State of the Discussion

The biggest single positive step would be to rejoin the EU. We’ve got to the point where that’s not unimaginable.

I can see calling it imaginable. But possible any time soon? It seems like that would require some significant portion of the population to accept that they were conned by the pro-Brexit campaign into thinking that the economy would benefit, rather than suffer. (They were told there would be negative consequences, but chose not to believe it.). Oops.

Getting people to accept that they made a mistake, is really difficult. Nobody likes to admit, even to themselves, that they were played for fools. I'd guess that it will take a bunch of Brexit believers dying off, and being replaced by younger voters who have no personal history in voting for it I'd live, for Britain's sake, to be wrong about that. But....

For example, a culture which enables slavery is worse than one which forbids it.
A proof would require some axiomatic statements about what is desirable. In the end, one has to make a moral judgment about those axioms. I’m entirely willing to do that.

I agree wholeheartedly. Once, when I was young and foolish, I was prepared to take the other line, but the issue which changed it was FGM (female genital mutilation). The fact that many older women in the relevant societies supported it became irrelevant to me when I heard the horrifying testimonies of women who had suffered appalling (fully intended) effects, and from girls and women who had either suffered terribly (you don't hear from the ones who die), or only just got away/out of the relevant countries in time.

For the avoidance of all doubt, I am also against male circumcision unless absolutely medically neccessary.

I’m not really sure how marriage is something you want to take as something that, I don’t know, argues against cultural relativism? 

I'm having a really bad day thread for explaining myself. :-(

I would say that marriage is an example of cultural relativism. While, at least in my view, every culture has an institution of marriage, the forms it takes, the ceremonies involved (if any), etc. vary widely. Cultural relativism says that those forms are equally valid.

Suppose your culture, like American culture, includes civil marriage. Another culture requires a religious ceremony for a marriage. Does the second culture get to say that anyone with a civil marriage in the first culture is immoral because they are "living in sin"? After all, they didn't get the reqiured-by-the-second-culture religious stamp of approval. Cultural relativism says no.

Again, speaking of Japan, almost everyone gets married civilly and there is no requirement for a ceremony, an officiant, or any kind of celebration to make it official

but they tell their friends and family, right?

because even without the big party thing or the religious aspect, simply announcing to other people that you are a couple is a big part of the event.

I'm not really sure how marriage is something you want to take as something that, I don't know, argues against cultural relativism? There are a lot of things to pick at, like the oscillation between legal terms and social naming (shacking up, friends with benefits), but the fact that you name it suggests that there is some public recognition of the fact.There is not a 'who is shacking up with whom' column in the NYTimes, but within that person's social sphere, there must be something that had to be named.

Again, speaking of Japan, almost everyone gets married civilly and there is no requirement for a ceremony, an officiant, or any kind of celebration to make it official and over half of the people do what is called a nashi-kon (no wedding marriage). So your definition seems a bit ethnocentric, at least where Japanese are concerned.

To understand 'marriage', you have to look at the totality of the culture, which seems to require some sort of cultural relativism in order to not fall into false comparisons.

It's instructive to read letters of resignation from ministers who've resigned recently over policy differences - Jess Phillips on 12th May, and John Healey on 11th June. The common message is that Keir Starmer talks a good game but fails to deliver.

A British Prime Minister is unlike a US President in that, by construction, he has the votes in the Commons to get legislation enacted. But also, by construction, he needs to retain those votes to keep his job. Most MPs are anxious to win their seats again at the next General Election, and they want the party leader most likely to facilitate that. Before Theresa May, MPs were highly reluctant to depose a Prime Minister, but that guideline has been destroyed by Brexit and its consequences - if a PM's MPs perceive an electorally more attractive alternative, he's gone.

The British government operates under budgetary constraints which do not (yet) apply in the US - they can borrow only so much money, as Liz Truss discovered. Meanwhile, voters want more government spending, especially from Labour governments, and lower taxes, especially from Conservative governments. In the absence of economic growth, which has been crushed by Brexit, these things cannot be delivered. (I'm looking at these numbers per capita.)

Furthermore, the main categories of UK government spending are on benefits (especially the state pension), health, and education. In all of these things, static spending, in real terms, looks inadequate - see Baumol's cost disease. Debt interest and the armed forces are two more rising costs - Healey's resignation was because defence spending wasn't, in his view, increasing fast enough.

Any Prime Minister would have had a difficult time in the last two years - Rishi Sunak called the last General Election five months before he had to because he didn't want to be responsible for impending decisions on spending. Burnham will have the same challenges. In the short term the hope is that he will do a better job of presentation: he could hardly do worse.

In the medium term, the country won't get stable governments unless economic growth is restored. The biggest single positive step would be to rejoin the EU. We've got to the point where that's not unimaginable.

(I've used "he" because the context is Starmer's resignation. But two of the four short-term Prime Ministers who preceded him were women.)

We can argue whether these sorts of differences are enough to undermine a term of marriage, but regardless, I’d avoid making claims about the universality of marriage until you specifically define what you mean.

OK, I can take a shot at that.

Marriage: a term signifying that two (or more**) individuals have taken a legal and/or ceremonial step to form a new, publicly acknnowledged, social unit that includes both of them. That is, they did not just start cohabitating. They are not just "friends with benefits". There was some public action to establish the new unit. And, generally, some kind of legal and/or ceremonial action is required to later dissolve the joint unit -- stipulating that dissolution is, in some cultures, not an option.

What kind of legal action or ceremony is used varies widely, of course. But there is some kind of public acknowledgement that a new social unit now exists.

Hope that helps.

** Until very recently, either one man and one or more women, or one woman and one or more men. With everyone assumed, at least for social purposes, to be having sex primarily if not exclusively with those of the opposite sex.

You have to either argue that there are no morals outside of culture or you have to argue that morals within a culture can’t be questioned from outside. Seems both are pretty problematic.

Or you can consider that the purpose behind cultural relativism is to provide a way for the ethnographer to describe a foreign (to him) culture and describe how it works. From the viewpoint of the members of that culture, without injecting into the description a lot of discussion about the way a member of his own culture would react if living in that culture (rather than just visiting).

Ideally, ethnographers from the US or China or Japan or India, describing the culture of a native group in the Amazon, would produce very similar descriptions. In reality, it's impossible to successfully set aside all of your cultural baggage, no matter how hard you try. If nothing else, your attention tends to be drawn to the parts of the culture which are most different from your own. But it is possible, and useful, to reduce the impact of the observer's culture on the description you produce.

This is kind of where the wheels come off. When you mean marriage, I assume you mean partnering up. 

Actually, no. That's exactly what I don't mean. Because, as you say, partnering up has been going on forever.

What I mean is a socially recognized partnering, one which confers various rights and obligations which the culture recognizes and will enforce. Sometimes there are legal processes involved. But even if a particular culture doesn't do much with legal formalities, it will still have norms about marriage and socially enforce them.

If it will help (and the terms are still in use), consider the difference, in American culture, between "getting married" and "shacking up." The obvious difference being that, if you're married, you can't just walk away and it's over. Not only are there legal consequences, those around you will expect you to provide for the other party appropriately. Whereas, if you're shacked up, you can pack and move out, and nobody will expect you to do anything else.

Consider this: marriage, in some form or another, seems to be pretty universal.

This is kind of where the wheels come off. When you mean marriage, I assume you mean partnering up. Well, I'm pretty sure gay people have partnered up through history. Every small southern town had their two spinsters who were living together while President James Buchanan, a lifelong bachelor, roomed with a politician from Alabama for 10 years before he became president (and the roommate passed away before Buchanan became president). So why is that not 'marriage'?

But when a lot of people talk about marriage, they are thinking about wedding cake, or licenses, or getting drunk at receptions. But those are certainly not universal, but it is easy to have the lines blur between what is the core and what is peripheral. In addition, there are a lot of things associated with marriage that, if we acknowledge some set of universal human rights, we can't simply say oh, we have to accept that. Dowries? Father giving away the daughter? Understanding it requires understanding the social networks and all the other anthro sort of things, but it's just a conservative conceit that this means researchers _defend_ those practices. You have to either argue that there are no morals outside of culture or you have to argue that morals within a culture can't be questioned from outside. Seems both are pretty problematic.

Are you saying that there are no objective morals? And no one has any grounds to criticize cultures that fall short of those morals?

I'm saying that morals arise out of, and are part of, particular cultures. Certainly you can criticize other cultures for falling short of your morals. But can you demonstrate that your morals on a particular point are superior to theirs? A demonstration which would convince someone from a culture which doesn't happen to have a position on the issue, and is therefore arguably objective.

There are some moral precepts which are, if not quite universal, are very widespread. You can probably make a decent argument that the anomalies have missed the boat somehow. But it's also possible that they got it right, and the rest of us will eventually get it right, too.

Consider this: marriage, in some form or another, seems to be pretty universal. But gay marriage did not (to my knowledge) occur anywhere, was not even raised as a serious possibility, until the last few decades. There might be recognized relationships, but they were not (and nobody in their culture would have characterized them as being) marriage. Was that universal rejection of the idea a universal moral precept? Are those places which still reject it being immoral for doing what everybody in the world did a century ago?

Cultural relativism is about understanding a culture (or subculture) in its own terms. Look at how its cultural norms work for the benefit of its members — how they impact others from outside the culture is irrelevant.

Hmmm, I think the first part is right, but the second part is problematic. Certainly, no culture, with the possible exception of the Sentinelese, is exists in a vacuum, so you are moving from cultural relativism to ethical relativism. It seems like the second statement could be used to justify anything. Cultural relativism is an analytical framework, but it shouldn't become a moral compass.

Boas, who argued for cultural relativism, with no culture being superior to another. (yay!) Though I wonder how they would deal with MAGA culture…

My recollection (It's been half a century since I was a Cultural Anthropology major) is that it distinguishes cultures and sub-cultures. MAGA would be a subculture of the general American culture. That is, something which shares the vast majority of features with the general culture, while having multiple features which are peculiar to itself. It can take exposure to foreign cultures to realize just how much the subculture share with the general culture. But be assured, you have an enormous number of points of cultural agreement with MAGAs.

Cultural relativism is about understanding a culture (or subculture) in its own terms. Look at how its cultural norms work for the benefit of its members -- how they impact others from outside the culture is irrelevant.

Look at it this way. You, in your culture, may find certain features of another culture peculiar or even abhorrent. But your opinion is irrelevant because you are not part of the culture. In short, cultural relativism rejects the concept of universality between cultures. Your views on, for example, universal human rights are just that: your views. Another culture may have other, equally valid, views of what constitute human rights which ought to be universal.

This is not to say that you shouldn't try to change features of your culture that you dislike.** Cultures change constantly. (There's an entire specialty withing Cultural Anthropology which focuses of how that change happens.) Anyone who demands that their culture never change might as well argue that the sun circles the earth or that gravity doesn't apply to people and inanimate objects equally. That just ain't the way the universe works.

Sometimes those changes are apparently adjustments to external forces. If you contact a different culture, a lot of people in your culture may find something new and attractive there and embrace it -- see the impact of Hollywood, or of K-pop, outside their culture of origin. Or economic forces force an adjustment -- think the spread of the railroads or cell phones. Nobody said: let's change our culture. But it happened anyway.

Other changes are the result of conscious effort by some group. Think of women's sufferage or gay marriage. This tends to generate more pushback, partly because pushback can work more successfully. But what is more common is change in fits and starts. Or, if you prefer, two steps forward, one step back. Which is very irritating for advocates of the change, who typically have trouble taking a long view of just how much change they have made successfully.

** You can also try to change features of other cultures that you dislike. Just don't try to convince a believer in cultural relativism that you are morally correct in any univerally vaild sense.

Fascinating discussion. For some reason I immediately thought of the Lord of Misrule tradition, and when I tried to work out what the connection was, all I could really come up with was that both seem to represent the human need for inversion.....

Since lj is mentioning Radin, I’ll drop this in the discussion, which represents my attempt to sort out the origin of the concept of the trickster as a mythological type (not the origin of stories that feature what we would now call a trickster figure, but the origin of the taxonomy), all in response to Michael Caine’s request for more on the topic.

So to start off, I do what every modern student does and head straightaway to find out what Wikipedia has to say about the topic as a springboard to a deeper dive. And what I get is this...

Tricksters, as archetypal characters, appear in the myths of many different cultures. Lewis Hyde describes the trickster as a "boundary-crosser". The trickster crosses and often breaks both physical and societal rules: Tricksters "violate principles of social and natural order, playfully disrupting normal life and then re-establishing it on a new basis."

To which the first year writing professor in me immediately responds with “Wonderful, it’s a ‘Since the beginning of time…’ introduction, and starts skimming for some moment of actual engagement or analysis with the concept beyond summarizing concepts and making lists. Alas, to no avail. There is nothing like a genealogy of the idea, or any indication of why it is that this particular concept has wormed its way so firmly into general usage to become a foundational concept. Sometimes a Wiki article manages to transcend this tendency and go somewhere useful. This one does not.

I’m inherently suspicious of concepts that have shed their contexts and genealogies to become timeless and monlithic.

So begins my archaeological dig into the concept.

Two names that frequently get associated with the concept of the trickster are the Brothers Grimm and Vladimir Propp (who assembled a grand typology of Russian fairy tales), who are often mentioned as collectors of many tales featuring classic trickster figures, but neither of these ever seem to have used the concept thematically, nor used their own equivalent of the term to describe these figures. From what I can tell, the concept of a class of mythological entities that can be typified as “tricksters” dates back to the latter half of the nineteenth century with American antiquarian Daniel G. Brinton writing about Native American tribal mythologies in his essay “The Hero-God of the Algonkins as a Cheat and Liar” in 1885. From there the term gets adopted by other folklorists of Native American mythology, like Franz Boas who studied the tribes of the Pacific Northwest, and on to Paul Radin, who worked to systematize the various sources starting in the 1920s and culminating in 1957 in his book The Trickster : A Study In American Indian Mythology. We’ll return to it in a moment. But first...

In the mean time, another figure enters the chat – Joseph Campbell – whose grand mythological bouillabaisse so fascinates Bill Moyers and pretty much anyone else not inclined to actually do the reading (I’m looking at you, George Lucas). Campbell takes mythology assembled from everywhere with the serial numbers filed off of it à la Frazier’s Golden Bough, throws it in a pot with a heaping serving of Jungian psychology, then plates it all with an eye towards James Joyce’s Ulysses. Somewhere in the cooking he adds a dash of the trickster concept to the descent-and-return motif, and the ground has been prepared for the trickster archetype to bloom in every garden. He publishes The Hero With a Thousand Faces in 1949.

And that brings us back to Radin’s The Trickster…. When Radin is writing his magnum opus, he enlists the input of Jung and of Karl Kerenyi to add some heft to the underlying ideas and give the concept more universality. Jung ties the Trickster to the shadow side of humanity’s collective unconscious and the trickster takes on the role of the mediator between two irreconcilable concepts.

Yep, the mythologizing of the dialectic. Thesis/antithesis/synthesis as a modern day god for anyone who is brave enough to confront their shadow side. And all just in time for the explosion of the counterculture. Just a few years later, Levi-Strauss also gets on the bandwagon with his Structural Anthropology, but it’s really the mixture of Campbell and Jung that kicks things into high gear and makes it all spill over into popular culture.

I haven’t worked out yet quite how Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Discordianism manages to exert outsized influence in the neopagan ciricles that grew out of this counterculture, but I know it’s there alongside Stranger in a Strange Land so feel free to speculate there if you wish.

Oooo, teaching in the target language. It's one of those things that seems like such a good idea but is focussing on the teacher rather than on what the student does and is therefore destined to fail.

Here in Japan, you get students who just wait the teacher out for a Japanese explanation and if you have enough of them, it can be agonizing.. It also reinforces that native/non-native divide, and I've had folks (both Japanese and non-Japanese) argue with a straight face that the native (i.e. native English speaking teacher) should NOT learn any Japanese, so as to be this rock of immovable language that the students run into over and over. Sigh...

Wonkie, you might be thinking of the book by Paul Radin, a student of Franz Boas. If anyone wants to check out his book on it, it is here
https://ignca.gov.in/Asi_data/4517.pdf

cleek - interesting possible connection between the figure of Satan and of Loki in scholarly debate...

Milton scholars are divided over what inspired Milton's characterization of Satan in Paradise Lost. Some scholars posit influence from the apocryphal Book of Enoch. Another group points to the possibility of Milton having had access to the Junius II manuscript, which contains the Anglo-Saxon account of Genesis and, in particular, an imaginative addition referred to as "Genesis B," in which Satan expresses sentiments and grievances surprisingly like those in Paradise Lost.

The reason why this has drawn parallels to Loki is because in "Genesis B" Satan has not just been cast into hell, but has been bound there by chains meant to keep him there so that he cannot wage war against The Almighty. Given that the language here is Anglo Saxon, medievalists have pointed out the parallels between Satan here and Loki, bound in Hel, and between the description of the angelic rebellion and of Ragnarök.

No proof of a connection, or of Milton having actually read the manuscript, but this sort of thing is catnip to academics.

Meanwhile, Elaine Pagels also posits in Adam, Eve, and the Serpent that Satan started out as a tricksterish figure in Abrahamic myth before developing into a sort of anti-god.

What it comes down to is this: the ways that people learn best differ.

Some people absorb information best by reading. (We tend to do well academically as a result.) Other people learn best by listening. Could be identical words to reading something themselves; the channel still makes a significant difference.

For learning to do something physical, the same applies. You still have that dichotomy. But you now also have people who learn best by seeing someone else go thru the motions. And other people who do best by going thru the motions themselves, even if the teacher has hold of their hands, arms, etc. and is guiding those motions.

It is probably unfortunate that the people who design our school curriculums, and who create directions for stuff (whether for filling out government forms or for running stuff you bought for your own use) are almost universally from the "learn by reading" segment of the population. (And yes, that does include the authors of nearly incomprehensible directions for software.) They frequently aren't even aware of the phenomena. And, as a result, exclaim "RTFM!" regularly as a result. (Guilty as charged.)

Further to which, anybody who hasn't already heard it should check out Hounds' new song, Remember Obama, out on all streaming platforms. It will drive him (even more) demented...

However, it does occur to me that Abrahamic religions could really use a trickster figure

though his character was invented after the OT, Satan sometimes is a tricky troublemaker in Christianity. and Islam has Iblis (and his devils).

...because people think that the Bible is somehow historical fact (or ignore it because they don’t want to get in fights) has them fail to see how people and situations are archetypes 

What bugs me particularly is how often obvious figures of speech are translated and taken literally. A couple of examples:

• "Jonah was in a whale." But if you say of someone you know: "Jonah is in a pickle," do you really expect your listener to think a giant cucumber is involved?
• "Jesus was walking on the water." And if you say, "I have a house on the lake," does anyone assume a houseboat? Sure, it could be. But the most likely meaning is lakefront property, with the house being high and dry, albeit with a view.

And that ignores cases of simple mis-translations, due to the different ways different languages parse the world. Hebrew, like English, distinguishes conceptually between a young woman and a virgin; Latin does not. So a prophecy that "A young woman shall conceive," doesn't actually require a virgin birth.

It seems like the literalists are aware of the potential problem. Hence their insistence that the translations were all divinely inspired. Avoids numerous awkward facts.