Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id NAA16519 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Mon, 15 Jan 2001 13:12:45 GMT User-Agent: Microsoft Outlook Express Macintosh Edition - 5.0 (1513) Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2001 08:09:26 -0500 Subject: Re: DNA Culture .... Trivia? From: William Benzon <bbenzon@mindspring.com> To: <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Message-ID: <B688607F.694E%bbenzon@mindspring.com> In-Reply-To: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D3101745BCA@inchna.stir.ac.uk> Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
on 1/15/01 6:28 AM, Vincent Campbell at v.p.campbell@stir.ac.uk wrote:
> But on what are Freud and Jung basing their schema for explaining
> such behaviour? Their models ,at the very least have been contested, at
> worst have been rejected completely by various threads of contemporary
> psychology. For example, Freud's creation of the Oedipus complex in denial
> of both female sexuality, and widespread child sexual abuse in polite
> Viennese society (so one criticism goes). As for Jung and his collective
> unconscious, nobody really believes that anymore do they? That's not to say
> they haven't played a formative role in psychology and are important
> thinkers to be aware of, but they don't offer genuinely cogent answers to
> these kinds of questions.
Nor does memetics.
Look, I'm not saying accept this old stuff hook line and sinker. But I do
think there's work of value, more in psychoanalysis than in Jung. And, just
as there are thinkers who have rejected psychoanalysis, so there are
thinkers who, for the last 30 years, have been working to reconstruct
psychoanalytic ideas on more modern intellectual foundations derived from
ethology, cognitive psychology, systems theory, and the neurosciences.
>
> <On why some religions are more widespread, etc. you might try
> reading some
>> of the standard literature on the origins of the state, not to mention
>> some
>> standard histories of religion. I'm not terribly interested in this
>> subject, so I can't give you references. But at least some of this surely
>> involves historical conquest. That may not be all there is to it, but it
>> is
>> part of the story.>
>>
> Of course historical conquest is part of the picture, but there's
> more to it than that. For example, Benedict Anderson's famous work on
> nations as 'imagined communities' offers the view that the 'nation' isn't
> something physically measurable, but is a social construction, in which
> symbolism and ritual etc. play a significant part.
Of course nations are social constructions, how could it be otherwise? And
nationalism needs to be studied in much the same way that religion has been.
Anderson's work has been seminal in that regard.
> structuralist work in there, as that's something that has gone kind of out
> of vogue lately, even attracting the ire of some social scientists.
It had pretty much gone out of vogue by the time I published those articles.
They way I see it the humanities and social and psychological sciences have
been drifting for the last 30 years. As such, they have been prone to the
winds of fashion.
Bill B
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