeply felt spiritual experience, one that involves a central symbol of Christianity. Nevertheless, his belief is a delusion—after all, he is not Jesus—and it signifies a breakdown in reality testing. In this case, a culturally constituted defense mechanism is a psychotic symptom, and a perduring one to boot. As Obeyesekere describes it, the Singhalese priestesses have two types of spiritual experiences. In one type, the priestess interacts with a god while she in a trance state; in the other, she is possessed by a god, also while in a trance. The priestess's interaction with a god while in a trance is, Obeyesekere writes, a "joyous" experience because it involves a "shaking from within" (as it is called in Sri Lanka), which, he says, is an experience of sexual orgasm, an experience that "many" priestesses, like "many" other women in Sri Lanka, have never had. Because the priestess enters into this intimate relationship with a god following her "rejection of the husband's penis and an emotional-sexual relationship with him," her orgasmic experience, Obeyesekere argues, is a consequence of having "renounced eros for agape"; that is, it is a consequence of renouncing a physical relationship with her husband in favor of a spiritual relationship

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with a god. "The pleasure and release" that the priestess obtains from this orgasmic experience is "translated into religious language as a divine ecstasy" (Obeyesekere 1981: 33). If the priestess's joyous interaction with a god involves sexual orgasm, why is this interaction a spiritual experience? And although the priestess's ecstasy is achieved in an encounter with a god, it consists of or is induced by sexual orgasm, so why is the ecstasy agape, not eros? Perhaps anticipating such objections, Obeyesekere remarks that "it is misleading to see [the priestess's orgasm] in its purely biological sense, for, like everything in the ascetics' lives, this experience is also a spiritual one. The calm, all passion spent, that descends on her later is a product of religious ecstasy, not biological orgasm. The special power of that experience lies in the acting out of frustrated sex through a symbol system. In that sense we cannot speak of frustrated orgasm now receiving expression, since the biological drive is fully infused with the spiritual; eros is agape" (88-89; italics in original). Well, perhaps so. But surely it is not self-evident that eros is agape rather than eros if frustrated sex is acted out through a symbol system. Nor is it self-evident that the priestess's calm is the product of religious ecstasy rather than orgasmic experience. Indeed, if she had never before had an orgasm, one can only wonder what else, in addition to her orgasmic experience, her ecstasy might consist of. Agape, after all, is sublimated eros, and if there is any sublimation here, it is not obvious to me. Sexual orgasm experienced in interaction with a divine being might arguably be characterized as spiritual if the divine being is, for example, the Christian god, for he is conceived as wholly spiritual. Hindu gods, however, are not only conceived of anthropomorphically but are also taken to be physical beings. Because many of them are portrayed in myth and sculpture as sexually active and highly potent, it is difficult to understand why spiritual is the appropriate term for an orgasm that the priestess experiences in interaction with one. Similar difficulties arise in connection with Obeyesekere's interpretation of the distinguishing mark of a priestess, the invol-

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untary growth of matted head hair. Because the priestess herself views it as the god's gift for her sexual renunciation, Obeyesekere interprets it as "a sublated penis emerging via the head"—not, however, an "ordinary penis, but the god's Ungarn, the idealized penis, his sakti, the source of life and vitality." Hence, here also we see the transformation of symptom into symbol and the "converting [of] eros into agape" (34-35). In reply I can only reiterate what I said about the priestess's sexual interaction with a god. Just because the putative penis is that of a god does not mean that it represents agape, any more than orgasm is agape just because it is achieved by means of a god's, not a man's, penis. Furthermore, seeing that the priestess believes her matted hair is not a symbol of the god's penis but is his penis, I find it hard to understand how her belief transforms symptom into symbol. If the priestess's interaction with a god in trance and visions constitutes the transformation of frustrated sex into a spiritual experience, her trance possession by a god, Obeyesekere claims, constitutes the transformation of frustrated aggression into a spiritual experience. I submit that the latter claim is no less difficult to accept than the former. To take but one example, consider Obeyesekere's dramatic account of possession by the goddess Sohon Kali. "I have seen female ecstatics possessed by Sohon Kali during kapilla, sorcery-cutting rituals. Tongues lolling out, with contorted visages, hooting and shouting in ecstasy and agony, they act out the role of the terrifying Kali and simultaneously act out their own dark aggressions of childhood: abreaction and symbolic action are fused into a single performance" (89). This is a marvelous description, but how does it indicate that the priestesses' behavior is transformed aggression? To be sure, their behavior may well be displaced, not direct, aggression, but I fail to see how the aggression is thereby transformed. Just as transformed eros is sublimated eros, so, too, transformed aggression is sublimated aggression, and surely there is no hint of sublimation in this description. In my view, the priestess does not transcend her archaic motivations either when she interacts with a god in trance or when she

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is possessed by a god; rather, she fulfills her archaic motivations. This brings me to the second conclusion enunciated above: that these experiences are psychotic episodes consisting of hallucinations and of delusions.2 Any encounter with an object, whether a thing, a person, or a god, that takes place in a trance or dream is hallucinatory because the image of an object is construed by the actor not as a mental representation of that object but as the object itself. When this occurs, images in the inner world are mistaken for objects and events in the outer world. Fantasy is confused with reality. Such confusion signifies an impairment in the capacity for reality testing, namely, the capacity to distinguish an image in the mind from the object that it represents. If the impairment is permanent, it constitutes the diagnostic criterion for psychosis; if it is transient, as it is in a trance or dream, it is a transitory psychotic episode. Although very few people in Sri Lanka or anywhere else enter into trance, all people dream, and some may dream of gods and spirits. Upon awakening, however, they usually recognize that the god encountered in their dream was not the god in person but an image—an iconic representation—of the god. They recognize that the dream was a hallucination. The Sri Lankan priestess, in contrast, views her encounters with gods in dreams and trance as actual encounters both during and after the dissociational experiences. In respect to these experiences—but not, so far as we know, in respect to others—there is a breakdown in her capacity for reality testing. That being so, it is hard to credit Obeyesekere's claim that in the priestess's trance and visionary experiences she employs re2. Because clinical diagnoses are often problematic even when clinicians are working in their own society, where the necessary information is relatively complete, diagnoses are even more problematic in connection with foreign societies. If I were nevertheless to hazard a guess, I would suggest, following Langness's (1965) characterization of similar phenomena in New Guinea, that these experiences are symptoms of a "hysterical psychosis" (Hollender and Hirsch 1964). I would also suggest that if, according to Obeyesekere, the matted hair of the priestess is an unconscious symbolic representation of the god's penis, the matting is probably a symptom of conversion hysteria.

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ligious symbols to move from the archaic sources of motivation to the realm of the sacred or the numinous. For her, the gods she encounters in these experiences are not symbols that represent the gods; instead, they are the gods themselves. This breakdown in reality testing is in effect a breakdown in symbolic functioning. Obeyesekere insists that the priestess's retrospective view of her trance experience as real does not signify a breakdown in reality testing. "The external world is culturally defined," he argues, so for Sri Lankans (and for other non-Westerners) the "real world" comprises not only the "sociopolitical and economic world" but also "the world of ghosts and spirits," which, for them, "is as real as that of markets" (Obeyesekere 1990: 66). Again, when a Sri Lankan "says he is possessed by prêtas [demons], he is not out of touch with reality; quite the contrary, he is in closer touch with cultural reality than the ordinary member of society!" (Obeyesekere 1981: 104). Consequently, concepts like "reality principle" and "reality testing" are "completely problematic and incapable of grasping the uniqueness and complexity of the South Asian scene" (Obeyesekere 1990: 67). This argument is misplaced because in their technical usage these concepts do not mean what Obeyesekere takes them to mean. Reality principle does not denote an "orientation to the socio-political-economic order," nor does an orientation to the world of ghosts and spirits signify a failure in reality testing. Rather, the reality principle is a regulatory principle that modifies the "pleasure principle" by postponing the fulfilling of a wish until or unless the conditions in the external world are propitious for its fulfillment, and a failure in reality testing signifies that an image located in the mind—whether that of a ghost, a prêta, or a market—is mistaken for the external object that it represents. In accordance, then, with the technical meanings of these concepts, none of the following religious phenomena violate the reality principle or signify a failure in reality testing: the belief in a world of gods and spirits; the belief that gods and spirits may help and protect or harm and attack human beings; the belief that their help can be obtained and their harm averted by means of

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rites and rituals; the wish to be dependent on, and to be protected and loved by, them; the belief that one is protected and loved by them; and the representation of such beliefs and wishes by images in the mind in waking life or in dreams. To repeat, none of these instantiations of an orientation to the world of gods and spirits constitutes a violation of the reality principle or a failure in reality testing. Nor, for that matter, does Obeyesekere's example of the ecstatic priest who claimed that an old man dressed in white who had come up to him and smiled was in fact a god, for if the cultural criteria for identifying a god were satisfied, this experience entailed neither cognitive nor perceptual distortion and hence did not constitute a failure in reality testing. Suppose, however, that the ecstatic priest had encountered the old man in a dream or trance, and suppose that even following the dream or trance he took the old man for a god—not an image of a god but the god himself. This would constitute a failure in reality testing because the priest would have confused the mental image of the god with the god himself—which is precisely what Obeyesekere overlooks when he denies that the priestess's encounters with gods and spirits in trance and in dreams constitute a breakdown in reality testing. When Obeyesekere says that the priestess's belief in the "community" of gods cannot be compared with the "paranoid pseudocommunity" of a psychotic because in her case the belief is culturally constituted, his claim is unexceptionable. But when he adds that the gods constitute a "real" community, both for the priestess and for her society, "with [the] one difference" that for the priestess this belief is "translated into a more dynamic interaction and experience" with the gods (Obeyesekere 1981: 88; my italics), he misses the crucial point. For it is precisely that one difference— the difference between the devotee's belief and the priestess's hallucinatory experience—that constitutes the difference between normal symbolic functioning and a breakdown in symbolic functioning and hence between an unimpaired capacity for reality testing and a breakdown in that capacity. Obeyesekere overlooks the critical difference between a belief

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and a hallucinatory experience once again when he argues that because "all members of the [Sri Lankan] culture recognize the notion of incubi and succubi in various shapes and guises," it follows that a woman's incubus visitation (in which she and the incubus engage in hours of lovemaking culminating in coitus) is "not a fantasy, but a set of ideas the culture itself provides for an individual to canalize private fantasy into public culture and thereby abolish fantasy" (131). In short, the incubus visitation "is entirely a symbolic system" (139). There is a fallacy in this argument. Although admittedly the notion of incubi and succubi, as well as ideas about them, are shared, and the notion and ideas constitute a symbolic system, the experience of making love with an incubus is not a cultural symbol but a culturally constituted fantasy. Anyone who has such a notion and such ideas might also have such a fantasy. What distinguishes such a person from a woman who has an incubus visitation is that the latter regards her fantasy as a veridical experience. Her experience, far from constituting "entirely a symbolic system," is not symbolic at all; since she confuses fantasized with actual incubi, it is a hallucination. Hence, it signifies a breakdown in symbolic functioning as well as in reality testing.3 Let us turn now to the priestess's trance possession by a god or goddess. Divine possession—not the culturally constituted belief in divine possession but the personal experience of being possessed—is an experience in which the priestess believes that she is the goddess and consequently acts as the goddess herself would act (as in the case of possession by Sohon Kali). If her experience of interacting with a god or a goddess is a hallucination, her experience of being possessed by one is a delusion. 3. Devereux made the same distinction between belief and experience in an article published forty years ago. Although I first read the article shortly after its publication in 1956, it had no impact on my relativistic views, and I promptly forgot (repressed?) it. When I reread the article a few years ago, I was astonished to find the following passage: "The real source of the fallacious views held by cultural relativists is their refusal to distinguish between belief and experience" ([1956] 1980: 21; italics in original).

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A delusion, as was evident in the example of the Western male who believes he is Jesus, consists of the breakdown of self-object differentiation such that the person's self-representation is fused with an object-representation. Unlike a priestess's identification with a goddess, then, in which she modifies her self-representation to correspond to her representation of the goddess but retains her identity separate from that of the goddess, in possession-trance the priestess loses her separate identity and experiences herself as the goddess. Unlike the American male whose delusion is perduring, if not permanent, the priestess has a delusion of limited duration, lasting no longer than her possession-trance. The former is psychotic, but the latter has intermittent psychotic episodes. Let me summarize this discussion so far. Obeyesekere says that for a Singhalese priestess religious symbols become personal symbols. If by that he means that she internalizes the cultural propositions concerning gods and other supernatural beings as personal beliefs, I entirely agree with him. (I prefer the formulation in my terms because divine beings are represented by symbols and other signs, but they themselves are not symbols—not, at any rate, for the religious actors themselves). In this regard, the priestesses are no different from other Sri Lankans. Like the priestesses, other Sri Lankans acquire their knowledge of gods and goddesses through the social transmission of religious doctrines, and like the priestesses, they internalize these doctrines as personal beliefs. Like the priestesses, they also recognize and understand the cultural symbols and signs by which the gods and goddesses are represented. Thus, they understand that the goddess Kali, for example, is represented lexically by the term Kali and iconographically in sculptures found in temples and in polychromatic lithographs found in homes and shops. Like the priestesses, other Sri Lankans in all likelihood also form private images of these gods and goddesses that correspond to these public and external images. The priestesses differ from other Sri Lankans in that (as Obeyesekere puts it) they have a dynamic interaction and experience with the gods and goddesses. That being so, it is they alone, he argues, for whom the cultural symbols (and signs) of these di-

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vine beings function as personal symbols. Moreover, in their interaction and experience with the gods and goddesses, there is, he claims, a progressive movement in their use of these symbols. In opposition to these claims, I have argued that the priestesses' interaction and experience with the gods and goddesses is characterized neither by personal symbols nor by a progressive movement in the use of symbols; it is characterized instead by an absence of symbolization. Because, for example, the priestess's interaction and experience with Kali consists of a hallucination of, or fusion with, her, she construes her mental image of Kali not as a symbolic (more accurately, iconic) representation of Kali but as the goddess herself. That being so, her experience is characterized not by a progressive movement in the use of symbols but by an extremely regressive movement. Hallucination and fusion are cognitive operations of infancy—employed prior to the development of self-object differentiation and the capacity for reality testing—as well as infantile modes of wish fulfillment. Rather than transcending her archaic motivations in her religious experiences, then, the priestess fulfills them, and she does so by archaic means. These experiences are characterized not by a transformation of (neurotic) symptom into (cultural) symbol but by a transformation of (cultural) symbol into (psychotic) symptom. To be sure, Obeyesekere reports (and I concur) that having embarked upon her religious role, the priestesses have "moved into another level of [psychological] reality that makes life not only bearable but transfigured and meaningful, and what is most interesting, utterly pleasurable—at least for most of them and for some of the time" (68). That does not mean, however, that the hallucinations and delusions that are a critical feature of the priestesses' performance of their religious role are any the less psychotic, or that the performance enables them to overcome their archaic motivations, to resolve their conflicts, or to achieve a cure. In the first place, hallucinations and delusions, insofar as they fulfill thwarted wishes, are always pleasurable, which is why a priestess would certainly prefer these religious experiences to her frustrating mundane existence. What makes these experiences psychotic symp-

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toms is not that they are painful, which they are not, but that they constitute a breakdown in reality testing. In the second place, if a priestess's archaic motivations were overcome and her unconscious conflicts resolved by the performance of her religious role, then her life would be pleasurable not only some of the time— during her trance and possession experiences and for some limited time thereafter—but most of the time. Instead, like a drug addict who feels fine until the effects of the chemical wear off but then requires another fix, so, too, the priestess feels fine until the effects of her religious experience wear off, and then, as her archaic motivations and conflicts once again threaten to engulf her, she requires another and yet another such experience to cope with her inner turmoil. Conclusions

Although Obeyesekere claims that in my analysis of culturally constituted defense mechanisms, I postulate that an isomorphism exists between (cultural) symbol and (neurotic) symptom, in fact I postulate no such thing. Rather, I have argued that if a culturally constituted defense mechanism is constructed to cope with normal conflict, it is not only the opposite of a neurotic symptom but obviates the need to construct one. I have also argued, however, that if a culturally constituted defense mechanism is constructed to cope with pathological conflict, then it, like a privately constructed one, is not merely isomorphic with a symptom but is itself a symptom—not a neurotic symptom but a psychotic one. The latter is the case, I submit, in respect to a Sri Lankan priestess. Although she employs a religious symbol system to cope with her conflicts, inasmuch as her conflicts are pathological this culturally, constituted defense mechanism is also pathological. Because her religious hallucinations and delusions constitute a breakdown in symbolic functioning, hence a failure in reality testing, they are psychotic symptoms. In contrast, when ordinary Sri Lankans cope with their normal conflicts by employing the

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same religious symbol system, they do so in a psychologically normal, not a pathological, way. In comparison, suppose that an ordinary Singhalese woman has the wish to be dependent on her parent's care and protection, as she was when a child, and suppose that now that she is an adult, this wish is conflictual. She might hope to fulfill the wish by means of her culturally constituted belief in the mother goddess Pattini. If she comes to believe that Pattini does in fact care for and protect her, this culturally constituted defense mechanism fulfills her conflictual wish in a psychologically normal way, one that involves neither a breakdown in symbolic functioning nor a failure in reality testing. In sum, even though sometimes culturally constituted defense mechanisms are symptoms, usually they are not; instead, they fulfill conflictual wishes in a normal way. that being so, we may turn to their relation to cultural internalization, the topic of this book.

7 Internalization of Sex and Gender Ideologies

The Ideologies Redux

In Chapter 2,1 delineated two interrelated cultural ideologies (or cultural systems) regarding sex and gender that are prominent not only in Burma, where I studied them at first hand, but in many other societies throughout the world. The Ideology of the Superior Male asserts that males—in virtue of their sexual anatomy and an ineffable spiritual essence called hpoun—are intellectually, spiritually, and morally superior to females and that it is consequently their right to dominate and control them. The Ideology of the Dangerous Female comprises two subsystems. According to the Ideology of the Morally Dangerous Female, females employ treachery and deceit to dominate and control males; according to the Ideology of the Sexually Dangerous Female, female sexual anatomy and physiology pose a dangerous threat to a male's vital powers. Although these two ideologies compose only one set of the cultural propositions regarding gender and sex, both in Burma or elsewhere, I have focused on them because their internalization is anomalous. That females would internalize the ideologies is anomalous because they denigrate females, but since my information regarding their internalization by females is incomplete—for reasons 136

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explained in Chapter 2—here I am concerned only with their internalization by males. The males' internalization of the Ideology of the Superior Male is anomalous because in many societies, including Burma, its propositions are either inconsistent with, or the reverse of, the social system of male-female relations. Their internalization of the Ideology of the Dangerous Female is doubly anomalous not only because its propositions are highly threatening to males but also because virtually all of them are either empirically undemonstrable or demonstrably false. Because of these anomalies, the males' internalization of the ideologies poses a special challenge for any theory of cultural internalization, and in my judgment the theory that best meets this challenge is the psychological preadaptation theory. This chapter, then, was dialectically conceived: I employ the psychological preadaptation theory to explain the internalization of these ideologies, and I employ these ideologies as a test of this theory of cultural internalization. First I wish to make some methodological observations. In the light of the rightful concern of anthropology with cultural diversity, the impulse of virtually every anthropologist is to view any cultural system as particular to a sociocultural context and hence to explain it by reference to the conditions—political, economic, ecological, and the like—that constitute that context. That was my initial impulse when I encountered the Ideologies of the Superior Male and Dangerous Female more than thirty years ago in the course of doing fieldwork in Upper Burma. Subsequently, however, I realized that similar ideologies—if not culturally constituted, then personally constructed—are widely distributed across highly diverse societies. It became evident that I would have to inhibit that impulse.1 If these ideologies are not peculiar to 1. That similar ideologies may also be personally constructed is important because even in societies in which the ideologies are not found at the cultural level, many of their constituent propositions may be prevalent at the individual level. The belief in the dangerous vagina, for example, is not culturally normative in Western societies, but it is frequently present as a conscious or

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Burma, if, instead, they are Burmese variations on common cultural themes, then a valid explanation for their internalization must be capable of explaining the other variants (including our own) as well. That being so, my second impulse was to explain the internalization not of these Burmese ideologies but of the generic ideologies of which the former are among many culturally parochial variants. Upon reflection, I decided that because a concrete case is more illuminating than an abstract (generic) one, I would focus my explanatory effort on the internalization of the Burmese ideologies. That procedure has important consequences for the employment of the psychological preadaptation theory in the service of that effort. This theory assigns special importance to precultural wishes and beliefs as critical explanatory variables; but if the Burmese ideologies are variations on common cultural themes, it is necessary when identifying the precultural wishes and beliefs that might explain their internalization to specify not only the Burmese conditions that generate such wishes and beliefs but also the generically human conditions. A comprehensive explanation for the internalization of these Burmese variants must therefore tack between parochial Burmese conditions and more general human ones. If the former task requires ethnographic knowledge of Burmese society and culture, the second requires a theory of the human mind that is capable of explaining a psychological activity as complex as the internalization of gender ideologies. In my view, such a theory must attend to both conscious and unconscious mental processes, so here I employ a psychodynamic theory. unconscious belief of individual actors. Ethnographic studies that confine their investigations to cultural data alone are therefore not necessarily reliable indices of the beliefs of the actors themselves. In a recent book Lepowsky (1993) claims that neither the cultural ideology of the superior male nor that of the dangerous female is present among the Vanatinae of Melanesia. Yet the latter claim is contradicted by the widespread Vanatinae belief in female witchcraft, besides which there is no evidence in the book to suggest any elicitation of the personal beliefs of individual actors, so we cannot be sure that these ideologies do not exist at the individual level.

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In addition to these methodological observations, there are two caveats to introduce. First, although it is often assumed that if a cultural system is internalized by a group of social actors, they all do so from the same motive or set of motives, this assumption is unwarranted. Different actors may—and often do—internalize one and the same cultural system from very different motives. Whereas some Burmans internalize Buddhism to achieve nirvana, others do so to be reborn in one of the Buddhist heavens, or to attain a better reincarnation on earth, or to improve their lot in their present incarnation, for example. And since motivation is overdetermined, others do so from all of these motives, and perhaps other motives as well. Similarly, when I propose one or another explanation for the internalization of the Burmese gender ideologies by the males of Yeigyi village, I do not mean to suggest that their motives for doing so are shared by other Burmese males, for the latter may internalize them from different motives. In other words, the motives I attribute to the village males for their internalization of these ideologies constitute sufficient, not necessary, conditions for their internalization. My second caveat is that because some members of a social group internalize a cultural system, it does not follow that other members also internalize that system. Hence, when I propose one or another explanation for the internalization of these gender ideologies by the males of Yeigyi village, I do not mean to suggest that they are internalized by all Burmese males. It is more likely that they are internalized by most, acquired as clichés by some, and rejected by others. In any event, because cultural internalization may conform to three different explanatory paradigms depending on the type of cultural proposition or cultural system that is internalized, in order to explain the internalization of these two gender ideologies, we must first identify the type or types of propositions of which they consist. Based on the typology developed in Chapter 3, we may characterize these propositions as predominantly descriptive propositions (of pure knowledge). Descriptive propositions, it will be recalled, are either consum-

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matory (i.e., their internalization satisfies some desire or need) or nonconsummatory (i.e., they do not serve such a function). In that the propositions that make up the Ideology of the Superior Male are flattering to males, they are clearly consummatory. Even though the propositions making up the Ideology of the Dangerous Female are highly threatening to males, I shall argue that they, too, paradoxically enough, are consummatory. In accordance with our paradigm, then, we would expect the acquisition of both to be motivationally instigated. The acquisition of consummatory propositions, as I observed in Chapter 3, is motivated by wishes whose fulfillment is achieved not by physical or social action but by means of a belief. I also argued that their internalization (as opposed to their acquisition) is either empirically or motivationally grounded; that is, consummatory propositions are held to be true either because they are empirically supported or because the actor wishes to believe they are true. Because both of these gender ideologies are either unsupported or false, we would expect their internalization to be motivationally grounded, in which case they both (according to our typology) are cultural systems of powerful emotional concern. Although this is the appropriate designation for these systems viewed from the perspective of cultural internalization, viewed from a social system perspective, they are more appropriately called cultural ideologies. That is the term I have employed throughout this book. Since my understanding of ideology corresponds to Harry Johnson's, I can do no better than to quote his definition. An ideology, he writes, "consists of selected or distorted ideas about a social system or a class of social systems [I would add a social class or class of persons] when these ideas purport to be factual, and also carry a more or less explicit evaluation of the 'facts.' This definition is narrow in that ideology consists only of those aspects of a system of social ideas which are distorted or unduly selective from a scientific point of view" (1968: 77; italics in original). We may again follow Johnson in defining au ideology as "a more or less coherent system of ideas in which ideological distortion is important" ( 77). Since this distortion can be explained by

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the fact that an ideology is a cultural system of powerful emotional concern, the internalization of any ideology would be expected to conform to the third paradigm of the psychological preadaptation theory of cultural internalization: its acquisition is motivationally instigated, and its internalization is motivationally grounded. We can assess the validity of that expectation by proceeding directly to the internalization of the Burmese gender ideologies. Internalization of the Ideology of the Superior Male

To explain the internalization of the ideology that males are superior to females, as well as its ubiquitous cross-cultural variants recorded in Chapter 2, let me take as our point of departure the rhetorical question posed by Lutkehaus regarding the "dominant ideology" of male superiority among the Manam of New Guinea. In considering that ideology, Lutkehaus is led to wonder why Manam males "find it necessary to reaffirm continually what in reality would appear to be secure: their hegemony over women" (1982: 49). The same question must be addressed as we now consider the internalization of the analogous ideology by Burmese village males—at least those in the village of Yeigyi. It is axiomatic in the study of personality that if an actor constructs an elaborate set of beliefs to prove that he or she is superior to others, that is because the actor in fact suffers serious doubts about his or her superiority, and hence their construction is most likely motivated to quell those doubts. In short, their construction is best construed as a form of overcompensation. Based now on the premise (enunciated in Chapter 3) that the internal ization of cultural propositions is governed mutatis mutandis by the same principles that govern the construction of private beliefs, we might expect that if an actor internalizes a cultural system that proclaims the superiority of his or her own social group or social category over another group or category, its internalization is similarly motivated by doubts concerning their superiority. That this expectation most likely holds for the internalization of the Ideology of the Superior Male may be inferred from the fact

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that in some crucial respects this cultural system (as we observed in Chapter 2), is the very reverse of the village social system of male-female relations. If we consider, for example, that the females excel in certain kinds of achievement and that within the family they dominate the males, who, in turn, are dependent on them (as is the case in many other societies), it is apparent that when males are first exposed to the Ideology of the Superior Male, they are not empty containers, affectively neutral to the message conveyed by the ideology but active agents, motivationally receptive to its message. Because of their subordination to and dependence on females in the domestic domain, many males, according to my argument, form the belief that in some important respects they are inferior to females. Since this belief thwarts their wish to believe in male superiority, it is a threat to their self-esteem and consequently arouses narcissistic anxiety. Hence, even though in some critical respects the Ideology of the Superior Male is false, the males are highly motivated to believe that it is true by a powerful wish to believe that it is.2 I am not arguing that female domination and control are in themselves a threat to male self-esteem. Indeed, any individual or group may be inferior to some other individual or group (in one characteristic or another) without their experiencing this fact as a threat to their self-esteem. If this condition is, however, experienced as a threat—if, that is, it arouses narcissistic anxiety—it does so because it is discrepant with their wish to regard themselves as superior. To put it differently, narcissistic anxiety is aroused by the "affective dissonance" (DeVos 1976) that results from a discrepancy between an actor's ideal self-representation and that actor's actual self-representation. 2. Ardener (1973) has proposed a similar explanation for culturally constituted beliefs about male superiority elsewhere, and much earlier Homey (1932: 351) proposed a similar explanation for analogous privately constructed beliefs. By holding beliefs of this kind, Homey writes, the male seems to be saying, "'It would be too ridiculous to dread a creature who, if you take her all around, is such a poor thing.' This way of allaying his anxiety has a special advantage for the man: it helps to support his masculine self-respect."

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Applying this thesis to Burmese village males—and to other males more generally—I argue that female domination and control arouse their narcissistic anxiety because the resultant belief that they are, or might be, inferior to females in certain respects thwarts their wish to feel superior to them. Consequently, they are motivated to internalize the Ideology of the Superior Male both as a defense against that anxiety and as a means of fulfilling that wish. In regard to the former motive, by internalizing this ideology they can disavow their belief that they are inferior to females by denying that female domination in the domestic domain is a mark of female superiority. In regard to the latter motive—the wish to believe in male superiority—this ideology assures them that male superiority is in no way impugned by female domination or achievement, for these are "worldly" (loki) matters that are largely irrelevant for assessing a person's true value or worth. What is relevant are "spiritual" or "otherworldly" (lokoutura) matters, and the ideology is clear on this point: males are unequivocally superior to females. Thus, males alone possess hpoun, which itself is a mark of their superiority, but in addition they are superior to females in morality and intelligence. If this assurance is not sufficient, the males can take recourse to the essential mark of their superiority: the possession of a penis. Unlike the ignoble, polluting vagina, the penis is a noble organ, a golden flower. Recourse to the penis is frequent when, as is so often the case, the ideology of male superiority is inconsistent with facts. Thus, among the Kafyar of Nigeria, males "erect a considerable symbolic edifice" to proclaim their superiority, but since this is a "poor defense" when they encounter women in the daily domestic round, the male's recourse is to fall back on the "symbol of his power," the penis (Netting 1969: 1045). In sum, because of the threat posed by females to their selfesteem, males, in Burma or in any other society in which the Ideology of the Superior Male is prominent, are motivated to internalize this ideology because it can be employed for two defensive purposes: to disavow their private belief that in some important respects they are inferior to females and to fulfill a wish in fan-

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tasy—that is, they can transform the unconscious proposition that represents their disavowed belief in female superiority by mapping it into the cultural proposition of male superiority. These defensive functions may be served not only by this cultural system but by other cultural systems as well—art, for example. Thus, after summarizing the representations of females in Western painting over the past seven centuries, the art historian Edwin Mullins observes that these representations reflect a range of anxieties [related to the Western male's vision of himself] as a creature who is strong, dominant, decisive, good, virile and wise. [They] are about how this vision of himself can be made to hold once he stands alongside his most natural partner, woman. . . . The awareness that alongside woman he may cut a quite different figure, be submissive to her will, morally weakened by her, rendered impotent by her appetites, generally reduced, humbled, even made evil or destroyed, in fact not worth all that much at all... [means that] so much art comes to look like magnificent camouflage behind which the dominant sex hides horrible doubts about his fitness to dominate. (Mullins 1985: 224) A certain methodological issue has been implicit in the foregoing discussion. The hypothesis that the internalization of the Ideology of the Superior Male is motivated by narcissistic anxiety rests on the assumption that the regulation of self-esteem is a universal human characteristic, one that governs the psychological functioning of Western and non-Western actors alike. More broadly, it rests on the assumption of the psychic unity of mankind. Although the bedrock of traditional anthropological inquiry, this assumption has recently come under attack by a considerable group of contemporary anthropologists. Because I take it as axiomatic in this book, let me spell out its theoretical implications, which underlie the explanatory efforts of this chapter. 1. Human beings share an overlapping set of wishes, including a subset that are conscious (and provided with social or

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cultural means of fulfillment) in some societies but unconscious (because they are thwarted or culturally disapproved) in others. 2. Human beings share an overlapping set of beliefs and ideas, including, as Devereux (1978) has noted, a subset that are conscious (and provided with means of social or cultural expression) in some societies but unconscious (and repressed, because they are culturally disapproved) in others.3 3. Human beings share an overlapping set of defense mechanisms for fulfilling unconscious wishes and expressing unconscious beliefs and ideas, some of which are privately constructed and others of which are culturally constituted (Devereux [1956] 1980: ch. 1; Hallowell 1955: ch. 14). A corollary of 1 and 2 is that one and the same unconscious wish or belief that in some societies motivates the construction of a private defense mechanism may in other societies motivate the construction of a culturally constituted defense mechanism.4 That being the case, if a non-Western belief is similar to a defensively motivated Western belief, we might reasonably hypothesize that the non-Western belief is similarly motivated. That hypothesis is 3. In an important but little-known paper, Devereux formulates this assumption: "In a given ethnic group, a particular idea can surface consciously and be culturally implemented, while in another one it occurs only on the unconscious level and finds no direct cultural expression" (1978: 74; italics in original). He further suggests that "if all psychoanalysts were to draw up a complete list of all impulses, wishes, and fantasies elicited in a clinical setting, this list could be matched point by point by a list of all known cultural beliefs and devices drawn up by anthropologists" (76-77). In view of the potential theoretical importance of this suggestion, it is all the more regrettable that it has never been tested. 4. Devereux puts it this way. "Above all, the cultural [and, I would add, social] setting is decisively important in determining which impulse or fantasy will receive direct cultural implementation, which will receive indirect or substitute cultural implementation, which will be actualized only in a subjective manner, and, finally, which will remain altogether unconscious, being kept in a state of repression, either by means of culturally provided repressive devices or by means of idiosyncratically evolved repressive devices unsupported by culture" (1978: 76).

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an underlying assumption of the foregoing explanation for the internalization of the Ideology of the Superior Male, and it also underlies the explanations that I shall propose for the internalization of the Ideology of the Dangerous Female. The explanation for the internalization of the Ideology of the Superior Male leaves us with two unanswered questions. First, if the males' wish to dominate females is so important, why don't they act on it? Second, how is this wish to be explained? I shall address the first question here, but the second cannot be tackled until I deal with the theoretical issues raised in the next section. That males do not or cannot act on their wish to dominate females is most likely explained by the inhibitory influence of two countervailing attitudes—the fear of females and the wish to be dependent on them—which, as was noted in Chapter 2, are characteristic of both Burmese village males and the males of many other, perhaps most, societies. Since the wish is self-explanatory, it requires no discussion, and since the fear as it is found in Burma is discussed below, it is perhaps useful to provide some parallel non-Burmese examples here. Referring to the ethnographic record, Robert Murphy observes that there is a "widespread fear among men of most cultures that . . . male dominance in sex, and by extension in society, rests on fragile ground. The female, if her capacities were to be released, would prove to be destructive of the male and his powers" (1977: 22). Karen Homey portrays a similar, if more elaborated, condition. Although the following passage employs such terms as always and everywhere, in fact Homey's evidence is confined to western Europe and North America, so that, strictly speaking, it is Western males that she portrays: "Men have never tired of fashioning expressions for this experience: the violent force by which the man feels himself drawn to the woman, and, side by side with his longing, the dread lest through her he might die and be undone Always, everywhere the man strives to rid himself of his dread of woman by objectifying it: It is not,' he says, 'that I dread her; it is that she herself is malignant, capable of any crime, a beast of prey, a vampire, a witch, insatiable in her desires'" (Homey 1932: 349).

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Although Burmese village males do not act on their wish to dominate females, they can take satisfaction from the twin facts that formally they possess authority over females and that females, in turn, show them the deference that their authority entails. To be sure, authority without power (domination) is less than males might desire, but if that is the price the females exact to satisfy the males' desire to be dependent on them, that is the price the males seem willing to pay. Internalizaron of the Ideology of the Morally Dangerous Female

Granted that the regulation of self-esteem is a universal human need, the internalization of the Ideology of the Superior Male—an ideology that is highly flattering to the male ego—is clearly amenable to the explanatory paradigm that I previously proposed for consummatory propositions (and systems): its acquisition is motivationally instigated, and its internalization is motivationally grounded. It would seem, however, that this paradigm cannot apply to the internalization of the Ideology of the Morally Dangerous Female, which, rather than filling a male's emotional need, is highly threatening to his emotional security. According to this ideology, females are untrustworthy, seek every opportunity for sexual infidelity, and employ treachery and deceit to usurp the males' right of dominance and control. Nevertheless, similar, if not more threatening, ideologies are prevalent in the ethnographic and historical records. Here are a few examples in addition to those in Chapter 2. Consider, first, this medieval European text: "What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colors" (Kramer and Sprenger 1971: 43). In support of these views, they cite such worthies as Ecclesiasticus, Saint John Chrysostom, Cicero, and Seneca. Now consider the belief of the men of Monteros, a town in Andalusia, that a "woman's true ambition is to dominate completely,

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to rule her husband and children, and above all to sap her husband's strength, by forcing him to engage in heavy sexual activity and physical labor, until he utterly expires and dies" (Brandes 1981: 224). And consider large parts of the Muslim Middle East in which "the whole [social] system is based on the assumption that the woman is a powerful and dangerous being. All sexual institutions (polygamy, repudiation, sexual segregation, etc.) can be perceived as a strategy for containing her power" (Mernissi 1975: xvi)—hence the Moroccan proverb "Women are fleeting wooden vessels whose passengers [men] are doomed to destruction" (12). Because these ideologies are highly threatening to males, it seems counterintuitive that any male would believe, let alone be motivated to believe, that they are true. Since these ideologies are also false, we might expect that males would reject them, not internalize them. But they do internalize them; therefore—according to the psychological preadaptation theory—they must have compelling grounds, either cognitive or motivational, for doing so. Guided by that theory and by a psychodynamic theory of the actor, let us examine some possible grounds, beginning with motivational ones. Because I have personal knowledge of the Burmese situation, I shall concentrate on Burmese village males. In the discussion of motivation in Chapter 3,1 observed that a privately constructed threatening belief is motivated by the wish to prevent an even more threatening unconscious belief or desire from reentering consciousness. On the premise that the internalization of cultural propositions is governed mutatis mutandis by the same principles that govern the construction of private beliefs, I would now suggest that the internalization of the Ideology of the Morally Dangerous Female is also motivated by such a wish. To understand what that wish might be, let us return to the Ideology of the Superior Male. Although by internalizing that ideology, males believe not only that they are superior to females but also that they have the right to dominate and control them, for many males this culturally constituted belief is challenged by the fact that they are dominated and controlled by females. In consequence, we may as-

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sume that their disavowed belief in female superiority not infrequently threatens to enter consciousness. If that is the case, it is not counterintuitive to accept that males might be motivated to internalize the Ideology of the Morally Dangerous Female. It holds that females control males not because of superior talent or ability but because of deceit and treachery (ranging from sexual wiles to magic and sorcery), so by internalizing this ideology the males can construe female control as an adverse reflection not on male superiority but on female morality. As one villager put it, "Yes, females are more intelligent than males—more intelligent in knowing how to deceive them." In other words, although the ideology is threatening, males are motivated to internalize it because by employing it as a resource for the construction of the defense mechanism of rationalization, they can maintain their belief in male superiority and thereby avoid the arousal of narcissistic anxiety. Rationalizations (whether privately constructed or culturally constituted) often have at least some basis in reality. Hence, in addition to motivational grounds, I would suggest that Burmese village males have compelling cognitive grounds for internalizing this ideology—namely, it corresponds to private beliefs that they construct from their experience with females when they are young boys. Because a postpartum sex taboo remains in effect until a child is weaned, before then the child sleeps with the mother and is the primary focus of her affection and attention. When, following weaning, the mother returns to the conjugal bed, the child no longer enjoys his privileged position but must now share the mother's affection and her sleeping mat with his father. Because he now has the occasion (according to informants' reports) to witness parental intercourse, he may come to recognize that his mother shares intimacies with his father that she withholds from himself. Having come to believe that he is the primary, if not the exclusive, object of his mother's love and attention, the child now discovers that this belief is false. That is not all. With the birth of a sibling the child is once again removed from the focus of the mother's emotional orientation. Her breasts, her affection, her attention, and her sleeping mat are

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transferred to this second competitor, while he himself is consigned to the care of an elder sibling, a grandmother, or some other relative. Should he react to his mother's seeming preference for his young competitor with tantrums and withdrawal (as is often the case), the mother attempts to appease him with physical affection and caresses. As a result of these experiences and their expected cognitive sequelae, it is plausible to assume that young boys form a mental representation of their mothers that, in its essential features, corresponds to the collective representation of females conveyed by the Ideology of the Morally Dangerous Female. That is, from experience, the young boy may come to represent the mother as untrustworthy and unfaithful, as someone who uses feminine wiles as a means of control. It is a psychological truism that children's experientially acquired conceptions of their microsocial world of the family form the basis for their initial cognitive orientations to the macrosocial world (which is why anthropologists designate the child's family of origin as the family of orientation). That being so, I would suggest that the typical Burmese village male forms twin expectations— generalized from his experience with his mother long before he acquires the Ideology of the Morally Dangerous Female—that females are unfaithful to males and that they employ deception, including feminine wiles, to control males. If that is the case, the ideology serves to reinforce the male's privately constructed beliefs. This suggestion is supported by the TAT findings which, according to Steele, indicate that males are especially anxious about their mothers. It is is also supported by Steele's conjecture that these anxious males suffer from early childhood "deprivation," which, he argues, accounts for two other TAT findings: the "male's fear of desertion by the female" and "his feeling that he is relatively helpless to prevent her from deserting him in a marriage relationship if she so desires" (Steele n.d.: 16). According to this cognitive explanation, when the Ideology of the Morally Dangerous Female is transmitted to the males, its propositions are not new (unlike the propositions that make up,

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for example, Buddhist cosmology or Burmese ethnobotany); rather, they correspond to experientially grounded private beliefs that they already have formed of females. Hence, although these propositions are threatening, to deny their truth would be no less difficult for them than to deny the truth of their experientially grounded threatening beliefs that monsoon rains cause floods or that cobras are poisonous. If the males' anxiety regarding females is aroused ab initio by their earlier experiences with them, their anxiety would not be appreciably diminished even were they to reject the Ideology of the Dangerous Female. With this discussion as background we are now able to address the question raised but unanswered earlier: What accounts for the males' wish to dominate females? My answer takes its departure from the observation that this wish is hardly peculiar to male villagers in Upper Burma; on the contrary, it is so widespread that Robert Murphy (1977) goes so far as to refer to it as the masculinity project. Consequently, to address this question we must attend to the early experiences of human males generally; and in my opinion Murphy has identified two of the most important ones. The male wish to dominate females, Murphy writes, represents "an escape from early identification with the mother and the assertion of an autonomous ego. Beyond that, it is a denial of passivity and an attempt to assert active dominance over the maternal sex. . . . Women are, after all, the envelopers and controllers of their dependent male young, and male insistence on the maintenance of dominance is part of masculine differentiation" (1977: 22). As our description of the early mother-child relationship in Yeigyi village indicates, this explanation applies to Burmese village males as well. In addition, I would emphasize the boy's rejection by the mother in favor of the father or younger siblings, which is also a widespread early experience. Granted that early childhood experiences influence adult attitudes, I would speculate that the males' wish to dominate females, whether in Yeigyi village or elsewhere, is motivated by the following set of emotions and needs: (1) the fear (rooted in their early

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experience with the mother) of becoming reenveloped by a female, (2) the need to prove that they have overcome their subordination to the mother, (3) the feeling of revenge for their rejection by the mother, and (4) the fear that their wives (and other females), like their mothers before them, will dominate or reject them. (See also the valuable discussions in Chodorow 1978:180-190; Dinnerstein 1976: 59-60,165-172; Hudson and Jacot 1991: 44-49). Let me now summarize the argument for the internalization of the Ideology of the Morally Dangerous Female in our Burmese village. Based on childhood experience, males are cognitively preadapted to internalize this ideology because of the cognitive consonance between their early, exponentially grounded conception of females and the conception of females conveyed by this ideology. Based on their adult experience, males are motivationally preadapted to internalize this ideology because of the affective dissonance between their wish to dominate females and the fact of female dominance. This combination of cognitive and motivational grounds, I submit, renders its internalization compelling. If, as in the present case, a cultural system corresponds to an actor's privately constructed (and experientially grounded) beliefs, the two sustain a mutually reinforcing and dialectical relation. Since the private beliefs are constructed from the actor's early experience, they constitute the cognitive anläge for the internalization of the cultural system. At the same time, the latter is represented in a large corpus of traditional texts—sacred and secular, written and oral, mythological, legendary, and historical, philosophical and folkloristic—that invest the private beliefs with the full authority of tradition. In performing this function, the cultural system is only apparently redundant, for besides confirming the truth of the private beliefs, it, more importantly, shapes them in a cultural mold that both transforms and disguises them. In the Burmese case, village men have no conscious memories of the early experiences with their mothers from which ex hypothesi they construct their initial conceptions of females. This is hardly surprising: these memories are painful, hence repressed. But even if the memories were conscious, we would hardly ex-

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pect the men themselves to perceive a causal relation between the childhood experiences and their adult conceptions of women. Instead, when they are asked why they believe that females are untrustworthy, unfaithful, and the like, they refer to (or quote from) one or another of the traditional texts that enunciate the Ideology of the Morally Dangerous Female. This ideology articulates the males' privately constructed conceptions of females in a cultural idiom, the idiom in which they themselves think about these conceptions. In consequence, its internalization transforms their subjective and particularistic conceptions of females into what the males take to be objective and universal truths. Internalization of the Ideology of the Sexually Dangerous Female

According to the Ideology of the Morally Dangerous Female, females are immoral because, in virtue of their alleged immoral characteristics, they are wittingly harmful to males. According to the Ideology of the Sexually Dangerous Female, in virtue of their putatively dangerous sexual characteristics—including a virtually insatiable libido, polluting genitalia, and sexual allure—females are unwittingly harmful to them. The female libido is dangerous because its virtual insatiability leads women into infidelity, making it a threat to male domination and control. The vagina itself is dangerous because contact with that polluting organ is a threat to a male's vital powers (sexual, physical, and spiritual). Female allure is dangerous because it arouses sexual desire in males, which exposes them to the dangers of the vagina. In attempting to explain the internalization of these propositions, it is important to remember that all three have an astonishingly wide cross-cultural distribution (see Chapter 2). The Powerful Female Libido

The internalization of the proposition that the female libido is insatiable poses a difficult problem not only because the notion is threatening but also because it has no factual basis. Nor is there a

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factual basis for the proposition—at least not in Burma—that as a consequence of their insatiable libido, females are prone to adultery. Guided once again, by the principle that threatening cultural propositions may be internalized to prevent even more threatening, but unconscious, private beliefs or desires from reentering consciousness, we might be able to resolve this problem. To evoke that principle, it is first necessary to contextualize these propositions; that is, we must situate them in the constellation of cultural values, ethnographic facts, and male fantasies pertaining to sex and sexuality. This constellation varies from one society to another, so here I shall delineate only the Burmese constellation. Let me begin by noting that according to Buddhism— the most important cultural system in Burma—sex is a base drive and an insurmountable obstacle to ultimate salvation (nirvana), whose achievement requires, among other things, the extinction of sexual desire. The stronger one's libido, then, the lower one's position on the scale of spiritual progress—which is one reason that females, given their putatively powerful libido, are believed to be spiritually inferior to males. According to village men, however, sex is the strongest of all drives and, when satisfied, the most pleasurable (Spiro 1977: 213-216, 218-221). That is why the willingness and ability of Buddhist monks to comply with the monastic vow of celibacy conduces to their veneration (Spiro [1970] 1982: 404-408). The sexual wishes of married men are not directed toward their wives exclusively. Thus, although male adultery is infrequent in actuality, it is not infrequent in fantasy. As the Burmese proverb has it: "You may call a married man 'old/ but if he descends only three steps [from his house], he becomes a bachelor." In other words, the moment a married man leaves home, he is ready for sexual adventure. According to Buddhist ethics, the intent to commit a transgression is morally tantamount to its commission (Spiro [1970] 1982: 46-47). Consequently, if the fantasy of adultery is associated with the wish to act on it, the wish produces the same karmic punishment as the act itself. In contrast, female adultery is virtually nonexistent (unfortunately, I have no data on female sexual

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fantasies).Hence, although it is females who, according to the ideology, are highly prone to adultery, male adultery (though rare) is much more frequent. Finally, let me note that despite the strong sexual interests and motivations of most village males, for at least some of them—those in my sample—lovemaking is short, foreplay being brief and ejaculation rapid. Given these cultural values, male fantasies, and ethnographic facts, I shall argue that for male villagers the internalization of the cultural proposition regarding the insatiable female libido is motivated by the wish to defend themselves against the painful affects aroused inter alia by the strength of their own libido, their adulterous fantasies, and their rapid sexual behavior. For many village males, their strong libido, together with their adulterous fantasies (and, for a few, their adulterous behavior), is presumably in conflict with their commitment to Buddhist norms. This intrapsychic conflict might be expected to arouse a variety of painful affects, including guilt (aroused by the threat to their selfrepresentation as pious Buddhists), remorse (aroused by their violation of Buddhist injunctions), and fear (aroused by anticipated karmic punishment). It might also be expected that in defense against the arousal of these painful affects, the males repress or disavow their nonnormative sexual desires and fantasies. Given these expectations, I would now propose that the cultural propositions regarding the female libido are internalized because males can employ them as a resource for the construction of the defense mechanism of externalization, an unconscious cognitive operation by which a repressed or a disavowed characteristic of the self is attributed to others. By internalizing these propositions, a male possessed of a strong libido and adulterous wishes can attribute to females those warded-off characteristics that he himself possesses, thereby protecting himself from the painful affects that he would experience were he to acknowledge the characteristics as his own. In addition, to these culturally instigated motives for internalizing the proposition that the female libido is insatiable, some village males may well possess another (and, arguably, more impor-

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tant) experientially instigated motive. Because of their insatiable libido, females—so male villagers claim—require at least three acts of sexual intercourse at a time, and even then they are not satisfied. The males' claim echoes a conviction that is widespread in the human male. Because its cross-cultural distribution is extensively documented in Chapter 2, let me cite only one example here. In an Egyptian village studied by Antoun (1968:692), males believe that the female libido is twenty times stronger than a male's, a belief that is consistent with an influential fifteenth-century Muslim text: "Woman is never sated nor exhausted by copulation.... If one copulates, it seems, night and day, for years and years with a woman, she never reaches the point of saturation. Her thirst for copulation is never assuaged" (Sabbah 1984: 27). In this regard, it might be noted that many Middle Eastern scholars (e.g., Glitzin and Ross 1980; Wikan 1982; Eickelman 1981; Morsy 1978) view the customs of purdah, infibulation, and female circumcision as male attempts to control a putatively uncontrollable female sexuality. Even granting that the belief in the impossible-to-satisfy female is factually correct, the males' explanation—an insatiable female libido—may not be. If a woman is not easily sexually satisfied, it is not necessarily because the female libido is insatiable; rather, it might be because the sexual behavior of her male partner leaves her unsatisfied. If, as my sample of males in Yeigyi village report, their lovemaking is short, at least some female villagers probably do not achieve orgasm. This male sexual pattern is reported across a wide arc of human societies—for instance, the Sambia (Stoller and Herdt 1982), India (Roy 1975), Morocco (Memissi 1975), China (Hsu 1971), Malaya (Hyman n.d.), seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe (Stone 1979), contemporary southern Europe (Saunders 1981), and the United States (Michael et al. 1994)—so the same expectation would hold for females in these societies as well. For example, in a study of the sexual behavior of almost five thousand Americans between the ages of eighteen and fifty-nine conducted by the National Opinion Research Center, approximately 5 percent of the males reported that they found sex painful, 10 percent that they

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did not find it pleasurable, 10 percent that they could not achieve orgasm, 15 percent that they lacked interest in sex, 17 percent that they were anxious about their performance, and 30 percent that they ejaculated prematurely (Michael et al. 1994:126). It is surely no accident, then, that only 29 percent of the women in this sample reported that they experienced orgasm during sex (130), or that in a previous study of one hundred American couples (all of them white, Christian, highly educated, and happily married), 38 percent of the women reported insufficient foreplay, and 63 percent reported insufficient sexual arousal and hence a failure to achieve orgasm (Rranks et al. 1978). If women rarely (if ever) experience orgasm, it is a reasonable assumption that typically such women are sexually frustrated. Because neither of these American studies, nor the cross-cultural data cited above, provide information regarding this question, let us turn instead to Burma, where this assumption is supported by two kinds of data: (1) interviews with the few village women— one in Yeigyi and two in another village—who were willing to serve as informants on sexual matters and (2) the finding that fully half of all divorces recorded in my four-village survey were initiated by the wife on grounds of sexual dissatisfaction. Though not conclusive, these data are perhaps sufficient to warrant the assumption that at least some village women are sexually frustrated.5 That being so, I would now propose that even if women are indeed prone to adultery, as the Burmese ideology claims, it is not be5. This assumption also arguably applies to earlier historical periods. In the sixteenth century, according to Fitch, Burmese men inserted small round balls under the skin of the penis because, his informants explained, it was demanded by their wives as a means to obtain greater sexual pleasure (Pinkerton 1811: 421-422). This is also the most common explanation for the identical custom formerly practiced throughout insular and mainland Southeast Asia (Brown, Edwards, and Moore 1988). Another extinct practice, reported not only by Fitch but also by Hamilton (1930: 27-28) for the eighteenth century and by Sangermano (1893:158-159) for the nineteenth, was for women to wear unstitched sarongs that exposed their thighs and whose purpose was to sexually entice their husbands. If the explanations offered for these practices are veridical, it seems reasonable to speculate that they were instigated by women to deal with sexual frustration.

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cause they possess a virtually insatiable libido, as the ideology further claims; rather, it is because a few women—those married to men whose lovemaking is rapid—are sexually frustrated. This proposal brings me to a second suggested explanation for the internalization of these cultural propositions. To believe that one's wife is motivated to seek sexual satisfaction elsewhere would likely constitute a threat to a man's selfrepresentation as a virile male. Were he also to believe that her motivation was instigated by sexual frustration brought on by his sexual behavior, he might also be expected to be concerned about his potency. That potency anxiety is found among a few village males is evinced by verbal and behavioral data. Verbally, it is evinced by villagers' spontaneous references to potency anxiety. As a middle-aged villager commented: "It is only natural that a man should be anxious about maintaining an erection." Behaviorally, it is evinced in two ways: (1) the post-nuptial custom of feeding milk and eggs to the groom, the purpose of which, so informants explain, is to "strengthen the groom's penis"; and (2) the practice found among older men of ingesting a type of "medicine" to augment their semen supply and thereby increase their potency. Like many other characteristics of Yeigyi males, potency anxiety is common in many societies, extending from South Asia (Kakar 1978: 95; Obeyesekere 1984:454) to the Middle East (Sabbah 1984; Abu-Zahra 1970) and from Europe (Horney 1932) to the United States (Fromm 1943; Masters and Johnson 1966: 202). According to a large-scale statistical study (Broude and Greene 1972: 417), potency anxiety is prevalent in 80 percent of the societies comprising Murdock and White's standard cross-cultural sample (1969). Although there are any number of reasons for a male to be concerned about his potency, one plausible assumption is that he believes he cannot or does not satisfy his wife's sexual needs.6 His 6. For Horney, potency anxiety is explained by the fact that unlike the female, whose sexual performance can be achieved by "merely being, without any doing," the male is "obliged to go on proving his manhood to the woman" (1932: 359). This explanation is developed at length by Fromm (1943), as well as by Masters and Johnson, who call it anxiety concerning "sexual inadequacy"

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concern might be all the greater were he to believe that she might consequently be unfaithful. On that assumption, let me formulate the second suggested explanation for the internalization of the cultural proposition regarding the insatiable female libido. It applies only to males—Burmese and non-Burmese alike—who make love rapidly. I suggest that by internalizing the proposition that women are sexually insatiable, these males can defend themselves against potency anxiety, employing it as a resource for constructing the defense mechanism of denial. Specifically, by means of its internalization, the male can deny that his own sexual behavior is the cause of his wife's sexual frustration and attribute her frustration instead to her insatiable libido. Similarly, by internalizing the cultural proposition that women's libido leads them into adultery, the male can deny that he is responsible for his wife's adulterous disposition by once again attributing it to her insatiable libido. Even if this is a valid explanation for the internalization of these two propositions, it resolves one explanatory problem only to precipitate another, namely, how are we to account for the males' rapid lovemaking? We shall return to this question. The Dangerous Vagina Unlike the insatiable female libido, which allegedly is dangerous to a male because it threatens his social power, the vagina and female sexual allure are dangerous because they allegedly threaten his vital powers. Because the vagina is not only ignoble but also (and more importantly) polluting, even indirect contact with it is believed to cause a diminution in a male's physical, sexual, and spiritual powers. Similarly, because female allure arouses a male's desire for sex, it is also threatening, both because sexual intercourse exposes him to the dangers of the vagina and because it leads to the loss of semen, which is believed to be a crucial, but finite, source of male strength. Because this proposition about female sex(1970: 159-160). Masters and Johnson erroneously claim, however, that this type of anxiety is peculiar to Western society.

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ual allure is a redundant expression of the proposition about the dangerous vagina, I shall concentrate on the latter. The proposition regarding the dangerous vagina is even more threatening than that regarding the female libido, and because, like the the latter, it has no empirical warrant, in attempting to explain its internalization I shall be guided once again by the assumption that the internalization of a threatening cultural proposition is motivated by the wish to prevent an even more threatening—hence, disavowed or repressed—private belief or desire from entering consciousness. In the case of this proposition, I shall argue that what is warded off is the unconscious belief in the "vulnerable penis." According to clinical evidence, this widespread belief of males —that they might lose their penis—originates as a childhood castration fantasy but acquires special emotional salience when it impinges upon, and cognitively distorts, the boy's understanding of the anatomical differences between the sexes.7 When the boy first becomes aware of the fact that in the very place where (from his experience of his own body) he expects a penis to be, females 7. Although most personality theorists agree that young boys construct castration fantasies, they disagree about the determinants of the fantasies. According to standard Freudian theory, such fantasies originate at the Oedipal stage of development in connection with the boy's fear that in consequence of his wish to possess the mother and kill the father, he could be castrated (S. Freud 1925). This theory is supported by Ember's (1978) statistical study of twenty-five non-Western societies. For other theorists, castration fantasies originate at an even earlier stage of development in connection with the boy's fears of the "preoedipal" mother. For these theorists, the boy "fears the woman as castrator, not the man" (Rheingold (1964: 86). That is also Murphy's view, according to whom "the mother is not only the loving, nurturant figure, but she is ambivalently felt to be a swallower and destroyer: male castration anxieties, then, go beyond a fear of paternal authority to a dread of the power of the mother" (1977: 22). Still other theorists believe that the boy's castration fantasies originate in the actual, albeit teasing, castration threats of adults or else in their warnings that castration is the punishment that the boy might suffer for the violation of one or another cultural prohibition. There is no need hereto adjudicate among these or any other competing theories of the determinants of castration fantasies. For our purpose it is sufficient that the theorists generally agree that these fantasies originate in early childhood in connection with the boy's interaction with parents and other significant adults.

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do not have one, this awareness has no particular significance for him. Later, when it is filtered through his castration fantasies, the awareness conveys the distorted message that the absence of a penis in females is a condition brought about by castration. This distortion is perhaps understandable when we recall that the information processing of an immature child is highly egocentric, although it might be noted that a similar distortion is found in not a few adults as well (Rheingold 1964: ch. 8). This distortion is reinforced by the boy's awareness that "where the penis is in man, woman has a place where blood issues from time to time" (Blanton 1947: 217). As a consequence of his belief that the female genitals are a castrated organ, the boy acquires a "dread of the vagina" (Homey 1932), or, put less strongly, an "emotional aversion to the vagina" (Greenacre 1968).8 „Whatever the term, this strong affect may be explained by the clinical finding that the boy's view of the female as castrated "confirms" his belief in the vulnerability of the penis, thereby arousing one of his most painful anxieties—castration anxiety. His dread of the vagina is an expression of his anxiety that he, too, might suffer castration. Castration anxiety is not found only in a restricted cultural area, most notably Europe and the Middle East, as some contend. On the contrary, it is found in all other areas as well, including South America (e.g., among the Mehinaku [Gregor 1985]), North America (e.g., Lederer 1968), Southeast Asia (e.g., Thitsa 1980; Edwards 1984), and South Asia (Kakar 1978; Obeyesekere 1985), and in the human male more generally (Overview 1992). If koro— the fear of penile shrinkage or retraction—is interpreted (as it often is) as a symptom of castration anxiety, then, taking into account 8. According to Horney, the dread of the vagina is found overtly in "homosexuals and perverts" but covertly in most other males as well, appearing "unmistakably in the dreams of every male analyzand." Horney traces this dread to the boy's sexual desire for his mother and his attendant judgment that his penis is much too small for her vagina, as a consequence of which he develops "the dread of being rejected and derided." In brief, this dread is a reaction to "the menace to his self-respect" (Horney 1932: 351). My own explanation, as we shall see, is somewhat different.

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the wide distribution of this fear (Edwards 1984), castration anxiety would seem to be very widespread indeed. If the boy overcomes his belief in the vulnerable penis in the course of his cognitive and emotional development, he also gives up his distorted belief that the female is castrated; and because, as a consequence, the vagina no longer arouses castration anxiety in him, he also loses his emotional aversion to it. He now realistically views the vagina as an organ in its own right. Consequently, his sexual attraction to females is also ceteris paribus nonconflictual, and as an adult, he can enjoy sex without anxiety. If, however, he does not overcome his belief in the vulnerable penis—a not infrequent human condition, as the references cited above indicate—then, boy and man, he will continue to experience castration anxiety. As a defense against that painful affect, he may repress his belief in the vulnerable penis; if so, his belief in the castrated female undergoes repression as well. If the repression is complete, so that the belief in the vulnerable penis remains unconscious, then although unconsciously the vagina may arouse anxiety, consciously it does not. In other words, the vagina arouses castration anxiety, but since the anxiety it is not accompanied by castration fantasies, it is not experienced as castration anxiety. Nevertheless, because he continues to experience an emotional aversion to the vagina (without knowing why), the male's sexual attraction to women may be conflictual, and consequently he may be prone to premature ejaculation, if not impotence (e.g., Fenichel 1945:169-172). On the other hand, if the repression of the belief in the vulnerable penis is incomplete—if, that is, the unconscious castration fantasies activated by the thought of, or contact with the vagina, threaten to break through the repression barrier—an additional defense against the arousal of castration anxiety may be required. Typically, this defense consists of the transformation of the unconscious belief that the vagina is a castrated genital into a conscious belief that denies it. According to both ethnographic and clinical data, three such transformations are especially prominent.

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First, the unconscious belief that the female is castrated may be transformed, albeit highly infrequently, into the conscious belief that females possess a penis, specifically a penis inside the vagina. Reported inter alia in the West (e.g., Bak 1968; Greenacre 1968), Africa (e.g., Netting 1969:1045), and the Middle East (e.g., Bouhdiba 1985: 204), this belief creates the illusion that females possess a penis, thereby denying that they are castrated and making it possible to ward off the unconscious castration fantasies that are activated by the sight of or contact with the vagina. This belief has a dysfunctional consequence. It removes the male's emotional aversion to the vagina, but it may also lead to the sexual perversion of fetishism (Bak 1968; Greenacre 1968). Second, and most frequent, the unconscious belief in the castrated female may be transformed into the conscious perception that the vagina is ignoble (as in the case of the Burmese cultural proposition) or dirty and repulsive (as in the Jain belief that the vagina is like "a spittoon which is good enough only for spitting and vomiting into" [Goonasekere 1986: 102]). With this transformation the male retains his emotional aversion to the vagina, but he can now attribute his anxiety not to the castration fantasies that are activated by the sight of or contact with the vagina but to its aversive, but nondangerous, properties. Finally, the unconscious belief that the female is castrated may be transformed into the conscious belief that the vagina is dangerous. This belief is also widespread (see Chapter 2), and typically it takes two forms: the belief that the vagina has teeth (vagina dentata) or that it is harmful to a male's vital powers. The belief in the vagina dentata is found either as a personal fantasy (e.g., the Hindu belief that the vagina is "a chamber full of poison, causing death in the sexual act, or jaws lined with sharp teeth" [Kakar 1978: 92]) or as a group fantasy, that is, as a widespread folklore motif (Thompson 1956, vol. 3). Whether the one or the other, the transformation of the unconscious belief that the vagina is a castrated penis into the conscious belief that it has teeth defends the male against castration anxiety by displacing the cause

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of his anxiety from the castration fantasies activated by the vagina onto the putatively dangerous vagina itself. This belief has a serious psychological pitfall. Inasmuch as it may be accompanied by the fantasy that the penis is injured during coitus, it converts the vagina from a castrated into a castrating organ. In consequence, the male's unconscious castration fantasies reenter consciousness in an even more threatening form. It is hardly surprising, then, that this belief—which (by my interpretation) originates as a defense against castration anxiety— must itself be defended against by means of repression. This defense is well known to Western psychiatrists, who not infrequently encounter a belief in the vagina dentata as an unconscious fantasy (e.g., Lederer 1968: ch. 6). This transformation (and sometimes the previous transformation) may not in itself defend a male against castration anxiety, but in some cases it may do so indirectly. That is, the dangerous properties that this belief attributes to the vagina (and the repulsive properties that the previous belief attributes to the vagina) may motivate some males to refrain from sex with females, which, in turn, precludes the arousal of castration anxiety. Such males may turn to males—persons who possess a penis—for sexual gratification, or they may abjure sexual gratification altogether. If the belief in the vagina dentata is one form in which the unconscious belief that the vagina is a castrated penis is transformed into the conscious belief that it is dangerous, then the belief that the vagina is harmful to the male's vital powers is another. The latter belief is the form found in Yeigyi village, where, however, it exists not as a privately constructed belief but as a culturally constituted one. It comes into being through the internalization of the cultural proposition that contact with the vagina causes a diminution in a male's physical, sexual, and spiritual powers. I suggest that village males are motivated to internalize this proposition as a personal belief because (like the belief in the vagina dentata) it defends them against castration anxiety by displacing the cause of their anxiety from the castration fantasies activated by their view of vagina onto the putatively dangerous vagina itself. It performs

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this function, however, without the damaging psychological pitfall inherent in the vagina dentata belief, the arousal of fantasies of phallic injury. This explanation for the internalization of this cultural proposition is susceptible of two critical objections. First, although the explanation is based on the inference that village males are susceptible of castration anxiety, the only evidence offered in support of the inference is their internalization of the cultural proposition that the vagina is harmful to a male's powers. Second, although internalization of the proposition may defend a male against castration anxiety, it merely substitutes one type of anxiety for another—as does the vagina dentata belief—by replacing the privately constructed belief that the vagina is a castrated genital with the culturally constituted belief that the vagina is harmful to a male's powers. I shall address these objections in turn. That the susceptibility of village males to castration anxiety is an inference does not in itself impugn its empirical status; the same is true, surely, of any psychological trait that is attributed to persons other than oneself. To be sure, it is preferable that an inference have more, rather than less, empirical support, and in fact the inference of castration anxiety is based not only on the internalization of the cultural proposition regarding the dangerous vagina but also on an array of other data reported both in this chapter and in Chapter 2. Admittedly, none of these data taken individually is sufficient to warrant the inference of castration anxiety; taken collectively, however, they constitute a pattern that makes this inference highly probable. Let us review the data. Consider first the males' view that the vagina is a degraded organ together with their emotional aversion to it. Although this view of the vagina is common throughout the world, that it is shared does not make it any more rational. We could, therefore, reasonably assume that their emotional aversion is an expression of anxiety. This assumption is supported by their dramatic devaluation of the vagina and overvaluation of the penis—the ignoble vagina versus golden flower, that mark of male glory. Psychodynamically viewed, such an invidious contrast is most plausibly

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construed as a defense against the unconscious fear that the noble penis is susceptible of the same fate as the ignoble vagina, and hence an expression of castration anxiety. Consider again the brief foreplay and rapid ejaculation characteristic of the sexual behavior of village males, at least those composing my sample. These characteristics—whether found in Burma or across the wide arc of other societies in which they are prevalent—are typically, though not necessarily, the consequence of some type of inhibitory anxiety, and clinical findings suggest that this anxiety is most likely castration anxiety. Thus, according to these findings, if the unconscious belief in the vulnerable penis is repressed, contact with (and even the sight of) the vagina may activate unconscious castration fantasies, and the anxiety aroused by these fantasies (i.e., castration anxiety) may lead to rapid sexual behavior, if not premature ejaculation. This, however, is not the only plausible explanation for a male's rapid sexual behavior, especially in societies whose cultural ideologies impute dangerous properties to the vagina. Since Yeigyi village males internalize the cultural proposition that the vagina is harmful to their vital powers, their rapid sexual behavior might be explained by the anxiety aroused by this proposition. Though no doubt a valid explanation, it is incomplete; it does not explain why the males would internalize such an anxiety-arousing proposition in the first place unless they had a powerful motive for doing so. A convincing motivational explanation for their anxiety (hence for their rapid sexual behavior) must be capable of accounting for this motive as well. Given this explanatory requirement, I suggest that sexual behavior arouses anxiety in some (unknown) proportion of these males not only because, as a consequence of their culturally constituted belief in the dangerous vagina, contact with the vagina arouses conscious fantasies of harm to their vital powers but also because, as a consequence of their privately constructed belief in the vulnerable penis, such contact arouses unconscious castration fantasies. Both fantasies, the conscious and the unconscious, can explain their sexual anxiety (hence their rapid lovemaking), but it

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is the unconscious fantasy that motivates their internalization of the cultural proposition regarding the dangerous vagina because, so I reason, its internalization protects them from the reentry of their unconscious castration fantasies into consciousness. Another empirical basis for the inference that the vagina arouses unconscious castration anxiety in village males consists of their scrupulous compliance with the many cultural proscriptions that interdict contact with the female genitalia. These include (1) manual contact with the vagina during sex, and penile contact if the woman is menstruating; (2) sight of female genitals (which is why women do not remove their skirts during intercourse and why girls, unlike boys, cover their genitals at an early age); and (3) contact with any place or object with which female genitals have come into contact. Hence, toilet facilities are sexually segregated, male and female sarongs are kept separate in a closet, and males do not sit beneath a female or walk under a clothesline carrying a female's sarong. According to more than one psychological theory, the avoidance of an object is motivated by anxiety aroused by that object. The males' avoidance of the vagina might then be best explained as motivated by anxiety aroused by the vagina. The alternative cultural theory rejects this explanation, however. Since avoidance of the vagina is culturally prescribed, it is customary. Hence, like other kinds of customary behavior, such as compliance with culturally prescribed hairstyles, forms of salutation, and grammatical rules, avoidance of the vagina is a measure of cultural conformity, not of personal motivation.9 This may be a valid explanation for compliance with culturally 9. This explanation is very different from the highly influential claim that cultural conceptions of the vagina, menstruation, semen, and the like, as well as the rituals (including avoidance taboos) associated with them, are metaphorical expressions of social structural concerns. Thus, "it is implausible," Douglas writes, "to interpret [such cultural conceptions] as expressing something about the actual relation of the sexes," just as it is implausible to assume that "the problems which [pollution] rituals are intended to solve are personal psychological problems. . . . We cannot possibly interpret rituals concerning excreta, breast milk, saliva and the rest unless we are prepared to see in the body

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prescribed hairstyles and the like, but it is invalid for the culturally prescribed avoidance of the vagina because it does not account for the emotional salience of its avoidance, which, in the Burmese case, is indicated in three ways. First, the males themselves say that their compliance with the proscriptions on contact with the vagina is motivated by an emotional aversion to it; and since their a symbol of society, and to see the powers and dangers credited to social structure reproduced in small on the human body" (1966:115). Because "all margins are dangerous/' and because "matter issuing [from] the orifices of the body" is "marginal stuff of the most obvious kind"—she mentions spittle, blood, milk, urine, feces, tears, bodily parings, skin, nails, hair clippings, and sweat—which elements of this marginal stuff are viewed as dangerous depends on which marginal social dangers are symbolized by the body. Consequently, "when rituals express anxiety about the body's orifices, the sociological counterpart of this anxiety is a care to protect the political and cultural unity of a minority group." Saliva or genital excretions are therefore more polluting than tears because tears "purify, cleanse, bathe the eyes," rather than being connected with digestion and procreation, so "their scope for symbolizing social relations and social processes is narrower" (125). These quotations are perhaps sufficient to convey the gist of this metaphorical interpretation of such beliefs and rituals. Although this interpretation is widely accepted, I believe to be critically flawed factually and interpretively. It is flawed factually because beliefs and rituals related to polluting or dangerous body orifices are found not only among minority and marginal groups but also, and just as frequently, among majority and nonmarginal groups. Interpretively, the problems raised by this metaphorical view are formidable. Although Douglas, for example, claims that beliefs concerning the dangers of the vagina, menstrual blood, and semen loss are to be taken metaphorically as referring to social structure, the natives (both Western and non-Western) take them literally. That being so, when Douglas claims that the beliefs are metaphorical, she can only be referring to their unconscious meanings. I myself am drawn to such interpretations, but none of the available data from Western or non-Western actors suggest that unconsciously these particular beliefs and rituals are intended as metaphors, nor am I aware of any theory from which this interpretation might be deduced. In my view, then, if the natives say that they believe, for example, that the vagina is dangerous, then it must be assumed, unless there is compelling evidence to the contrary, that they believe precisely that. To claim instead that boys fear the vagina because they are concerned about group survival, or that men are anxious about sexual intercourse because for them the vagina is a symbol of society, or that women become depressed during their menses because they are anxious about the political and cultural unity of their group— is less than convincing.

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aversion can hardly be explained by the properties of the vagina itself, it is best explained by the meanings, conscious or unconscious, that they associate with it. Second, their compliance with these proscriptions is not perfunctory; rather, as in the case of the dietary proscriptions of Hindus and orthodox Jews, it is compulsive (in the psychological sense), so that failure to comply with them arouses anxiety. Third, these proscriptions are burdensome, including renunciation of sexual and other pleasures. Because compliance with the proscriptions on contact with the vagina is motivated by strong negative affect, we may reasonably conclude that the psychological explanation for the males' avoidance of the vagina—it is motivated by anxiety—is correct. Anxiety is a signal of danger (real or fantasized), and granted that their avoidance of the vagina is motivated by anxiety, I have not yet defended my hypothesis that the danger—or one of the dangers—that the males wish to avoid when they avoid the vagina is fantasized castration. Clearly, one danger consists of the fantasized harm that the Ideology of the Sexually Dangerous Female imputes to the vagina, namely, harm to the male's vital powers. This, however, is only a partial answer, for it accounts for the males' avoidance of physical contact with the vagina itself but does not account for their avoidance of the sight of the vagina or of some object that may have come into contact with it. Because in these cases anxiety is aroused by the mere sight or thought of the vagina,the harm may, I suggest, lie in the unconscious fantasy that the penis might become like a vagina—that it might be castrated. But if the sight or thought of the vagina activates unconscious castration fantasies, then, a fortiori, physical contact, must certainly do so. And that logical deduction leads to the hypothesis that consciously these avoidances are motivated by the wish to avoid the danger of a diminution in vital male powers, whereas unconsciously they are motivated by the wish to avoid the danger of castration. Strengthening this hypothesis is the very wide crosscultural distribution of the various avoidances of the vagina practiced in Yeigyi village. It is a methodological truism that if some

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practice p found in a particular society s is widely distributed across human societies, then a valid explanation for p should be able to account for its practice not only in s but in these other societies as well. Applied to the present case, this dictum requires that any motive that explains the avoidance of the vagina in Burma should also be capable of explaining its avoidance in other societies. That this motive very likely consists of the wish to avoid the fantasized danger of castration is suggested by the comparative data already cited as well as by other, perhaps more important evidence. Among the many prohibitions on contact with the vagina, the one most scrupulously practiced by Burmese villages males is the avoidance of sex with a menstruating woman. Males in a broad spectrum of societies, not excluding modern American society, also follow this practice. According to a recent study of American college students, female respondents reported that a large percentage of their male partners viewed sex during menstruation as "embarrassing, unsanitary, repugnant, or otherwise distasteful," and half the male respondents reported avoidance of sex with a menstruating woman (Paige 1977: 147)—all of this despite the permissive sexual norms of the contemporary American student culture. Although Paige does not tell us what motive or motives the males reported for their avoidance of sex with menstrual women, presumably they include the motives attributed by the females. In Burma, however, as in the other societies referenced in Chapter 2, this avoidance is motivated by the belief that menstrual blood is dangerous; indeed, in some societies, among the Enga, for instance (Meggitt 1964), menstrual blood is believed to be lethal. Given this belief, it is perhaps not surprising that sexual contact with menstruating women is often culturally tabooed, as is any other contact with them. Among the Oriyas of India, for example, "if the wife touches her husband on the first day of her period, it is an offense equal to that of killing a guru. If she touches him on the second day, it is an offense equal to killing a Brahman. On the third day to touch him is like cutting off his penis. If she touches him on the fourth day it is like killing a child" (Shweder 1985:

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203). To preclude the possibility that men will come into physical contact with menstruating women—or even with objects that have been in contact with them—the women are frequently physically segregated, either in a separate room or in a menstrual hut, for the duration of their periods. In the study of American college students, it is not reported that the males believe that menstrual blood is dangerous, but other evidence suggests that American (and other Western) males share this belief, albeit unconsciously. Based on clinical findings, Helena Deutsch reports that in unconscious fantasies Western males attribute hatred, the threat of death, magical powers, cannibalism, and poisoning tendencies to menstruating women, among other harmful characteristics (Deutsch 1944: 153). That these unconscious fantasies include castration fantasies— and that consequently the widespread avoidance of menstruating women is importantly (though not exclusively) motivated by unconscious castration anxiety—is evinced by Stephens's (1961) cross-cultural study of menstrual taboos. This large-scale quantitative study produced inter alia two important findings: (1) vaginal bleeding is unconsciously perceived as a sign of genital injury, and (2) male avoidance of menstruating females is defensively motivated by the wish to avoid the arousal of castration anxiety.10 10. Explanations for menstrual taboos and their observance are legion. Rather than summarizing them, I shall compare three prominent explanations with the one I have proposed here. Montgomery (1974) argues that menstrual taboos are an expression of the male envy of the female's ability to bear children; hence, they constitute an attempt by males to demean females. That many males envy females' ability to bear children is supported by much evidence, but that menstrual taboos are an expression ofthat envy is, in my opinion, a dubious conclusion. First, there is no evidence that females comply with menstrual taboos because of male coercion. Second, since these taboos prevent males from having sexual relations with females, eating food prepared by them, and so on, the males are inconvenienced as much as the females are. Third, this explanation does not account for the anxiety aroused in many males by menstruation and menstrual blood. Fourth, other taboos are believed to protect the tabooed person from harm, but menstrual taboos, as Stephens (1961: 75) observes, are intended to protect others from harm induced by the tabooed person. More recently, Paige and Paige have proposed that an "obsessive concern with menstruation may well reflect men's need to assess women's ability to con-

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My contention that Burmese village males are susceptible to castration anxiety, though admittedly inferential, is based on a broad array of converging data sets, as we have seen. Although the evidence disposes of the first—the empirical—objection to my explanation for the internalization of the cultural proposition regarding the dangerous vagina, it leaves us with the second—the theoretical—objection. I have proposed that males are motivated to internalize this proposition because they can then replace their privately constructed belief that the vagina is a castrated genital with the culturally constituted belief that the vagina is harmful to their vital powers; consequently they can defend themselves against castration anxiety by attributing the anxiety aroused by the vagina not to the castration fantasies that seeing or touching it activates but to the putatively dangerous characteristics of the vagina itself. This explanation is vulnerable to the objection that even if the internalization of this cultural proposition serves as a defense against castration anxiety, it only replaces one type of anxiety with another. Hence, it does not seem like a very useful defense. To address this objection, we must return to one of our theotinue producing offspring" (1981: 209). I would have thought that a woman's fertility constituted a better index of her ability to produce offspring. Nor is it clear how a man's need to assess a woman's reproductive abilities explains his sexual avoidance of the woman during her menses. And even on the improbable assumption that it does, why would strangers (who presumably have no stake in her fertility) also avoid contact with her? Even if we agree that an obsessive concern with menstruation reflects the interest of the husband and his kinsmen in the fertility of an in-marrying woman, we can only wonder why menstrual blood arouses their anxiety, for by that explanation it should have the opposite effect. Most recently, Martin has argued that menstrual taboos have nothing do with male anxiety. Instead, they are self-imposed by the women themselves because they provide a woman with a "welcome vacation" from "a large part of her daily tasks" (1987: 98). Even if true, this does not explain why the avoidance of menstruating women is mandatory, or why their segregation is compulsory, or why the men respond to contact with menstruating women with such strong affect. Even if women have self-serving motives for complying with these taboos, that does not mean that men do not have their own, very different motives for ensuring that women comply with them.

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retical first principles, namely, that if a cultural proposition is internalized even though it is threatening, its internalization is motivated by the wish to prevent an even more threatening, but unconscious, private belief from reentering consciousness. On that principle, the question is not whether the culturally constituted belief that the vagina is harmful to a male's vital powers is threatening for the male—it surely is—but whether his privately constructed belief that the vagina is a castrated genital is a greater threat. Put differently, the question is whether the anxiety aroused by the fantasy of castration is more painful than the anxiety aroused by the fantasy of a diminution in one's powers. In my judgment, it is. In the first place, the fantasy of castration is concrete, hence susceptible of pictorial representation, whereas the fantasy of a diminution in one's powers is abstract, hence best represented conceptually. Conceptual representations are less likely to arouse strong affect (in this case, the affect of anxiety) than pictorial ones. In the second place, even though both fantasies consist of harm to a male's valuable bodily possessions—his penis and his powers—there is an important difference between them. The fantasized harm to the penis—castration—consists of its irretrievable loss, whereas the fantasized harm to the male's powers consists of their diminution. I would submit that a diminution in a valuable object is less painful than its loss—especially if, as in this case, the diminution in the male's powers (except for the diminution in hpoun) can be recouped. Finally, and most important, for the typical male the penis is not just another valued bodily possession. It is one of the most highly valued, both emotionally and symbolically—emotionally because of his powerful narcissistic investment in the penis and symbolically because it is the distinguishing, and visible, sign of his masculinity. On these three theoretical grounds, the fantasy of castration would be expected to be more threatening for a male than the fan-

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tasy of a diminution in his powers, so it seems reasonable to conclude that the internalization of the cultural proposition regarding the dangerous vagina is a useful defense.11 This theoretically derived conclusion has empirical support. According to Western clinical findings reported earlier (Fenichel 1945:169-172), males who form no defense (either privately constructed or culturally constituted) against unconscious castration anxiety not infrequently ejaculate prematurely, suffer from impotence, abandon heterosexuality, or renounce sex altogether. Compare these males with Yeigyi village males, who, according to our hypothesis, defend themselves against castration anxiety by internalizing the cultural proposition regarding the dangerous vagina. Although many of them reported rapid lovemaking, none of them reported any of these characteristics seen in many undefended Western males.12 11. In a speculation derived from one version of psychoanalytic theory we might suggest another reason for this expectation. Castration, according to that version, is the male's fantasized punishment by the father for his transgressive Oedipal wishes. We could expect, consequently, that male castration fantasies would be accompanied, if only unconsciously, both by a fear of the father and by a sense of guilt. If so, internalizing the proposition that the vagina is dangerous protects the male not only from castration anxiety but from two other painful affects as well: fear of the father and the burden of guilt. Although he acquires, instead of the fear of the father, a fear of the vagina, he can always protect himself against the latter fear by simple avoidance. He is protected from the guilt because he is entirely blameless for any harm that the vagina might cause him; castration, in contrast, he would view as retribution for his transgressive Oedipal wishes. 12. The postulation of castration anxiety not only explains the males' internalization of this cultural proposition but also supports the classical feedback model of the relation between childhood experience and adult behavior. Thus, many village mothers are seductive with their young sons, which, according to some theorists, is the first link in a complex causal chain that constitutes one route to castration anxiety. If castration anxiety accounts in part for the rapid lovemaking of some village males, and if rapid lovemaking produces sexual frustration in some village females, perhaps the village females' sexual frustration explains their seductiveness with their sons. We have come full circle.

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Summary and Conclusions

Guided by the psychological preadaptation theory and a psychodynamic theory of the actor, I have proposed a series of explanations for the internalization of two gender ideologies, the Ideologies of the Superior Male and the Dangerous Female. These explanations are to be construed as hypotheses that require further testing. If any or all of these hypotheses are disconfirmed, I would then reformulate the psychodynamic theory of the actor, but I would not reject the psychological preadaptation theory in favor of the cultural determinist theory. The latter theory is problematic enough when dealing with emotionally gratifying propositions, such as those constituting the Ideology of the Superior Male (see Chapter 3); it is all the more so in the case of emotionally threatening propositions, such as those constituting the Ideology of the Dangerous Female. The psychological preadaptation theory, it will be recalled, makes a sharp distinction between cultural acquisition and cultural internalization. Although cultural propositions are acquired because they are socially transmitted, they are internalized only if the actor is psychologically preadapted, either cognitively or motivationally, to do so. If the internalization of a proposition is both motivationally instigated and motivationally grounded, the motive, according to the psychodynamic theory of the actor, is defensive; that is, it consists of the wish to prevent some painful, but unconscious, desire or belief from reentering consciousness. Even though the internalization of a cultural proposition is defensively motivated, the actor still holds the proposition to be true; that is, it is still psychologically real for that actor. Thus, although I have argued that the internalization of the cultural proposition regarding the dangerous vagina is defensively motivated, its psychological reality for Burmese village males can hardly be doubted, as is evinced not only by their verbal assent to its message but also (and much more importantly) by their behavior. If the internalization of a cultural proposition is defensively motivated, not only is the proposition psychologically real, but so

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is the unconscious belief or desire that it wards off. That it is unconscious does not diminish the motivational force of that belief or desire. Any act that might be instigated by the internalized cultural proposition is overdetermined—that is, instigated by conscious and unconscious motives simultaneously. For example, the prohibitions on contact with the vagina practiced in Yeigyi village may be motivated both by the conscious (culturally constituted) belief that vagina is dangerous and by the unconscious (privately constructed) belief that the vagina is a castrated genital. Although one and the same act may be instigated by both conscious and unconscious motives, neither motive is redundant because the existence of the former is dependent on the latter. If a village male was not motivated to ward off the castration anxiety aroused by his privately constructed (but unconscious) belief that the vagina is a castrated genital, then he would not be motivated to internalize the cultural proposition that the vagina is harmful to a male's powers. Put differently, in the absence of the private belief, the cultural proposition would either be rejected or be acquired as a cliché. It would be a belief with little, if any, emotional or motivational salience.

8 Conclusions and Implications

Cultural Internalizaron and Cultural Reproduction

In this book I have been concerned with cultural and, to a lesser degree, social reproduction. Distinguishing between beliefs that are clichés and those that are cognitively salient, I have argued that the transmission of cultural systems is necessary and sufficient for the reproduction of cultural systems as clichés but is not sufficient for their reproduction as cognitively salient beliefs, for that requires that the cultural systems also be internalized. My primary aim has been to explicate a theory of cultural internalization: the psychological preadaptation theory. This theory rejects the traditional social science view that cultural novices are empty containers prior to their acquisition of culture, passively receiving and automatically internalizing cultural norms, ideas, and values. Instead, it is based on the now robust finding that cultural novices are active agents possessing both biologically acquired needs and experientially acquired desires and beliefs. Because these needs, desires, and beliefs are acquired by the novices before they acquire culture, I call them precultural. The psychological preadaptation theory holds that novices internalize their culture just in case its norms, ideas, and values fill 177

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the novices' precultural needs, satisfy their precultural desires, and correspond to their precultural beliefs. The latter theory, in contrast to the cultural determinist theory of cultural internalization, rests on the following conception of culture. 1. Culture not only forms many of the beliefs of social actors but also is employed by the actors to validate and confirm their precultural experientially acquired beliefs. 2. Culture not only shapes much of the behavior of social actors but also is employed by the actors to justify their behavior. 3. Culture not only creates some of the desires of social actors but also is employed by the actors to satisfy their precultural acquired desires. 4. Culture not only organizes much of the experience of social actors but also is employed by the the actors to defend themselves against the painful emotions consequent upon their experience. 5. Culture not only constructs a symbolic world for social actors but also is employed by the actors to mediate the not infrequent conflicts between the demands of their inner world and the adaptive requirements of the outer world. That culture performs these functions inefficiently cannot be denied, but given the complexity of the tasks, it is remarkable that it does so at all. If cultural systems consist of both descriptive and directive propositions, then social (as opposed to cultural) reproduction requires not only that these propositions be internalized but also that the directive propositions, both optional and prescriptive, be implemented or complied with. Because these two types of directives, respectively, make up the ethical and pragmatic norms that constitute social roles, their implementation consists of the performance of these roles. (Their performance, of course, is a necessary condition for social reproduction.) Since the writing of this book was instigated by the seemingly anomalous internalization of the Burmese cultural ideologies of sex and gender, and since ideologies consist primarily of descriptive propositions, I have fo-

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cused on cultural reproduction. That is, although I have here developed a theory of cultural internalization, I have not developed a theory of cultural implementation (i.e., social reproduction). In fact, cultural implementation does not require a theory separate from a theory of cultural internalization because both processes can be explained by the psychological preadaptation theory, with, however, one qualification. Whereas cultural internalization requires both a cognitive and a motivational explanation, cultural implementation requires a motivational explanation alone. For both processes, the important motivational variables, I have argued, consist of sentiments, needs, and wishes. Although in both cases the motivation is usually conscious, it is also not infrequently unconscious, and sometimes unconscious motivation is more important. Unconscious motivation is much more complex and less well understood than conscious motivation, so much of my theoretical effort has been devoted to that topic. Cultural Internalization and Unconscious Motivation

Anthropologists have tended to ignore, if not reject, the relevance of unconscious motivation for cultural internalization and implementation. This tendency, in my judgment, has had significant dysfunctional consequences for the understanding of cultural and social reproduction, including the following. First, because discerning a conscious motive for either the internalization or the implementation of cultural propositions is often difficult, if not impossible, inattention to unconscious motivation has contributed to the commonly held view that these processes are not or need not be motivated at all. This in turn has reinforced the cultural determinist view that the transmission of cultural systems is a sufficient condition for their internalization and implementation. Second, inattention to unconscious motivation was an important factor in the repudiation of functionalism. On the premise that cultural internalization and implementation are unrelated to actors' wishes, sentiments, and needs, it was not unreasonable to

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conclude that cultural systems perform few, if any, functions for individual actors—none, at any rate, that are relevant for the understanding of cultural and social reproduction. That conclusion has contributed to the failure to discern one of the important sources of social and cultural change, besides fostering the extraordinary view that cultural meanings are unrelated to the functions that culture performs for social actors. Third, since the salience of cultural propositions and cultural practices often derives from their unconscious meanings, theoretical inattention to unconscious motivation has contributed to the failure to explain the paradoxical finding that seemingly trivial cultural propositions and cultural practices, as well as demonstrably false cultural propositions, frequently possess strong cognitive and motivational salience. Fourth, because cultural symbols possess not only conscious and culturally conventional meanings but also unconscious, noncultural ones, which are sometimes more salient for social actors, inattention to unconscious motivation has contributed both to a narrow conception of symbolism and to a restricted conception of the multiple meanings of many cultural symbols (polysemy). Fifth, inattention to unconscious motivation is a major reason for the failure to recognize that cultural systems may be employed as a resource for the construction of culturally constituted defenses. Although all of these consequences of the inattention to unconscious motivation deserve extended comment, here I shall discuss the fifth consequence alone. In this connection, previously I stressed the critical importance of culturally constituted defenses for cultural internalization, so here I shall address their other cultural and social functions. Cultural and Social Functions of Culturally Constituted Defenses

In distinguishing repression (the defense mechanism of the first type) from displacement, projection, and the like (defense mechanisms of the second type), I have observed that repression is always

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privately constructed, whereas defense mechanisms of the second type may be privately constructed or culturally constituted. In either case, defense mechanisms of the second type consist of both defensive thoughts and defensive acts. Defensive thoughts protect the actor from the painful affects aroused by threatening beliefs, sentiments, and wishes; defensive acts—acts that fulfill thwarted wishes—protect him or her from the painful affects aroused by the thwarting of a wish, on the one hand, or its fulfillment by culturally prohibited means, on the other. In addition, defense mechanisms may also have unintended negative functions for the actor. The repression of a morally conflictual sexual wish, for example, may thwart its fulfillment, and the attendant frustration may contribute to the development of a neurosis and to the fulfillment of the wish by means of a neurotic symptom. Again, if projection is used to defend against a morally conflictual aggressive wish, this defensive maneuver protects the actor from guilt at the cost of paranoia. The functions and dysfunctions of privately constructed defenses for individual actors are well known, so let us turn instead to their functions and dysfunctions for social groups. First, since the repression, for example, of culturally prohibited sentiments and desires (both wishes and aims) is a powerful means of achieving compliance with cultural prescriptions, it is also an important (though unintended) means of maintaining social order. That is also true of defense mechanisms of the second type. If, for example, actors displace their hostile sentiments or desires onto the members of an out-group, the defensive thought serves to maintain or promote amicable social relations within their own group. Besides fostering prosocial sentiments, privately constructed defense mechanisms may also motivate prosocial action. As a consequence of the displacement of hostile sentiments and wishes, the actors may experience amicable feelings for the members of their own group. If so, they are more likely to behave, not aggressively, but in a friendly and cooperative manner in their interaction with them.

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Privately constructed defense mechanisms may have negative (dysfunctional) social consequences as well. Should an actor project personal hostility onto others and in consequence develop paranoid beliefs and attitudes, this defensive maneuver promotes social conflict. Similarly, should an actor displace his unconscious hostility for his father onto a teacher and in consequence disrupt the latter's lectures (which injures the teacher and impairs the learning environment of the students), the displacement, while fostering compliance with one cultural norm, leads to the violation of another. Culturally constituted defense mechanisms—that is, defense mechanisms of the second type that employ a cultural system as a resource for their construction—with some exceptions, have the positive functions of privately constructed defense mechanisms of the second type without their negative functions. If, for example, a cultural system is employed as a resource for the transformation of an unconscious, morally conflictual wish (or, more accurately, its prepositional representation), this defensive thought performs a number of functions, both individual and social. The wish is admitted to consciousness without the actor's experiencing guilt, and it can then be fulfilled without arousing remorse. These functions are also performed by a privately constructed defensive thought. But a culturally constituted one also performs two others. Because the construction of the defensive thought is effected by the internalization of a descriptive cultural proposition, the actor is protected from the sense of social alienation associated with a defensive thought that is privately constructed. Because the defensive acts by which the wish is fulfilled consists of the implementation of a directive proposition, the actor is also protected from the punitive social sanctions attendant upon a privately constructed defensive act if, as sometimes happens, the latter is culturally proscribed. In addition to these individual functions, culturally constituted defense mechanisms simultaneously, though unintentionally, perform important social functions that are not performed by privately constructed ones. First, if social solidarity is achieved (as

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Durkheimians believe) by the sharing of a common set of collective representations, the employment of a cultural system for the construction of a defense mechanism enhances social solidarity. Second, if a cultural system is employed as a resource for the transformation of an unconscious wish, this wish becomes a powerful motive for internalizing this system, hence for reproducing it. Finally, because in such a case the wish is fulfilled by the performance of a social role, its performance is likewise provided with a powerful motive. This wish not only ensures the reproduction of the role but also protects society from the dysfunctional consequences attendant upon the performance of a culturally proscribed act for its fulfillment. In sum, if an unconscious, morally conflictual wish is fulfilled by means of a culturally constituted defense mechanism, that wish— which is potentially disruptive of both the cultural and the social systems—is transformed into a powerful instrument for cultural and social reproduction. Implications for a Theory of Sociocultural Integration

When I began this book, I intended to develop a theory of cultural reproduction. Because it soon became evident that this social process depends on the logically and empirically prior psychological process of cultural internalization, I realized that most of my theoretical effort would have to focus on internalization, not reproduction. To that end, I have developed a theory of cultural internalization—the psychological preadaptation theory—and I have employed it to deal with the difficult problem of accounting for the internalization of the Burmese gender ideologies. In addition to providing an explanation, if only a partial one, for cultural and social reproduction, this theory has important implications for another question, that of sociocultural integration. In the early history of the social sciences it was virtually axiomatic that, except under conditions of rapid change or anomie, most societies—traditional ones, at any rate—were more or less integrated wholes. Their integration was viewed as taking two forms.

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First, the cultural systems that govern the various social domains of a society (e.g., religion, kinship, politics) are integrated with each other. Second, the cultural system that governs any particular social domain is integrated with the social system—the system of social relations—that characterizes that domain. Although the meaning of the term integration is vague in both of these usages, the following meanings are essentially consensual.1 With respect to the relation among cultural systems, integration designates a condition of logical consistency among them. This might be called cultural integration. With respect to the relation between the cultural and social systems, integration designates a condition of structural homology between them. This might be called sociocultural integration. The assumption of sociocultural integration was formerly widespread in the social sciences, perhaps because it was taken as a corollary of the two classical theories that dominated the social sciences in their formative years, namely, the theories of social and cultural determinism. Proponents of these opposing theories agreed that cultural and social systems sustained a causal relation but disagreed about the direction of the causality. According to the theory of social determinism, the social system determines the cultural system. In its Marxist version, according to which the social system is dependent on economic and other material conditions, the relation between the social and cultural systems is that of base to superstructure.2 According, however, to the theory of 1. Although Sorokin's (1937) historical discussion of the various meanings of integration and his classification of types of integration (mechanical, external, causal and lógico-meaningful) are dated in some respects, his discussion (especially vol. 1, ch. 1) is still surprisingly contemporary. 2. For Marxists it is not the social system per se but the system of production (including both the technological and economic systems) that is causal (the "base"), whereas the superstructure (which includes the legal, political, and ideological systems) is not only determined by the base but also "corresponds" to, is "conditioned by," and is an "expression of" it (Alexander 1982: 42-48,178-187). Put differently, the base is "mapped onto" the superstructure, and in this mapping process, "definite economic-structural content is projected onto the superstructure" (McMurtry 1978: chs. 7-8).

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cultural determinism, the opposite is the case: the cultural system determines the social system. I shall refer to these classical theories as the "strong" forms of social and cultural determinism, respectively, thereby distinguishing them from their "weak" forms, which are examined below. According to both of the strong theories, sociocultural integration consists of a condition of structural homology between the social and cultural systems. But a causal relation between two variables does not entail structural homology. Indeed, in most causal relations—for example, between clouds and rain, sunlight and photosynthesis, war and migration—the variables are not structurally homologous. If cultural and social systems are, however, causally related and structurally homologous, it is because, according to the classical theories, one system is not only caused by the other but is also shaped by it. Put differently, one "reflects," or is "patterned after," the other. Other metaphors have recently been employed to convey these notions. For example, the cultural system is referred to by Clifford Geertz as a "template" for, or— with a stress now on feedback between the systems—as a "model for" and a "model of," the social system. Whatever the metaphor, the implications for the integration of cultural and social systems are the same. If one system shapes, or is the model for, the other in all domains, the predictable relation between these systems is that of structural homology (sociocultural integration). In the event, all the cultural systems in the same domain are ipso facto logically consistent with each other (cultural integration). This assumption of wholesale integration, perhaps most importantly exemplified in Benedict's Patterns of Culture (1934), has undergone important modifications over the years, particularly in its application to modern industrial societies. Although most contemporary integration theorists would, arguably, expect the cultural systems in a single domain to be consistent with each other (cultural integration), few would expect such a condition to obtain across domains. Nor would many expect all the cultural

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systems of a society to be structurally homologous with its social systems (sociocultural integration).3 In modern societies cultural and sociocultural integration are assumed to obtain within, but not across, domains. In my opinion, even that limited assumption is problematic. Although the thesis that all human beings are God's children may be an important teaching of Christianity, societies in which Christianity is the dominant religion have often been characterized by oppression, slavery, and other "inhuman" practices. Similarly, although social equality is a core value of American culture, American society has often been characterized by racial and ethnic inequalities, among others. As these examples demonstrate, neither of the classical determinist theories provides an adequate account of the relation between the social and the cultural systems. If these systems are not merely different from but the reverse of each other, they clearly do not sustain a relation of structural homology, and neither shapes, or is shaped by, the other. To be sure, these challenges to the strong determinist theories have been explained in various ways—by saying that modern societies are anomic, that they have undergone rapid social and cultural change, that their cultural systems are not internalized, and so on. If, however, the domain of male-female relations in the Burmese village of Yeigyi is taken as evidence, I would suggest that anomie, rapid change, and the failure of cultural internalization are not the only factors that might account for the absence of sociocultural integration, at least in its structurally homologous meaning. A Burmese village is a traditional community characterized by neither anomie nor rapid change; and the two cultural systems that govern the domain of sex and gender relations are internalized by the (male) actors. In respect to cultural integration, these systems— 3. For a few contemporary "science studies" theorists, the cultural systems of modern science are also homologous with, because they are shaped by, the social system. According to Schölte, for example, the concept of "biological constants" is merely an "ideological construct. Law and order in 'nature' [are] scientific means to rationalize law and order in society" (1984: 964).

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the Ideology of the Superior Male and the Ideology of the Dangerous Female—are in some important respects logically inconsistent with each other. In respect to sociocultural integration, although the former ideology is structurally homologous with the formal characteristics of the social system of gender relations, both ideologies are independent of, discrepant with, or the reverse of its actual characteristics. In addition, both are discrepant with the salient personal characteristics of the social actors: the first is discrepant with their moral and psychological characteristics, the second with their sexual characteristics. The configuration of social, cultural, and personality systems found in Yeigyi village—each system seems to go its own way, and none seems to sustain a relation of integration with any other— may be found, I would suggest, in virtually all societies, if not in respect to the domain of male-female relations, then in respect to some other domain. But because it is difficult to imagine how social actors might manage their lives in such a seemingly chaotic situation, the absence of integration may perhaps be more apparent than real. Integration may be absent in either the cultural or sociocultural sense, but it may be present in some other sense. To understand this possibility, let us view the relation between social and cultural systems from the perspective of their relation, not with each other, but with the personality system of the social actors. From a systems-centered perspective, the cultural systems may not be integrated in a logical sense (cultural integration), and the social and cultural systems may not be integrated in a structurally homologous sense (sociocultural integration), but from an actor-centered perspective, they may be integrated in a psychological sense. If the social and cultural systems, taken individually, are consonant with the cognitive orientations or the motivational dispositions of the social actors, as they often are, then, taken severally, they can be shown to be psychologically consistent with each other. Because in that case the social and cultural systems are related to each other by virtue of the psychological relation that each sustains with the personality system of the actors, the relation might be considered one of psychological integration. In

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contrast, a structurally homologous relation between them is one of formal integration. Applying these terms to the Burmese domain of male-female relations, we may now say that although the social and cultural systems that compose this domain are not integrated in the formal sense, they are integrated in the psychological sense. The Ideology of the Superior Male fulfills the males' wish to believe that they are superior to females; and although this belief is threatened by the social system of gender relations, the males' internalization of the Ideology of the Dangerous Female defends them against the threat. As this example suggests, whether sociocultural integration is formal or psychological is a function of two variables: the type of cultural system that governs the domain and the grounds on which that system is internalized. If cultural systems, classified as predominantly descriptive or directive, are internalized on either motivational or cognitive grounds, the two types of sociocultural integration might be expected to occur under the following conditions. First, if the cultural system that governs a domain is predominantly directive, sociocultural integration of the formal type is likely to occur in that domain because such a system is internalized just in case it is empirically grounded—that is, its truth is confirmed by the fact that compliance with its directives satisfies the desire that motivates its acquisition. In principle, a relation of structural homology might then be expected between the cultural and social systems. But social action is not always governed by cultural systems, so such a relation might not obtain in practice. Actors comply with directive propositions of the prescriptive type in hopes of approval from the superego, but if compliance thwarts the fulfillment of a more powerful wish, an actor might violate the prescription. Similarly, because a directive proposition of the optional type designates the means by which a wish can be fulfilled, the actor may not comply with the directive if a better means is discovered. Under either of these conditions the social and cultural systems may be structurally homologous, but only because of the coercive force of social sanctions. Second, if the cultural system that governs a domain is pre-

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dominantly descriptive and is, moreover, nonconsummatory or else consummatory but of ordinary emotional concern, sociocultural integration of the formal type is also likely to occur in that domain. Here, the cultural system is internalized just in case it is empirically grounded, and consequently the actual characteristics of the domain correspond to a greater or lesser degree to its cultural characterization. Third, if the cultural system that governs a domain is predominantly descriptive and is, moreover, a consummatory system of powerful emotional concern, it is highly unlikely for sociocultural integration of the formal type to occur in that domain. Such a system is internalized because it fulfills a peremptory wish. If the system fulfills the wish, it is internalized even if it is not empirically grounded. In consequence, the actual characteristics of the domain do not correspond with its cultural characterization. If the cultural system is internalized even though it is not empirically grounded, its internalization is motivationally grounded. If that is the case, sociocultural integration of the psychological type is likely to occur. Because internalization is motivated by a peremptory wish, the cultural and social systems alike might expected to be consonant with the wish—the social system because it produces the wish, the cultural system because it fulfills it. Both systems are, in these circumstances, psychologically consistent with each other. This is the case in regard to the domain of malefemale relations in the Burmese village of Yeigyi.

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Index

Acculturation, 57 Adultery, 25-26, 36,154-55, 157-58,159 Affective dissonance, 152 Africa, 33. See also specific countries Agape, 125-26,127 Aims, and desire, 79-84 America. See United States Ancient world, 24, 31, 34, 35, 36-37 Andabhuta Jataka, 23, 25 Andalusia, 32,147-48 Anderson, Benedict R. O'G., 21 Antoun, Richard T., 156 Anxiety: bodily anxiety, 112-14; castration fantasies and anxiety, 160-74,160n, 174n, 176; narcissistic anxiety, 108-12,142,143, 144; potency anxiety, 158-59, 158n Ardener, Shirley G., 142n Ariyapala, M. B., 31 Arnheim, Rudolf, xii Asia. See South Asia; Southeast Asia; specific countries Authority (awza) of males, 13, 22, 47,147

adjustive function of, 54; comparison of construction of private beliefs with internalization of cultural propositions, 69-70; consummately beliefs, 51-54, 63; definition of cultural beliefs, 8; descriptive beliefs, 49, 54; directive beliefs, 49-50, 54; ego integrative function of, 54; experiences versus, 130-31,13 In; model for construction of private beliefs, 48-54; narcissistically frustrating beliefs, 107,108-12; physically threatening beliefs, 107,112-14; of powerful emotional concern, 52; typology of privately constructed beliefs, 53-54; unconscious beliefs, 107-14; unconscious motivation for, 52, 54 Bena Bena, 28, 29, 33, 34, 35, 36, 42 Benedek, Theresa, 43 Benedict, Ruth, 185 Biological preadaptation, 57 Bloom, Harold, 1 Bodily anxiety, 112-14 Book of the Discipline, The, 27 Bouhdiba, Abdelwahab, 30, 32 Bourdieu, Pierre, 2 Bourguignon, Erika, xiii

Bedouin, 26, 28, 33, 34 Beliefs: adaptive function of, 54; 211

212 : INDEX

Brandes, Stanley, 32 Brazil, 29, 33, 34 Brenner, Suzanne A., 17 Brown, D. E., xii Bruner, Edward M., xiii Buddhism, 13-14, 21-24, 26-27, 41, 47-48,139,151,154-55 Burma: authority of males in, 13, 22, 47,147; Buddhism in, 13-14, 47-48,139,151; cultural systems of gender in, 19-28; definition of Burmese, xvi; equality of women in, 11-13; legal system of, 12; marriage and family in, 15-18, 19, 22, 24; political power in, 13, 14, 38; shamans and spirit cult in, 14-15; social system of malefemale relations in, 11-19, 29-30, 44,137,142,187; village productive economy in, 11-12. See also Cultural internal i zati on; Ideology of the Dangerous Female; Ideology of the Superior Male Burmese Family, The (Mi Mi Khaing),41 Burton, Richard, 36 Castration fantasies and anxiety, 160-74,160n, 174n, 176 Celibacy, 154 Charisma (hpoun), 13-14,18, 20-21, 26, 136,143, 173 Cherokee, 34 China, 12, 28, 31, 34,156 Christianity, 4, 35, 38, 58-59, 63, 125,132,186 Cicero, 147 Circumcision. See Female circumcision Classical anthropology tradition, postulates of, x-xv Classical culture theory, xii Clichés, 8, 47-48, 57, 59, 62, 139, 177 Cognitive consonance, 152 Cognitive dissonance, 63

Cognitive relativism, xii Comparative anthropology, xi. See also Ideology of the Dangerous Female; Ideology of the Superior Male Compromise formation, 94, 99 Consummatory beliefs, 51-54, 63 Consummatory propositions, 59-63,139-40

Contemporary culture theory, xi-xii Culla-Paduma Jataka, 22, 25 Cultural acquisition, scale of, 8-9 Cultural beliefs. See Beliefs Cultural determinism, xii, 7n, 46, 48, 55-56, 71-72, 86-87, 184-85 Cultural diversity, xii, 137-38 Cultural internal!zation : anomalies in, 15-18, 19, 29-30, 44,137, 142; of Buddhism, 47-48,139; challenges to theory of, 44,137; classical theories of, 45-48; classification of types of cultural propositions according to paradigms of internalization, 70-71; comparison of construction of private beliefs with internalization of cultural propositions, 69-70; of Consummatory propositions, 59-63; cultural determinist theory of, 46, 48, 71-72; and cultural reproduction, 4-5, 177-79; and culturally constituted defense mechanisms, 102-6,115-17; definition and description of, 3-4, 6-9, 66; of descriptive propositions, 59-63; of directive propositions, 64-68; distinguished from internalization of cultural propositions, 55; of Ideology of the Dangerous Female by females, 41-43; of Ideology of the Dangerous Female by males, 38-40,137,147-76,188; of Ideology of the Morally Dangerous Female, 147-53; of Ideol-

INDEX : 213

ogy of the Sexually Dangerous Female, 153-74; of Ideology of the Superior Male by females, 40-41; of Ideology of the Superior Male by males, 37-38,137, 141-47,175-76,188; Marxist theory of, 45-46, 48, 72-73; methodological observations and caveats on, 137-41; by novices, 55-57,177-78; of optional propositions, 64; of prescriptive propositions, 65-68; psychological preadaptation theory of, 48, 55-73,136-77; socialization theory of, 46, 48, 72-73; types of mental action in, 5-6; and typology of cultural propositions, 69; and unconscious desires, 102-6; and unconscious motivation, 179-80; versus social reproduction, 5-6. See also Psychological preadaptation theory Cultural novices, 55-57, 177-78 Cultural propositions: acquisition of, 8-9, 55; classification of types of, according to paradigms of internalization, 70-71; definition of, 8, 55; descriptive propositions, 58-63,139-40; directive propositions, 58-59; internalization of consummatory propositions, 59-63; internalization of descriptive propositions, 59-63; internalization of directive propositions, 64-68; internalization of optional propositions, 64; internalization of prescriptive propositions, 65-68; optional type of directive propositions, 64-66; of powerful emotional concern, 63; prescriptive type of directive propositions, 65-68; transmission of, to cultural novices, 55-56; typology of, 58-59, 69 Cultural relativism, xii

Cultural reproduction, 2, 3-5,19, 177-79 Cultural sharing, 6-7n Cultural universais, xii-xiii Culturally constituted defense mechanisms: compared with privately constructed defense mechanisms, 115-17,145,145n; cultural and social functions of, 180-83; and cultural internalization, 102-6,115-17; as defense mechanism of the second type, 119-20; definition of, 101,119; Devereux on, 145,145n; and neurotic symptoms, 118-24,134; Obeyesekere's critique of, 117, 118-34; and psychopathology, 117-35; and psychotic symptoms, 124-35; relative neglect of, 101-2 Culturally constituted defenses: definition of, 101; and neurotic symptoms, 118-24 Culture: concept of, in psychological preadaptation theory, 178; definition of, 6-7; distributive model of, 6-7n; relation between social and cultural systems, 19 Culture theory, xi-xii Cunnilingus, 42 D'Andrade, Roy G., 1, 50 Dangerous Female. See Ideology of the Dangerous Female Davenport, William H., xii Defense mechanisms: behaviorist conception of, 99; and defensive acts, 98,100-101,102; and defensive thoughts, 98,101,102; denial in fantasy, 112; disavowal, 110-11; displacement, 97, 99, 102,103-4,107n, 180-81; externalization, 104,155; functions and dysfunctions of, 181; and paranoia, 124; privately constructed versus culturally consti-

214 : INDEX

Defense mechanisms (continued) tutea defense mechanisms, 115-17,145,145n; projection, 104,124,180-81; psychological defense compared with mechanism of defense, 95,100; rationalization, 110; renunciation, 110; repression, 85-95, 96, 98, 100,110-11,114,145,145n, 162,180-81; of second type, 95-101,111-12,114-15,119, 121-22,124,180-81; sublimation, 106-7n, 126,127. See also Culturally constituted defense mechanisms Defensive acts, 98,100-101,102, 115 Defensive thoughts, 98,101,102, 115 Delusions, 125,128,131-32,133 Denial in fantasy, 112 Descriptive beliefs, 49, 54 Descriptive propositions, 58-63, 115,139-40 Desire: and aims, 79-84; concept of, 74-89; and cultural detenninist theory, 86-87; and goals, 80-83, 82-83n; and Marxist theory, 86-87; and needs, 74-78, 83n, 84, 84n; prepositional form of, 91-92; and sentiments, 75-78, 83-84, 83n, 84n; and socialization theory, 86-87; unconscious desire, 85-89; and wishes, 78-80, 82n, 83-84. See also Unconscious desires Deutsch, Hélène, 42-43,171 Devereux, George, xi, 118n, 131n, 145,145n Dhammathat, 21 Directive beliefs, 49-50, 54 Directive propositions, 58-59, 64-68,115 Disavowal, 110-11 Displacement, 97, 99,102,103-4, 107n, 180-81

Distributive model of culture, 6-7n Douglas, Mary, 167-68n Druze, 28, 35, 36 Dysmenorrhea, 43 Edgerton, Robert B., xii Egypt, 26, 28, 33, 34,156 Ember, Carol, 16On Enculturation, 57 Enga, 33, 34,170 Epistemological relativism, xii, xiii Epstein, A. L., 118n Etoro, 27, 34 Europe, 156,158,161. See also Medieval Europe; Southern Europe; and specific countries Evil practices of women, 21, 31-33. See also Ideology of the Morally Dangerous Female Experience, versus belief, 130-31, 131n Externalization, 104,155 Family: duties of wife, 22, 38; female domination of, 15-18,19, 29-30; in Greece, 29; husband's authority over wife, 15, 22, 29, 30,47,147; mother-child relationship in, 149-53,160n, 174n; wife's control of disposable family income, 16-17 Female circumcision, 36,156 Female sexuality. See Ideology of the Sexually Dangerous Female; Libido; Lust of women; Menstruation and menstrual blood; Sexual intercourse; Vagina Fetishism, 163 Fox, Robin, xii France, 29, 31, 32, 35, 36 Freud, Sigmund, 94,118 Freudian theory. See Psychoanalytic theory Friedl, Ernestine, 29 Fromm, Erich, 46,158n Frustration tolerance, 93

INDEX : 215

Gay, John, xii Geertz, Clifford, 185 Gender ideologies. See Ideology of the Dangerous Female; Ideology of the Superior Male Gill, MertonM.,96 Gilmore, David S., 17 Goals, and desire, 80-83, 82-83n Greece, 24, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36 Guilt, 87, 88-89, 93-94, 98, 114 Guilt cultures, 68n Gypsies, 33, 34 Haan, Norma, 90 Hagen, 33, 34 Hallowell, A. L, xii, l Hallucinations, 128,130-31,133 Hamilton, Alexander, 157n Haro, Father Joseph, 32 Herskovits, Melville, 1 Hinduism, 39-40, 42,163 Hockett, C. E, xii Holt, Robert, 80n Homey, Karen, 142n, 146,158n, 161n Hpoun. See Charisma (hpouri) Hysteria, 123 Hysterical psychosis, 123,128n Ideology, definition of, 140-41 Ideology of the Dangerous Female: anomalies in internalization of, 44,137,187; author's rationale for study of, 19-20; comparative perspective on, 20, 31-37, 39-40, 42-43,147-48,156; as consummately proposition, 140; description of, 3, 23-28,136; internalization of, by females, 41-43,136; internalization of, by males, 38-40,147-76,188; psychological preadaptation theory of, 147-74 Ideology of the Morally Dangerous Female: and childhood experiences of males, 149-53; compara-

tive perspective on, 31-33, 147-48; contradictions with social system of male-female relations, 44; description of, 23-24, 27,136,147,153; internalization of, by males, 38,147-53 Ideology of the Sexually Dangerous Female: comparative perspective on, 33-37, 39-40, 42-43,156, 161-62; contradictions with social system of male-female relations, 44; description of, 24-27, 136,153; insatiable female libido, 22, 25, 35, 39,153-59; internalization of, by females, 41-43, 136; internalization of, by males, 38-40,153-74; psychological preadaptation theory, 153-74; vagina as dangerous, 20, 26, 33-34, 39, 41,137-38n, 159-74 Ideology of the Superior Male: anomalies in internalization of, 15-18, 19, 29-30, 44,137, 142, 148-49,187; author's rationale for study of, 19-20; comparative perspective on, 20, 28-30; as consummatory proposition, 140; defensive functions of, 143-44, 188; description of, 2-3, 20-23, 136,148; and Ideology of the Morally Dangerous Female, 148-49; internalization of, by females, 40-41,136; internalization of, by males, 37-38,137, 141-47,175-76,188; and male fear of females and wish to be dependent on them, 146, 151-52; and males' wish to dominate females, 151-52; psychological preadaptation theory of, 141-47 Incubus visitation, 131 India, 12, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 39-40, 156, 170 Infibulation, 36,156

216 : INDEX

Infidelity. See Adultery Integration: definition of, 184, 184n; factors accounting for absence of sociocultural integration, 186-87; sociocultural integration theory, 183-89 Intelligence, male superiority in, 21,38 Intercourse. See Sexual intercourse Internalization. See Cultural internalization Introjection, 67-68 Iran, 33, 34, 35 Islam, 28, 29, 30, 31-32, 35-36, 148,156 Israel, 31, 35, 36-37 Italy, 29 Jains, 34,163 James, William, 52 Japan, 18 Java, 17,18, 21, 29, 30, 35, 36 Jay, Robert R., 17 Jews, 34, 99 John Chrysostom, St., 147 Johnson, Harry, 140 Johnson, V E., 158-59n Jorgensen, Valerie, 43 Kafyar, 29,143 Kardiner, Abram, 118n Kelantan, 35 Klein, George S., 51, 80n Kluckhohn, Clyde K., xii Kohler, Wolfgang, 55 Koro (fear of penile shrinkage or retraction), 161-62 Kroeber, A. L., 55 Kroeber, Theodore, 90 La Barre, Weston, xii Langness, L. L., 128n Latin America, 29. See also specific countries Lepowsky, Maria, 138n Levinson, David, xii

Libido: Burmese and Buddhist view of, 21,154-55; insatiable female libido, 22, 25, 35, 39, 153-59; male internalization of beliefs about, 39,153-59; of males, 154-55; psychological preadaptation theory of powerful female libido, 153-59 Linton, Ralph, x, 1 Lloyd, Barbara, xii Lokaniti, 22, 23, 25 Lust of women, 21-22, 24-27, 3337. See also Ideology of the Sexually Dangerous Female; Libido Luther, Martin, 63 Lutkehaus, Nancy, 141 Magic. See Witchcraft and magic Maitreyani Samhita, 31 Malaya, 36,156 Malaysia, 28, 35 Male sexuality. See Penis; Semen; Sexual intercourse Males. See Ideology of the Superior Male Malone, Martin J., xii Manam, 28,141 Mandelbaum, David G., 30 Manu, 31 Maring, 33, 34 Marriage. See Family Martin, Emily, 172n Marxist theory, 45-46, 48, 72-73, 86-87,184-85,184n Masters, William H., 158-59n Masturbation, 27 Mechanism of defense: definition of, 95,100. See also Culturally constituted defense mechanisms; Defense mechanisms Medieval Europe, 28, 31, 33, 35, 36, 38,147 Mehinaku, 33, 34,161 Melanesia, 27, 35,138n Menstrual taboos, 39, 66,167, 170-72,171-72n

INDEX : 217

Menstruation and menstrual blood: comparative perspective on, 34, 42-43; as dangerous, 24, 26, 34, 170,171; Douglas on cultural conceptions of, 167-68n; medical perspective on, 43; men's negative attitude toward, 34, 39; psychoanalytic perspectives on, 42-43; segregation of women during menstrual periods, 171, 172n; taboo against sexual intercourse with menstruating women, 39, 66,167,170-72, 171-72n; unconscious attitudes toward, by women, 42-43; women's negative attitudes toward, 42-43 Mernissi, Fatima, 30 Merton, Robert, 1 Mi Mi Khaing, Daw, 41 Middle East, 12, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35-36, 148, 156, 158, 161 Mills, Mary Beth, 24 Mombasa, 29-30 Monks, Buddhist, 13-14, 21, 41 Moral relativism, xii Morally Dangerous Female. See Ideology of the Morally Dangerous Female Morocco, 28, 35, 148, 156 Mother goddesses, 30 Mother-child relationship, 149-53, 160n, 174n Mothers, veneration of, 30 Mullins, Edwin, 144 Mundurucu, 29, 30 Murdock, George Peter, xii, 158 Murphy, Robert, 146,151,160n Muslim. See Islam Narcissism, 107,108-9, 114-15 Narcissistic anxiety, 108-12,142, 143,144 Narcissistically frustrating beliefs, 107, 108-12

National character, 84n Needs: and desire, 74-78, 83n, 84, 84n; prepositional form of, 91-92 Negeri Sembilan, 28, 35 Nepal, 31,34, 35,42 Neurosis, and repression, 93 Neurotic symptoms, 94, 96, 99, 118-24, 134, 181 New Guinea, 12, 28, 29, 33, 34, 42, 128n, 141 Nigeria, 29,143 North Africa, 33 North America, 161. See also United States Novices. See Cultural novices Obeyesekere, Gananath, 117, 118-34,128n Oedipal stage, 160n, 174n Optional type of directive propositions, 64-66 Orgasm, female, 125-27,157 Oriyas, 170 Ortner, Sherry B., 2,6 Otherness, xi-xii Ouktazaun (female spirits), 24 Overcompensation, 141 Overdetermined, 98 Paduma, 25 Paige, Jeffery M., 171-72n Paige, Karen Ericksen, 170, 171-72n Papua New Guinea, 12. See also New Guinea Paranoia, 124 Parsons, Talcott, 1,8 Patterns of Culture (Benedict), 185 Paul, Robert A., xiii Peasant societies, 29 Penis: belief that females possess a penis, 163; and castration fantasies and anxiety, 160-74,160n, 174n, 176; koro (fear of penile shrinkage or retraction), 161-62;

218 : INDEX

Penis (continued) as noble organ, 20,143,165-66; rejection of, by priestesses in Sri Lanka, 125; Sri Lankan priestess's matted hair as god's penis, 127, 128n; as symbol of male power, 29,173; vulnerable penis, 160-62,166; wedding custom concerning, 39,158 Physically threatening beliefs, 107, 112-14 Piedmont, 33 Pitt-Rivers, Julian, 32 Pleasure principle, 129 Portugal, 29 Postmodernism, ix-xi Postpartum sex taboo, 149 Potency anxiety, 158-59,158-59n Preadaptation theory. See Biological preadaptation; Psychological preadaptation theory Premature ejaculation, 157,162,174 Premenstrual syndrome, 43 Prescriptive type of directive propositions, 65-68 Priestesses of Sri Lanka, 122-35 Private beliefs. See Beliefs Projection, 104,124,180-81 Propositions: definition of, 91. See also Cultural propositions Psychic unity of mankind, xiv, xv, xvi, 144-46 Psychoanalytic theory: of castration fantasies, 160n, 174n; feminist view of, xi; and Little Hans case, 52; of menstruation, 42-43; of repression, 90-92; of wishes, 80-81n. See also Defense mechanisms; Psychological preadaptation theory Psychological defense, 95,100. See also Culturally constituted defense mechanisms; Defense mechanisms Psychological preadaptation theory: classification of types of cultural propositions according to para-

digms of internalization, 70-71; compared with cultural determinist theory, 71-72; compared with Marxist theory, 72; compared with socialization theory, 72-73; comparison of construction of private beliefs with internalization of cultural propositions, 69-70; concept of culture in, 178; of cultural internalization, 48, 55-73,136-77; cultural internalization and cultural reproduction, 177-79; of dangerous vagina, 159-74; of Ideology of the Dangerous Female, 147-74; of Ideology of the Morally Dangerous Female, 147-53; of Ideology of the Sexually Dangerous Female, 153-74; of Ideology of the Superior Male, 141-47; and internalization of descriptive propositions, 59—63; and internalization of directive propositions, 64-68; and internalization of Ideology of the Superior Male, 141-47; methodological observations on, 138; and novices' cultural internalization, 55-57, 177-78; of powerful female libido, 153-59; and typology of cultural propositions, 58-59, 69 Psychopathology: and culturally constituted defense mechanisms, 117-35; neurotic symptoms and culturally constituted defenses, 118-24; psychotic symptoms and culturally constituted defenses, 124-35 Psychotic symptoms, and culturally constituted defense mechanisms, 124-35 Pubic hair, shaving of, 34 Pudenda, shaving of, 34 Purdah,36,156 Rationalistic Tradition. See Western Rationalistic Tradition

INDEX : 219

Rationalization, 87-88,110,149 Reality principle, 129-30 Religious propositions: and inevitability of death, 112-14; internalization of, 61-63; and privately constructed versus culturally constituted defense mechanisms, 115-17. See also Buddhism; Christianity; Hinduism; Islam Repression: criticism of, 93; as defense mechanism, 90-92,100, 101,110-11,114,145,145n, 162; and defense mechanisms of the second type, 96, 98,180-81; Devereux on, 145,145n; and unconscious desires, 85-89; and vicissitudes of unconscious conflict, 92-95 Reproduction. See Cultural reproduction; Social reproduction Rorschach protocols, 18 Sambia, 33, 34, 35,156 Sanday, Peggy R., 29 Sangermano, Vicentius, 157n Sapir, Edward, 1, 2, 8, 9, 55-56 Sarakatsani, 29, 31, 32 Scale of cultural acquisition, 8-9 Schölte, Bob, 186n Schwartz, Theodore, 6n Scientific propositions, internalization of, 60-61 Searle, John, ix Self: culturally constructed self, 6; definition of, 108 Self-esteem, 108-9,144,147 Self-representation, 108 Semen, 27, 39,159,167-68n Seneca, 147 Sentiments, 75-78, 83-84, 83n, 84n, 91-92 Sex taboo, postpartum, 149 Sexual allure of women, 24-27, 159-60. See also Ideology of the Sexually Dangerous Female Sexual frustration of women, 157-58, 157n

Sexual intercourse: anal intercourse, 34; brevity of sex act, 39,156-57, 159,166,174,174n; Buddhism on, 26-27,154-55; child's awareness of parental intercourse, 149; as dangerous, 26-27, 34-35; of exorcists, 39; female orgasm during, 157; male cultural internalization of negative beliefs about, 39; premature ejaculation during, 157, 162,174; taboo against sex with menstruating women, 39, 66,167, 170-72,171-72n Sexuality of men. See Penis; Semen; Sexual intercourse Sexuality of women. See Ideology of the Sexually Dangerous Female; Libido; Lust of women; Menstruation and menstrual blood; Sexual intercourse; Vagina Sexually Dangerous Female. See Ideology of the Sexually Dangerous Female Shamans, 14-15,122-35 Shame cultures, 68n Shan, 33, 34 Sharing of culture, 6-7n Shinsawbu, 13 Shweder, Richard A., xiv Sibling, birth of, 149-50 Social person, 6 Social reproduction, 5-6,105-6 Socialization theory, 46, 48, 72-73, 86-87 Sociocultural integration theory, 183-89 Sorokin, Pitrim A., 184n South America, 12,161. See also specific countries South Asia, 30,158,161 Southeast Asia, 161. See also Burma; and other countries Southern Europe, 22, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33,156 Spain, 17, 28, 29, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36

Spirit cult in Burma, 14-15

220 : INDEX

Spiro, Melford E., 118n Sri Lanka, 29, 30, 31, 34, 36,122-35 Staal, Frits, xii Steele, James, 150 Stephens, William M., 171,171n Sublimation, 106-7n, 126,127 Succubi, 24,131 Supayalat, Queen, 14 Superego, 67 Superior Male. See Ideology of the Superior Male Suppes, Patrick, 90, 91 Swahili, 29-30 Swartz, Marc J., 6n, 8, 58 Taboos, 66 Temptress image of women, 26-27, 36-37. See also Ideology of the Sexually Dangerous Female Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, 37 Thai, 33,34 Thailand, 24, 28, 31, 33, 34, 35 Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), 18,150 Thibaw, King, 14 Tibet, 31 Tiger, Lionel, xii Transference object, 97 Transformation, 95 Treachery of females, 23-24, 27, 31-32, 38. See also Ideology of the Morally Dangerous Female Trobrianders, 35, 36 Unconscious beliefs, 107-14 Unconscious conflict, 92-95 Unconscious desires, 85-89, 102-6 Unconscious motivation, 179-80. See also Culturally constituted defense mechanisms; Defense mechanisms United States, 4, 35, 40, 42, 43, 68n, 125,132,156-57,158,161, 170, 171,186

Vagina: anality associated with, 42; betel nut inserted in, 24; Burmese view of, 20, 26; as dangerous to males, 20, 26, 33-34, 39, 41, 137-38n, 159-74; Douglas on cultural conceptions of, 167-68n; dread of the vagina, 161,161n; female internalization of negative beliefs about, 41-42; as harmful to male's vital powers, 26, 39, 159,164-65,167,169; male internalization of negative beliefs about, 39,159-74; as polluting and repulsive, 20, 26, 34, 41-42,159,163; prohibitions on contact with, 167-71,167-68n, 176; psychological preadaptation theory of dangerous vagina, 159-74; vagina dentata, 163-64, 165 Vagina dentata, 163-64,165 Vaginal discharges, 24, 26,42, 43 Vanatinae, 138n Wallace, Anthony E C., 6n Warren, Hermine, 90, 91 Western Rationalistic Tradition, ix-x White, Douglas R., 158 Whiting, John W. Ni, 118n Whyte, Martin K., 29 "Widow ghosts/' 24 "Will to believe," 52 Wish fulfillment, 94, 96-98,112, 114,133,135,140,181 Wishes, 78-80, 80-82n, 83-84 Witchcraft and magic, 23, 38,44, 102-4,138n World of Burmese Women, The (Mi Mi Khaing), 41 Yeigyi. See Burma Zuni, 34, 42