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Clifford Geertz, one of the most influential thinkers of our time, here discusses some of the most urgent issues facing intellectuals today. In this collection of personal and revealing essays, he explores the nature of his anthropological work in relation to a broader public, serving as the foremost spokesperson of his generation of scholars, those who came of age after World War II. His reflections are written in a style that both entertains and disconcerts, as they engage us in topics ranging from moral relativism to the relationship between cultural and psychological differences, from the diversity and tension among activist faiths to \"ethnic conflict\" in today's politics. Geertz, who once considered a career in philosophy, begins by explaining how he got swept into the revolutionary movement of symbolic anthropology. At that point, his work began to encompass not only the ethnography of groups in Southeast Asia and North Africa, but also the study of how meaning is made in all cultures--or, to use his phrase, to explore the \"frames of meaning\" in which people everywhere live out their lives. His philosophical orientation helped him to establish the role of anthropology within broader intellectual circles and led him to address the work of such leading thinkers as Charles Taylor, Thomas Kuhn, William James, and Jerome Bruner. In this volume, Geertz comments on their work as he explores questions in political philosophy, psychology, and religion that have intrigued him throughout his career but that now hold particular relevance in light of postmodernist thinking and multiculturalism.Available Lightoffers insightful discussions of concepts such as nation, identity, country, and self, with a reminder that like symbols in general, their meanings are not categorically fixed but grow and change through time and place. This book treats the reader to an analysis of the American intellectual climate by someone who did much to shape it. One can read Available Light both for its revelation of public culture in its dynamic, evolving forms and for the story it tells about the remarkable adventures of an innovator during the \"golden years\" of American academia.

Pyschological anthropology is a vital area of contemporary social science, and one of the field's most important and innovative thinkers is Melford E. Spiro. This volume brings together sixteen essays that review Spiro's theoretical insights and extend them into new areas. The essays center on several general problems: In what ways is it meaningful to speak of a social act as having "functions"? What elements and processes of human personality are universal, and why? What is the relationship between religion and personality? Why? What are the pyschological underpinnings of social manipulation?

Is there a Buddhist discourse on sex? In this innovative study, Bernard Faure reveals Buddhism's paradoxical attitudes toward sexuality. His remarkably broad range covers the entire geography of this religion, and its long evolution from the time of its founder, Xvkyamuni, to the premodern age. The author's anthropological approach uncovers the inherent discrepancies between the normative teachings of Buddhism and what its followers practice. Framing his discussion on some of the most prominent Western thinkers of sexuality--Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault--Faure draws from different reservoirs of writings, such as the orthodox and heterodox \"doctrines\" of Buddhism, and its monastic codes. Virtually untapped mythological as well as legal sources are also used. The dialectics inherent in Mahvyvna Buddhism, in particular in the Tantric and Chan/Zen traditions, seemed to allow for greater laxity and even encouraged breaking of taboos. Faure also offers a history of Buddhist monastic life, which has been buffeted by anticlerical attitudes, and by attempts to regulate sexual behavior from both within and beyond the monastery. In two chapters devoted to Buddhist homosexuality, he examines the way in which this sexual behavior was simultaneously condemned and idealized in medieval Japan. This book will appeal especially to those interested in the cultural history of Buddhism and in premodern Japanese culture. But the story of how one of the world's oldest religions has faced one of life's greatest problems makes fascinating reading for all.

Anthropologists Melford Spiro & Catherine Lutz developed opposite perspectives on cultural cognition & depth psychology, both while doing fieldwork in the Pacific atoll of Ifaluk. Spiro (1950) took a psychoanalytic approach in which discourse processes filtered through the unconscious were trivialized & ethnocentric assumptions were made about cultural practices as responses to unconscious conflict. From her cognitive perspective, Lutz (1988) reduced motivation to environmental pressures & the distribution of power, & emotions were never deeply experienced. A reanalysis of the Ifaluk cultural material is presented here, leading to a synthesis of the cultural cognition & psychoanalytic perspectives. The synthesis involves the assumption of a repertoire of interpersonal schemas with archaic components from childhood. It posits that ambivalence in relationships is a dynamic motivator within cultural schemas, especially those with emotional undertones of compassion or justifiable anger. The synthesis is tested on the Ifaluk case of spiritual beliefs. 16 References. M. Pflum

Considers the issue of cultural relativism in the context of native anthropology & the challenge to conventional cultural anthropology posed by experimental ethnographers. The issue of relativism is traced in the literature through the writings of Benjamin Whorf (1939), Franz Boas (1940), Clifford Geertz (1984 [see abstract 8504092]), & Melford Spiro (1986). In the 1980s, Geertz advocated the relativist's position, while Spiro defended the thesis that there exist universal moral & cognitive grounds above & beyond any particular culture. Efforts by experimental anthropologists such as Jim Clifford (1986) are described as seeking to move beyond this debate by proposing a form of modified relativism. However, these efforts are criticized for neglecting the situation of the native anthropologists & implicitly assuming a white male identity for the typical anthropologist. Mikhail Bakhtin's (1981) model of language is drawn on to unsettle the conventional dichotomies between relativism & universalism, subject & object, native & nonnative that appear in most cultural anthropological work. D. M. Smith

Gender Ideology and Psychological Reality: An Essay on Cultural Reproduction. Melford E. Spiro. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. 220 pp.