ABSTRACT
American cultural anthropology of the Culture and Personality school, which, whether strictly speaking psychoanalytic or not, accepted the causal importance of childhood and unconscious determinants in behavior and in cultural and social phenomena. The author showed how a few specifiable logical dilemmas arising from this situation gave rise to a vast array of symbolic expressions in Tibetan culture, each very different on the surface but similar in representing transformations of the same underlying dynamics. The ecology demands a certain economic adaptation-tropical horticulture combined with hunting and war-which in turn leads to a particular social institution-the strongly gendered division of labor-at the level of primary institutions. Spiro’s analysis, whereby cultural variation coexists with human universals, suggests an analogy with Chomskyan linguistics, according to which existing languages, where they are certainly very different from one another, are nonetheless different “surface” manifestations of a universal “deep structure.”.
