The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage MindAuthor :
Hardback
Published : Tuesday 8 March 2011
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Description
Fox traces our ongoing struggle to maintain open societies in the face of profoundly tribal human needs that, paradoxically, hold the key to our survival. This latest book ranges from incest and arranged marriage to poetry and myth, from human rights and vengeance to pop icons such as Seinfeld.
We began as savages, and savagery has served us well--it got us where we are. But how do our tribal impulses, still in place and in play, fit in the highly complex, civilized world we inhabit today? This question, raised by thinkers from Freud to Levi-Strauss, is fully explored in this book by the acclaimed anthropologist Robin Fox. It takes up what he sees as the main--and urgent--task of evolutionary science: not so much to explain what we do, as to explain what we do at our peril. Ranging from incest and arranged marriage to poetry and myth to human rights and pop icons, Fox sets out to show how a variety of human behaviors reveal traces of their tribal roots, and how this evolutionary past limits our capacity for action. Among the questions he raises: How real is our notion of time? Is there a human right to vengeance? Are we democratic by nature? Are cultural studies and fascism cousins under the skin? Is evolutionary history coming to an end--or just getting more interesting? In his famously informative and entertaining fashion, drawing links from Volkswagens to Bartok to Woody Guthrie, from Swinburne to Seinfeld, Fox traces our ongoing struggle to maintain open societies in the face of profoundly tribal human needs--needs which, paradoxically, hold the key to our survival.
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