Anthropology ? dictaobscura

In addition to introducing me to the work of Robert Graves, my high school Latin teacher introduced me to the discipline and approach(es) of anthropology (I think he was getting a master?s degree in it at the time).

I used to try to apply anthropological analysis to classical and medieval law and history.? I liked it the way it allowed me to make sense of things that hadn?t looked sensible before ? like finding that there were patterns in succession to the Visigothic throne, that ?morbus gothorum? did not do justice to what was going on (it was part of, and the impetus for, my original dissertation topic, which I chickened out of, in favor of one that had originality built into it but for which I didn?t have much enthusiasm ? that one had to do with 14th-century dower in England, and I wrote a paper on Livy?s telling of the story of Lucretia and the validity of coerced consent in Roman law, instead).

I was thinking this morning about the Republican race for president, about conservative thinking on moral decay and strengthening the family, and about the factor of religion in the primaries.? One of the things that passed through my mind was how Mormonism, I think, sees itself as trying to make good on Christianity?s promise, and how its sometime embrace of polygamy might fit into whatever project of reform it is engaged in.? From another angle, I was thinking about kinship groups other than the nuclear family and the roles they sometimes play in social and economic networks.

So, what came out of this mixture of thoughts was the idea that maybe our insistence in our current culture of relying on a nuclear family is a point at which we might intervene when we try to identify what?s not working in our society and how to address those ills.? I forget why we came to live as nuclear families either in fact or in terms of an ideal that then influences our expectations.

Maybe work is already done in this regard, about what might be a more natural living arrangement for groups of people of different generations, genders, abilities to contribute to the unit either through caretaking or through bringing in resources like income, in our current society.? If it is, maybe we could please hear more about it in those places in the media in which we hear what the psychologists, sociologists, biologists, neuroscientists, and other favorites are doing.

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Tags: Mormonism, nuclear family

Source: http://dictaobscura.wordpress.com/2012/03/03/anthropology/

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