ABSTRACT
One of the most hoary assumptions of the uniformitarian viewpoint is the belief that a society will fall apart and its members scatter if they are not threaded like beads on a string of common motives. Numerous sources may be quoted which attest to the “common thread” belief. Thus Aberle, Cohen, Davis, Levy, and Sutton, in an essay on the functional prerequisites of a human society, include as prerequisites a “shared, articulated set of goals.” Fromm asserts that a nuclear character structure must be shared by “most members of the same culture” in order for the culture to continue; socialization must make people “want to act as they have to act.” Durkheim’s thesis that society depends for integration upon the “common sentiments” of its members is a similar view. Honigmann expresses the position in the plaintive assertion, “In any community, there must be some congruence between what different people do, believe, and feel, otherwise social order would be impossible.” Margaret Mead has carried the argument to the point where cultural heterogeneity (as, for example, in contemporary United States) is conceived as almost ipso facto pathogenic:
… in a heterogeneous culture, individual life experiences differ so markedly from one another that almost every individual may find the existing cultural forms of expression inadequate to express his peculiar bent, and so be driven into more and more special forms of psychosomatic expression.
From Culture and Personality. Copyright © 1961 by Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the publisher and the author. Anthony F. C. Wallace is Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania.
