The Tribal Imagination
Civilization and the Savage Mind
-
- 37,99 €
-
- 37,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
We began as savages, and savagery has served us well—it got us where we are. But how do our tribal impulses, still in place and in play, fit in the highly complex, civilized world we inhabit today? This question, raised by thinkers from Freud to Lévi-Strauss, is fully explored in this book by the acclaimed anthropologist Robin Fox. It takes up what he sees as the main—and urgent—task of evolutionary science: not so much to explain what we do, as to explain what we do at our peril.
Ranging from incest and arranged marriage to poetry and myth to human rights and pop icons, Fox sets out to show how a variety of human behaviors reveal traces of their tribal roots, and how this evolutionary past limits our capacity for action. Among the questions he raises: How real is our notion of time? Is there a human “right” to vengeance? Are we democratic by nature? Are cultural studies and fascism cousins under the skin? Is evolutionary history coming to an end—or just getting more interesting? In his famously informative and entertaining fashion, drawing links from Volkswagens to Bartók to Woody Guthrie, from Swinburne to Seinfeld, Fox traces our ongoing struggle to maintain open societies in the face of profoundly tribal human needs—needs which, paradoxically, hold the key to our survival.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An examination of the continuing influence of tribalism on how humans think and behave is by times both fascinating and frustrating. Fox (The Red Lamp of Incest), professor of social theory at Rutgers University, applies our savage instincts to explain a wide variety of phenomena, including Middle Eastern politics, religious sectarianism, the 10 Commandments, poetry, and incest taboos. However, it is in the thesis itself that the trouble lies. The author argues that our notions of "human" and "rights" are historically constituted and relatively recent, yet goes on to essentialize his own view of human nature (tribal and antagonistic to strangers). More worryingly, he implicitly places all of humanity on a simplistic evolutionary scale that sees Western democratic societies at the top. The attempt to view so many dimensions of culture and politics through the lenses of an atavistic tribalism oversimplifies, doing little justice to the richness and variety of both the contemporary world and the author's own eclectic interests.