Description
Book SynopsisDrawing on ethnographic studies of the distinctive modes of psychological functioning in communities around the world, Shweder explores ethnic and cultural differences in ideals of gender, in the life of the emotions, in conceptions of mature adulthood and the stages of life, and in moral judgments about right and wrong.
Trade ReviewHow much cultural relativism is enough? Whether you consider yourself a modernist with universalist sympathies or a post-modernist with completely pluralist preferences, you will be given pause by the arguments in this book. You will be informed, amused, infuriated, moved, and prompted to doubt deep personal convictions - often within the space of a single paragraph. No serious student of psychological anthropology or cultural psychology can ignore Shweder's commentary on the great issues confronting those fields. -- Richard E. Nisbett, University of Michigan
Richard Shweder is the authentic voice of a concerned and critical anthropology: unbuttoned, funny, courageous, and mercilessly precise.
Why Do Men Barbecue? takes no prisoners. It is a major contribution to the exposure of all forms of ethnocentrism, with special and loving attention to our own. -- Clifford Geertz, Institute for Advanced Study
In fresh, brisk, and arresting language, Shweder challenges us to see the world in new ways or else come up with new arguments for holding on to the views we already have. This insightful and provocative book isn't just for anthropologists and other social scientists, but for those who value having to look twice at the world they think they know. -- Martha Minow, Harvard Law School
In our globalized world there are, and will always be, many divergent views of what is real, good, and true, and how to think and feel and be a person. Rick Shweder's spirited and beautifully written essays remind us that it is not just right but necessary to recognize and understand differences in ideas and ways of life. His provocative insights give us an agenda for a cultural psychology we can really use in the turbulent years ahead. -- Hazel Rose Markus, Stanford University
Shweder's "recipes" are lucid, timely investigations of suffering, the domestic life of Hindu women, the sleeping arrangements parents of different nationalities and classes institute with their children, and female genital mutilation--to name a few. * Publishers Weekly *
Whether writing about the lives of Hindu women in rural India, comparing the family sleeping arrangements of different societies, or challenging feminist criticisms of female genital surgery in sub-Saharan Africa, Shweder describes the results of his ethnography of difference with elegance and wit. He avoids the dehumanizing fetishism of difference that characterizes all too much contemporary social science and social theory, and resists familiar relativist bromides demanding 'tolerance.' -- Michele M. Moody-Adams * Times Literary Supplement *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Anti-Postculturalism (or, The View from Manywheres) 1. Who Sleeps by Whom Revisited (with Lene Balle-Jensen and William Goldstein) 2. The "Big Three" of Morality (Autonomy, Community, Divinity) and the "Big Three" Explanations of Suffering (with Nancy C. Much, Manamohan Mahapatra, and Lawrence Park) 3. Cultural Psychology of Emotions: Ancient and New (with Jonathan Haidt) 4. "What about Female Genital Mutilation?" And Why Understanding Culture Matters 5. The Return of the "White Man's Burden" and the Domestic Life of Hindu Women (with Usha Menon) 6. Culture and Mental Development in Our Poststructural Age 7. A Polytheistic Conception of the Sciences and the Virtues of Deep Variety 8. Fundamentalism for Highbrows: The Aims of Education Address at the University of Chicago Conclusion: From Manywheres to the Civilizing Project, and Back Notes References Acknowledgments Index
