Mind, Body and Culture:
Anthropology and the Biological Interface
Geoffrey Samuel
Description
In
this book, Geoffrey Samuel is concerned with the aspects of human behaviour
which have been traditionally described as cultural or social. Are culture,
society and similar concepts from anthropology and sociology of any real sense
in making sense of human social life? How can we understand the relationship
between the social group and the individual human beings, with their self-awareness
and sense of personal identity, who make it up? Drawing on his background in
physics, Samuel suggests a scientific approach involving a reconceptualization
of many of the concepts we take for granted. The multimodal framework, or MMF,
derives from this approach. It incorporates many of the insights of social and
cultural anthropology, particularly the work of Gregory Bateson and Victor Turner,
as well as being influenced by recent developments in the philosophy of science
and related fields.
Samuel uses the multimodal
framework to analyse ethnographic material drawn from a range of societies.
He demonstrates how human populations differ both in the kinds of patterning
of interpersonal behaviour which prevail, and in the ways in which patterns
are manipulated and transformed.
Finally, the book considers
some of the implications of the MMF for biological approaches, and focuses on
questions of brain structure and on evolutionary explanations for human social
behaviour.
Reviews
of Mind, Body and Culture
A brief
introduction to some of the ideas in Mind, Body and Culture
Contents
Chapter 1. New paradigms
and modal states
Chapter 2. A natural science
of society
Chapter 3. Starting points
I
Chapter 4. Starting points
II
Chapter 5. Interpreting
the flow
Chapter 6. The multimodal
framework
Chapter 7. The Ndembu modal
state repertoire
Chapter 8. Sociocentric
modal states
Chapter 9. Shamanic mechanisms
Chapter 10. The growth of
the clerical approach
Chapter 11. Technical and
transformational mechanisms
Chapter 12. Mind, body and
culture
Publication Details
Mind, Body and Culture:
Anthropology and the Biological Interface. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
and New York, 1990.. xii + 192pp. (ISBN 0-521-37411-1)
Purchasing Information
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