Theories of Culture

Arnold Groh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138668669
• eBook ISBN: 9781317211310
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This authoritative but concise guide describes the most significant cultural theories from the 19th to the 21st century and their originators, as well as the links between them and their mutual influences.

This guide explores ideas around what culture is, when and why cultures change over time and whether there are any rules or principles behind culture-related phenomena and processes. For those seeking to answer questions on culture, familiarity with these topics is essential. From refugee movements caused by wars, to the ongoing demographical changes in regions of the world like sub-Saharan Africa or the Indian subcontinent, understanding the underlying mechanisms of culture-related processes has become an immediate and essential task. Covering everything from the processes of cultural change to counterculture and destabilisation, the book explains different ideas in a clear and objective fashion and includes approaches that have been unduly neglected but which have high explanatory value regarding culture and its phenomena.

Providing readers with an up-to-date idea of what culture is, and how our understanding of it has been established over the past century, this text is the perfect companion for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers.

Chapter 1

Views from a distance

Freud’s (1913c) Totem and Taboo can be claimed to be the first attempt in modern times to formulate a comprehensive theory of culture, construing the origin of culture to Darwin’s Origin of Species. However, we have to take later criticism into consideration, as well as the disillusioned view that Freud himself (1930) later took on culture. Critical perspectives were also taken by other authors who described European culture from a virtually external point of view. Places like the South Pacific became a projection screen for alternative drafts of paradise-like places that contrasted sharply with the accelerating lifestyle of the industrial culture. Under the influence of her mentor Franz Boas, Margaret Mead wrote her Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), which very strongly influenced 20th century pedagogics and had a long-lasting impact on social sciences and educational policies. However, Freeman (1983) challenged Mead’s (1928) work as an ‘anthropological myth’.

1.1 Totem and Taboo (Freud)

Sigmund Freud

Born on 6 March or May 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia, which then belonged to Austria-Hungary (now Přibor, Czech Republic), as Sigismund Schlomo Freud.

In 1860, the Freud family moved to Vienna.

From 1873 to 1881, Sigmund Freud was a student of medicine at the University of Vienna. During this time, from 1876 to 1882, he had a research job at the Vienna Physiological Institute in the laboratory of Ernst Wilhelm Ritter von Brücke, interrupted in 1879 by his one-year military service.

In 1881, Freud became doctor of medicine, and from 1882 to 1885, he worked in the Vienna General Hospital, where he participated in research on cocaine as an analgesic.

In 1885, he did his habilitation (postdoctoral qualification) at the University of Vienna’s Institute of Neuropathology and subsequently became Privatdozent (Associate Professor) from 1885, lasting 17 years.

In 1885 and 1886, Freud was also a student of Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893) at the Salpêtrière Psychiatric Hospital in Paris. Charcot worked with women who had been diagnosed with hysteria without any organic findings. Freud then translated Charcot’s works into German.

In 1886, he opened a private neurological practice in Vienna, and he married Martha Bernays, from Hamburg. They were to have six children. The last of them, born in 1895, was Anna Freud (1895–1982), who later became a well-known psychoanalyst.

In 1902, Sigmund Freud became extraordinary professor of neuropathology at the University of Vienna, where 17 years later, he became ordinary titular professor.

Freud, a heavy smoker, developed oral cancer in 1922, so that in the following year, his right jaw and gum had to be removed and replaced by a mechanical prosthesis. In the remaining years of his life, he underwent more than 30 further operations, without giving up his cigars.

In 1930, he was awarded the Goethepreis of the city Frankfurt am Main, despite protests from anti-Semitic organisations. Three years later, Freud’s works were among the books burned by the Nazis.

The British Royal Society of Medicine made Freud an honorary member in 1935. Three years later, he emigrated to London with his family to escape persecution by the Nazis.

On 23 September 1939, two days after his doctor, Max Schur, had sedated him with a morphine injection, followed by a second one 12 hours later, Sigmund Freud died in London. He had suffered from severe pain after undergoing another operation and radiotherapy. The first injection had put him to sleep, and the second had put him into a coma, from which he eventually died.

Sources:

www.explorepsychology.com/sigmund-freud-born/

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud

www.dhm.de/lemo/biografie/sigmund-freud

www.munzinger.de/search/portrait/sigmund+freud/0/1039.html

Lohmann (2004). Sigmund Freud. Reinbek bei Hamburg: rororo/Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag.

Schmidbauer (2013). Der Mensch Sigmund Freud – Ein seelisch verwundeter Arzt? Hamburg: Edel eBooks.

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939).

Source: By Max Halberstadt.

Sigismund Schlomo Freud was the first son of Kallamon Jacob Freud¹ and Amalia, née Nathanson. It was Jacob’s third marriage. Amalia was only 20 years old when she gave birth to Sigmund, while Jacob, who had a son and a daughter from a former marriage, was already 40 years old. After Sigmund, Jacob and Amalia had seven more children. It is important to know this family constellation in order to understand Freud’s personal context that influenced his theoretical work.

Sigmund Freud had a nanny, and his stepbrothers were his mother’s age. He later reported (in a footnote added to the 1924 edition of Freud, 1901) that, as a child, he had suspected, regarding the origin of his little sister, that one of his stepbrothers had put the baby in his mother’s womb.

In contrast to today’s standards of scientific methodology, Freud did not cautiously handle his own, personal experiences, feelings and ways of seeing things as subjective, but he deduced constructs and theories from them, for which he claimed general validity. For example, he took an infantile affection for the mother with simultaneous jealousy towards the father for granted and as universal, and based on this perspective, he formulated his concept of the Oedipus complex.

Freud’s idea on the origin of culture

Totem and Taboo was Freud’s first cultural-theoretical work, in which he focused on civilisation, society and religion. The title itself might be somewhat vague, but the book has a subtitle which gives a better understanding of Freud’s intentions: Some Points of Agreement Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. And this is exactly what Freud tried to work out with this text. What later became a book was actually a series of articles at first. These articles were originally published in the journal Imago in 1912 and 1913. One could assume that at this time, immediately before the onset of the First World War, there was a feeling in Europe that European culture was in its prime, as it was connected with the worldwide expansion of European power and colonial prosperity. This perspective, implicitly taken in Totem and Taboo, might explain why it became such a success. One thing that becomes apparent to the readership is Freud’s belief that European culture was the best, and that all other cultures were, and should be, inferior to it. Freud (1913c) writes about indigenous peoples as ‘the most backward and miserable of savages, […] these poor, naked cannibals’ (p. 2), comparing the ways they live with the features of a neurosis, as it was defined as a mental disorder in his own society. Yet, his book was not seen as inappropriate by other intellectuals. Rather, it was acknowledged as an explanation of cultural evolution for a long time.

Let us have a look at the theoretical ingredients of Totem and Taboo. Freud referred to theories of different research disciplines such as anthropology, ethnology, biology, history of religions and psychoanalysis. Altogether, Totem and Taboo consists of four essays. Freud had never carried out any studies in indigenous contexts himself, but he was apparently inspired to write these essays through treatises of other researchers, especially of social anthropology. He received particular insights from Wilhelm Wundt’s (1912) thoughts about a Völkerpsychologie (ethnic psychology), Sir Edward Burnett Tylor’s (1871) cultural evolutionist view on Primitive Cultures and William Robertson Smith’s (1894) book on the Religion of the Semites. W. R. Smith, by the way, was not only a friend of James George Frazer, but he even provided the central idea of a slain god for Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), to which Freud (1913c) refers extensively. Wundt’s particular contribution found in Totem and Taboo is the aspect of taboos being humankind’s oldest form of behaviour rules, and a central aspect of Tylor’s work is that of animism being the initial belief of humankind, which is the belief that spirits exist in plants, animals, rocks or other objects in the environment.

But there was also another motivation for Sigmund Freud to write Totem and Taboo. In the preface, Freud (1913c) mentions one of Carl Gustav Jung’s works, which had encouraged him to write the four essays. It is worth taking a closer look at that. The work of C. G. Jung, to which Freud referred, was later published in English under the title Psychology of the Unconscious (1916), with only the subtitle, A study of the transformations and symbolisms of the libido, a contribution to the history of the evolution of thought, clarifying what this conveys.² This work was Jung’s critique of Freud’s primarily sexual conceptualisation of libido. The first part was published in the psychoanalytic and psychopathological yearbook of which Eugen Bleuler and Sigmund Freud were the main editors, and Jung was part of that almanac’s editorial staff. At the end of this article, published in the first half of Vol. III in 1912, and which was more than 100 pages long, it was announced that the second part was to appear in the second half of the volume, but it did not. The readers had to wait until the first half of Vol. IV, in 1912, and were then presented with an article that was more than 300 pages long.

One can only imagine what had happened in the meantime. Freud, being one of the main editors, had certainly read Jung’s text thoroughly. He rejected Jung’s postulation to broaden the libido concept, and he even did not accept Jung as a psychoanalyst any more. Their friendship broke down in 1913, and in the following year, Jung left the International Psychoanalytic Association, despite being its founding president.

The underlying reason for Totem and Taboo to exist, regarded by many scholars of that time as one cultural theory, was these hefty quarrels between Jung and Freud. These were first carried out as an exchange of thoughts published in articles. When the dispute was entrenched, both sides underlined their dogmatisms by making a book out of their articles. Interestingly, Freud did not publish his articles of this debate in the psychoanalytic and psychopathological yearbook, but in Imago, a journal for the application of psychoanalysis to the humanities (Freud, 1912a, 1912b, 1913a, 1913b).

Freud explained his position by reference to the anthropological discourse of his time. The popularity which these writings soon reached might be explicable by the fact that he had picked up some exotic topics and addressed quite a number of sexual aspects. As this was done in an academic style, a large audience dared to consume these texts. As we shall see later on, Freud was not the only scholar during the first quarter of the 20th century who successfully applied such an approach.

To mention some central terms, a taboo is something that is prohibited. One may not say, do or touch something that is declared taboo. Freud focused on such taboos that have the function of strict regulations in indigenous cultures. He thereby created a picture of backward societies, where life was full of myths and interwoven with irrational rules and strange behaviour. During his time, it was certainly easier to create this kind of image than it would be today, as worldwide mobility and transcultural contacts have already rendered a sobering effect regarding such exoticism. Freud (1913c) referred to taboos related to rulers, to dead people and to other things like menstruation, illness or hunting. To explain the phenomenon, he also compared someone who or something which was considered taboo with electrically charged objects. One function of a taboo was, for example, that chiefs and other rulers needed to be protected, and therefore, one had to be cautious with regard to all interactions with them.³ Persons who broke a taboo by touching or doing something that was prohibited would become ill or even die, or they could become taboo themselves as well. Therefore, the concept of taboo could have different meanings. Something that is taboo could be holy or dangerous or prohibited. An example given by Freud (1913c) stated that Maori people thought that persons had to die if they ate something that had been cooked on a fire which had been started with the breath of their chief. Freud (1913c) equated such fears to the irrational beliefs of neurotic patients. He also claimed that there were many features in European culture which bore similarities to taboos, referring to the fear of the dead and the belief that they persisted as spirits. At the same time, we mourned the deceased and missed them very much. Also, with regard to authorities, we feared and respected our fathers, heads of states and God, while also loving and admiring them. Freud (1913c) called the contradiction within these feelings ambivalence. And again, he saw such ambivalence as characteristic of both neurotics and members of totem clan societies.

Totem is another of the central terms. Following Freud’s very biased depiction, indigenous societies were organised in clans. The members of each clan called themselves after a totem, which usually was an animal, but it could also be a plant or a natural power, like rain or wind, to which the people of the clan believed they had some particular relation. In the most common case, the respective animal was considered holy and as belonging to a higher power. That higher power could also turn into this animal. The ancient Egyptian deities could be understood in connection with this, as they were represented with animal heads. A totem was seen like a patriarch, as a protective spirit and a helper. And the totem was considered taboo – it was forbidden to kill an animal that belonged to the species regarded as totem, and it was forbidden to eat from its meat. Frazer (1910), to whom Freud referred, had assumed a former regulation that required a man to belong to the totem clan as a precondition for hunting the totem animal, and he had mentioned cases of totem animals being eaten at special ceremonies. Per...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Views from a distance
• 2 Some perspectives on cultural change
• 3 Structures of culture
• 4 Culture as a storage of information
• 5 Finding answers
• 6 The individual and cultural context
• 7 Internal perspectives
• 8 External perspectives
• 9 Meta perspectives
• 10 Disillusions
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• References
• Index of persons
• Subject index