“Culture” Crosses the Atlantic: The German Sources of The Mind of Primitive Man

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry Liebersohn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Research University ◽  
The United States ◽  
Intellectual Style ◽  
German Research ◽  
The Mind

This chapter explores the Franz Boas's German sources and how he used them, focusing on his book The Mind of Primitive Man. Boas was a proud graduate of the German research university, and after his move to the United States he continued to practice its virtues and its emphasis on detailed empirical research and methodological self-consciousness. His intellectual friendship with Carl Stumpf, a prewar Berlin professor, also underlines the intellectual style of a time and place. The chapter further argues that in Boas's anthropology, culture became a fluid, historical concept, relatively autonomous but open to new elements and reconfiguration. In the end, it was Boas, not Stumpf or his colleagues in the superbly knowledgeable and cultivated universities of prewar Germany, who became the founder of the modern study of culture.

The Challenge of Limits

1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Garrett Hardin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Waste Disposal ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Financial Support ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Population ◽  
Human History ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
Earth Day ◽  
The Mind

A funny thing happened on the way to the second nationwide Earth Day in 1990. Twenty years earlier the first Earth Day had been saluted with much talk about population problems. At that time world population stood at 3.6 billion. But when the second Earth Day rolled around, the topic of population was almost completely ignored. Was that because world population had stopped growing? Hardly: in the intervening two decades it had increased 47 percent to an estimated 5.3 billion— an increase of 1.7 billion (more than six times the present population of the United States). Common sense tells us that the per capita share of environmental riches must decrease as population numbers increase, and waste disposal necessarily becomes an ever greater problem. Of course common sense is sometimes wrong. But if that is so in this instance, the celebrants of the 1990 Earth Day should have been shouting, "We've found the secret of perpetual growth!" A few incurable optimists did defend this position, but most people lumped their claims with those of the flat earthers, ignoring both. The celebrants were generally silent about the 47 percent increase in population. Why? The answer comes in two parts, the first being historical. It is now known that the planners of Earth Day 1990 were under economic pressure to leave population out of the picture. When directors of philanthropic foundations and business concerns were solicited for financial support they let it be known that they would not look kindly on a population emphasis. Money talks, silence can be bought. (Why the bankrollers shied at population will become clear later.) The second aspect of the answer is more subtle. It has long been recognized that some of our most deeply held views are not neat, precise propositions but broadly "global" attitudes that act as the gatekeepers of the mind, letting in only those propositions that do not challenge the dominant picture of reality. Germans call such gatekeeper attitudes Weltanschauungen, an impressive mouthful that is quite adequately translated as "worldviews." For all but the last few hundred years of human history the dominant worldview was a limited view: resources were limited, human nature was fixed, and spending beyond one's income was a sin. This essentially conservative perception prevailed until about 1600.

Celebrity and Presidential Targets

Stalking ◽  
2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert T. M. Phillips
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Local Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Officials ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Figures ◽  
Celebrity Status ◽  
The Status ◽  
Unique Factor ◽  
The Mind

Celebrities have become targets of potentially violent stalkers who instill fear by their relentless pursuit and, in some reported cases, threatened risk of violence. Celebrity stalking may evolve to planned, often violent attacks on intentionally selected targets. The causes of these incidents are complex, and frequently involve delusional obsessions concerning a contrived relationship between the target and stalker. Similar dynamics can be at play for presidential stalkers. Becoming the focus of someone’s delusional obsession is a risk for anyone living in the public eye. Planned attacks by stalkers, however, are not confined to internationally prominent public officials and celebrities. Some of the same themes emerge on a more local level when public figures become the object of pursuit. Celebrity and presidential stalkers often do not neatly fit any of the typologies that have evolved to codify our understanding of the motivation and special characteristics of stalking. Clinicians are often unaware of a “zone of risk” that extends beyond the delusional love object and can lead to the injury of others in addition to the attempted or accomplished homicide of a celebrity or presidential target. Most people can resist the temptation to intrude on a celebrity’s privacy—celebrity stalkers do not. This chapter explores celebrity status, as seen by the public and in the mind of the would-be assailant, as a unique factor in stalking cases that raises issues of clinical relevance and unique typologies. Special attention is given to the behaviors and motivations of individuals who have stalked the presidents of the United States. Many celebrities become targets of stalkers who relentlessly pursue and frighten them and who, in some cases, threaten violence. Though each case of celebrity stalking is unique and complex, such incidents frequently involve delusional obsessions concerning the contrived relationship between the stalker and victim. Stalking is not confined solely to well-known figures, of course. However, it is the very nature of celebrity—the status and the visibility—that attracts the benign (if voyeuristic) attention of an adoring public and the ominous interest of the stalker. Obsessional following of celebrities is not a new phenomenon in the United States.

The iron fist in the velvet glove? Testing the militarization/community policing paradox

2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy M Koslicki ◽  
Dale Willits
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Community Policing ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Control ◽  
Military Equipment ◽  
Military Vehicles ◽  
The Face ◽  
Societal Changes ◽  
Equipment Acquisition

A number of police militarization scholars have explored the paradox of the simultaneous emergence of community policing and militarism in the United States. Several researchers have suggested that police militarization and community policing may be cohesive strategies of state control, with community policing being the “velvet glove” that wraps the “iron fist” of militarization in palatable rhetoric. Alternatively, it has been suggested that these two policing strategies are incoherent, having emerged as a result of the state’s disorganized attempts to maintain control in the face of significant societal changes. To date, little research has examined the link between community policing and police militarization specifically. This study uses community policing data from the 2013 LEMAS survey to examine variation in military equipment acquisition data from the Department of Defense’s 1033 Program between the years 2012 and 2014. Results show that departments engaging in certain community policing activities are significantly less likely to acquire general military equipment, firearms, and military vehicles. These findings suggest that these policing strategies are not necessarily coherent and potentially support the argument that community policing efforts can buffer militarization. However, these results also highlight the need for more empirical research on existing theories of militarization, as well as the causes and effects of police militarism and community policing activities.

Disarmament

1927 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-39
Author(s):  
Tasker H. Bliss
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Abstract Reasoning ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Slow Process ◽  
Analytical Reasoning ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Intense Activity ◽  
The Mind

These two careful and elaborate studies of the problem of disarmament have attracted wide attention among its students in Europe and the United States. Both have appeared in the year in which probably more definite thought than ever before has been given to the subject by men earnestly striving to find the entrance to some path that may lead to the solution. These volumes plainly show that the writers—than whom no one can have thought more deeply—are convinced that it is not a problem for abstract reasoning. It is not like an equation in mathematics where the application of definite rules leads to one exact conclusion. In such a problem, if there are unknown factors, they are inert things; they are subjected, without evoking protest, to any sort of torturing process of analytical reasoning to determine their value, and that being done the problem is solved. But in this other problem the factors are living, sentient things; human beings acting of themselves in the mass or under the influence of individuals; swayed by every sentiment of the mind, fear, suspicion, greed, ambition, and by the highest and purest as well; sentiments perhaps dormant at one time, at another in intense activity, sometimes thinking and reasoning and again appearing as a wild outburst of senseless passion, and at all times subject to direction towards purposes good or ill according to the character of some guiding mind. No wonder that so many think it a waste of time to study the problem at all while, at the best, it seems to be one the solution of which can be arrived at only by a long slow process of empiricism.

Science, technology and education: England in 1870. The Wilkins Lecture, 1976

1977 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-90 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Power Structure ◽  
The United States ◽  
Railway Line ◽  
Science Technology ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind ◽  
History Books

My lecture is about the diffusion of science and technology, through education, into the culture and economy of a society. As the journal Nature wrote early in 1870, ‘Education and science so naturally associate themselves in the mind that it is hardly possible to discuss the latter as independent of the former’. Here historians of science find common territory with economic and social historians, political historians, historians of education and with some eminent scientists; Lord Ashby has been a notable pioneer in the subject. Why 1870? Because it is one of the dates which form natural breaks in history books. Momentous upheavals were occurring in the power structure of the world. The Franco-Prussian War in 1870, so short, yet so far-reaching in its consequences, was followed by the unification of Germany. Italy too was unified in 1870. Japan had thrown off feudalism. The United States had just emerged from the Civil War, its unity symbolized by the opening of the first railway line linking the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans

scholarly journals Attitudes Towards Self-change: A Comparison of Japanese and American University Students

1995 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 577-593 ◽  
Author(s):  
David S. Crystal ◽  
Kazuo Kato ◽  
Sheryl Olson ◽  
Hirozumi Watanabe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
College Students ◽  
Academic Achievement ◽  
University Students ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Self Control ◽  
American University

This study examined attitudes related to the possibility of changing cognitions and behaviours among samples of college students in the United States and Japan. Students were asked to identify three things about themselves that they wanted to change, the method they would use to effect these changes, how difficult they thought making such changes would be, and how much they desired to make the changes. Japanese and US students differed significantly in the frequency with which they mentioned all seven aspects of the self that were targeted for change. Students in the United States expressed a desire to improve their sociability, academic achievement and cognitive abilities, physical appearance, and sense of individuality. Students in Japan were most concerned about enhancing their relationships with others, self-control and motivation, and ability to manage practical affairs. In addition, US respondents were more likely than their Japanese counterparts to use behaviour-oriented strategies, to believe it was easy to make self-changes, and to indicate a strong desire to improve the self. The findings are discussed in the context of theories describing different cultural construals of self, and of empirical research on differences between collectivistic and individualistic cultures.

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