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National Character Studies
National character studies is a set of anthropological studies conducted during and immediately after World War II. This involves the identification of people, ethnicity, and races according to specific, indomitable cultural characteristics. History National character studies arose from a variety of approaches with Culture and Personality, including the configurationalist approach of Edward Sapir and Ruth Benedict, the basic personality structure developed by Ralph Linton and Abram Kardiner, and the modal personality approach of Cora Du Bois. These approaches disagreed with each other on the exact relationship between personality and culture. The configurationalist and basic approaches both treated personalities within a culture as relatively homogeneous, while Cora Du Bois argued that there are no common personality traits found in every single member of a society. Examples of national character studies in America include those undertaken to differentiate the Japanese charac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cultural Anthropology
Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of a posited anthropological constant. The term sociocultural anthropology includes both cultural and social anthropology traditions. Anthropologists have pointed out that through culture, people can adapt to their environment in non-genetic ways, so people living in different environments will often have different cultures. Much of anthropological theory has originated in an appreciation of and interest in the tension between the local (particular cultures) and the global (a universal human nature, or the web of connections between people in distinct places/circumstances). Cultural anthropology has a rich methodology, including participant observation (often called fieldwork because it requires the anthropologist spending an extended period of time at the research location), inter ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Geoffrey Gorer
Geoffrey Edgar Solomon Gorer (26 March 1905 – 24 May 1985) was an English anthropologist and writer, noted for his application of psychoanalytic techniques to anthropology. Biography Born into a non-practising Jewish family, Gorer was educated at Charterhouse and at Jesus College, Cambridge. During the 1930s, he wrote unpublished fiction and drama. His first book was ''The Revolutionary Ideas of the Marquis de Sade'' (1934, revised in 1953 and again in 1964 as ''The Life and Ideas of the Marquis de Sade''). He then published an account of a journey he made following Féral Benga in Africa, entitled ''Africa Dances'' (1935, new editions 1945: Penguin, 1949, 1962; Eland 2003), which was a considerable success and proved to be a springboard for a career as a writer and anthropologist. After ''Africa Dances'', his career was advanced by the publishers and anthropologists now taking a keen interest in his well-regarded work. Another cultural study followed: ''Bali and Angkor, or ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Seny
(; from Proto-Germanic ) is a form of ancestral Catalan wisdom or sensibleness. It involves well-pondered perception of situations, level-headedness, awareness, integrity, and right action: "a kind of refined good sense and self-realisation." The opposite of is known as (), "impetuosity or capriciousness". Cultural significance Many Catalans consider as something unique to their culture, a true Catalan symbol. , as a distinctive feature of Catalan society, is grounded in a set of ancestral local customs that reflect the value system and social norms of traditional rural Catalonia. The values of were transmitted from generation to generation without much change by the exemplary behaviour of the elder members of the family, as well as in the form of aphorisms and moral stories. The latter were largely based on Christian values, and their examples and illustrations often included animals and plants that were common in rural Catalonia. This oral lore caught the attention of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nihonjinron
''Nihonjinron'' (: ''treatises on Japaneseness'') is a genre of ethnocentric nationalist literary work that focuses on issues of Japanese national and cultural identity. ''Nihonjinron'' posits concepts such as Japanese being a "unique isolate, having no known affinities with any other race", and has been described as racist. ''Nihonjinron'' literature flourished during a publishing boom after World War II with books and articles aiming to analyze, explain, or explore Japanese culture and cultural mindset. History Hiroshi Minami traces the origin of nihonjinron to before the Edo period. The roots of the nihonjinron be traced back at least to the ("national studies") movement of the 18th century, with themes that are not dissimilar to those in the post-war nihonjinron. Kokugaku Kokugaku, beginning as a scholarly investigation into the philology of Japan's early classical literature, sought to recover and evaluate these texts, some of which were obscure and difficult to read ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nationalism
Nationalism is an idea or movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the state. As a movement, it presupposes the existence and tends to promote the interests of a particular nation, Smith, Anthony. ''Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History''. Polity, 2010. pp. 9, 25–30; especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining its sovereignty ( self-governance) over its perceived homeland to create a nation-state. It holds that each nation should govern itself, free from outside interference (self-determination), that a nation is a natural and ideal basis for a polity, and that the nation is the only rightful source of political power. It further aims to build and maintain a single national identity, based on a combination of shared social characteristics such as culture, ethnicity, geographic location, language, politics (or the government), religion, traditions and belief in a shared singular history, and to promote national unity or solidarity. There are ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978) was an American cultural anthropologist, author and speaker, who appeared frequently in the mass media during the 1960s and the 1970s. She earned her bachelor's degree at Barnard College of Columbia University and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia. Mead served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975. Mead was a communicator of anthropology in modern American and Western culture and was often controversial as an academic. Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960s sexual revolution. She was a proponent of broadening sexual conventions within the context of Western cultural traditions. Early life and education Margaret Mead, the first of five children, was born in Philadelphia but raised in nearby Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Her father, Edward Sherwood Mead, was a professor of finance at th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ethnic Stereotype
An ethnic stereotype or racial stereotype involves part of a system of beliefs about typical characteristics of members of a given ethnic group, their status, societal and cultural norms. A national stereotype does the same for a given nationality. Stereotyping is typically associated with racism, and may also be used for humor in jokes. National stereotypes may relate either to one's own ethnicity/nationality or to a foreign/differing one. Stereotypes about one's own nation may aid in maintaining a national identity due to a collective relatability to a trait or characteristic, referred to as national character. Examples According to an article by ''The Guardian'' titled "European Stereotypes: What Do We Think of Each Other and Are We Right?", the Europe stereotype towards Britain is as " drunken, semi-clad hooligans or else snobbish, stiff free marketers", their view towards France is "cowardly, arrogant, chauvinistic, erotomaniacs", and they see Germany as "ruddy-face ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cultural Determinism
Cultural determinism is the belief that the culture in which we are raised determines who we are at emotional and behavioral levels. It contrasts with genetic determinism, the theory that biologically inherited traits and the environmental influences that affect those traits dominate who we are. Yet another way of looking at the concept of cultural determinism is to contrast it with the idea of environmental determinism. The latter is the idea that the physical world- with all its constraints and potentially life-altering elements-is responsible for the make-up of each existing culture. Contrast this with the idea that we (humans) create our own situations through the power of thought, socialization, and all forms of information circulation. It is also used to describe the concept that culture determines economic and political arrangements. It is an idea which has recurred in many cultures over human history, from ancient civilizations through the present. Cultural determinis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Collective Memory
Collective memory is the shared pool of memories, knowledge and information of a social group that is significantly associated with the group's identity. The English phrase "collective memory" and the equivalent French phrase "la mémoire collective" appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century. The philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs analyzed and advanced the concept of the collective memory in the book ''Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire'' (1925). Collective memory can be constructed, shared, and passed on by large and small social groups. Examples of these groups can include nations, generations, communities, among others. Collective memory has been a topic of interest and research across a number of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, history, philosophy, and anthropology. Conceptualization of collective memory Attributes of collective memory Collective memory has been conceptualized in several ways and proposed to have certain attributes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edward Sapir
Edward Sapir (; January 26, 1884 – February 4, 1939) was an American anthropologist-linguistics, linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the development of the discipline of linguistics in the United States. Sapir was born in German Empire, German Pomerania, in what is now northern Poland. His family emigrated to the United States of America when he was a child. He studied Germanic linguistics at Columbia University, Columbia, where he came under the influence of Franz Boas, who inspired him to work on Indigenous languages of the Americas, Native American languages. While finishing his Ph.D. he went to University of California, Berkeley, California to work with Alfred Kroeber documenting the indigenous languages there. He was employed by the Geological Survey of Canada for fifteen years, where he came into his own as one of the most significant linguists in North America, the other being Leonard Bloomfield. He was offered a professorship at ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edward Tylor
Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (2 October 18322 January 1917) was an English anthropologist, and professor of anthropology. Tylor's ideas typify 19th-century cultural evolutionism. In his works '' Primitive Culture'' (1871) and ''Anthropology'' (1881), he defined the context of the scientific study of anthropology, based on the evolutionary theories of Charles Lyell. He believed that there was a functional basis for the development of society and religion, which he determined was universal. Tylor maintained that all societies passed through three basic stages of development: from savagery, through barbarism to civilization. Tylor is a founding figure of the science of social anthropology, and his scholarly works helped to build the discipline of anthropology in the nineteenth century.Paul Bohannan, ''Social Anthropology'' (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969) He believed that "research into the history and prehistory of man ..could be used as a basis for the reform of Brit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
