ABSTRACT
First proposition: the structure of personality is very dependent on the characteristic culture of a particular society, by culture it being understood the fundamental value system of that society. Thus, according to Kardiner, there is a ‘basic personality’ corresponding to each socio-cultural society. ‘Ego is a cultural precipitate’, he wrote. According to McClelland, certain societies give a supreme value to achievement (a concept which signifies simultaneously performance and success, which we generally talk about as accomplishment). In these societies, the need for achievement tends to be a fundamental component of the personalities of the members who belong to it. As a corollary to this first proposition, culturalists tend to accord a decisive role to the socialization by which the fundamental values of a society are transmitted from one generation to another in their analyses of social systems. Second proposition: each society tends to constitute a single cultural totality. Societies which are similar from the point of view of their degree of economic development can be, as common sense and immediate experience tend to admit, profoundly different from a cultural viewpoint. The Germans are culturally different from the English; as Linton remarks, a traveller who, disembarking in Norway, asks a porter to change a banknote is almost certain to see the porter return with the change. In Italy, he is almost certain never to see it again. Third proposition, which completes the above: the value system of societies tends to be characterized by the dominant or modal values (which does not exclude, to use Kluckhohn’s terminology, the existence of deviating values and variable values). Thus, according to Ruth Benedict, the Zunis of New Mexico attach vital importance to the measure, harmony, and unity of man with the universe: they constitute an Apollonian society. The Kwakuitl of the northwest coast of America are, conversely, immersed in a climate of constant competition where everyone tries to demonstrate their superiority, and to beat their competitors, possibly by violence: they constitute a Dionysian society. For Parsons, Americans attach more importance to ‘achievement’ and less to the ‘maintenance of cultural models’ than do the Germans. According to Margaret Mead, ‘Americans see the world as a vast malleable space, controlled by man, in which one builds what one wishes…. The important sentiment is to be able to control the environment’ (Anthropology: A Human Science, p. 123). For the English, the world is a ‘natural place to which man adapts himself, within which he does not attribute to himself any control over the future, but only the foresight of experience of the cultivator or gardener…. Man is seen as the minor associate of God’. Fourth proposition: the culture of a society tends to organize itself in a collection of coherent, mutually complementary elements: ‘the second ambition of anthropology is totality. It sees social life as a system of which all aspects are organically connected,’ writes LéviStrauss (whom one would not class as an anthropologist, but who does not differ from them on that point) in Structural Anthropology, p. 399. This proposition is
illustrated by Benedict’s attempt to sift out patterns of culture and to classify them. Fifth proposition: man lives in a symbolic universe created by himself. All reality is symbolic to him. Judgements, evaluations, and perceptions are all relative to the cultural system to which he belongs. According to Herskovits, who mirrors Cassirer on this point, all ‘reality’ being perceived through a cultural system, culture is the measure of everything.
