by Hugh M. Lewis

Becoming human involves the growing awareness of the inexorable shadow we cast upon the world.

We can trace the devaluation of women in the Western World to an old medieval romantic tradition involving a separation of sex and sentiment rooted in an older religious tradition of sanctified monogamy, as well as concomitant sexual repression. This has been a tradition that has come to focus upon the reproductive function of women, emphasizing their domesticity, raising motherhood to a virtue, and making a vice of female sexuality. Perhaps we might understand some of the motivation behind contemporary feminist appeals and pleas for power and equality in a male-dominated world.

Margaret Mead's classic Coming of Age in Samoa provided the American public a vivid portrayal of a simpler society that seemed to function smoothly without the kinds of sexual repression that we have always presumed to be natural and universal. And it has been the work of more recent political economists in Oceania (Victoria Lockwood "Capitalist Development and the Socioeconomic Position of Tahitian Peasant Women." Jo. Anth. Rsrch. 44(3): 263-285; Lorraine Sexton Mothers of Money, Daughters of Coffee: The Wok Meri Movement, 1986; Aihwa Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline, 1986) to remind us that in our exportation of a World Economy we may have also concomitantly exported certain andro-centric value and reality orientations that accompany the kind of social organization underlying capitalist development. This may include the primarily valuation of money, property ownership and control, public spheres of social life, and the devaluation of human labor, social relations and domestic-centered life.

The issue of our own and other's sexuality bring us perhaps to some basic facets of our own cultural orientation. If sex is illicit, and taboo outside of an officially and traditionally sanctioned arrangement of institutional monogamy, then any hint of sexuality outside of marriage is morally regarded as polluting. If our andro-centric notions of what is sexual have come to focus upon the topography of the female body, then this body is seen as a reservoir of pollution, a potentially dangerous entity when outside of normal social control. If we couple these sexual taboos and the symbolic importance of the female body in our definition of human sexuality with the reproductive function of mating and the child-bearing and child-rearing role of the woman, as well as with a deep-seated notion of the necessary naturalness of kinship, that "blood is thicker than water," (David Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship, 1984: pgs. 165-201) then perhaps we can also understand some of the causes if not the justification for an inordinate need to exert control over the activities of women in the transmission of culture and society.

We can ask what the social function and structural reasons for these taboos might be, and speculate on patterns of property ownership and patri-lineal inheritance, or on the primordial need for the father to maintain certainty that the children of his wife are really of his own blood. We can also ask about the historical origins of our institutions of monogamy and sexual repression and discuss the role of the Catholic church in early medieval Europe in appropriating private property in the name of sin and sainthood (Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, 1983:pg. 44-6), or go back even further to a time before Christ that was ruled over by a vengeful, patriarchal, Judaic Yahweh. We might ask also about the psycho-socially integrative aspects of such taboos and ask why sexuality in our media is x-rated and yet pornographic violence is commonly permitted, and even explicitly promoted, on public television--perhaps a society which values male achievement and competitive aggressiveness and success at any cost finds in the systematic repression and frustration of human sexuality both an indirect means of sublimating and enhancing indirect aggression and offering at the same time offering elusive, illicit, banal sexuality as the prize for success. Replete in our commercial media and advertisements are our male success symbols and our female sex symbols.

But sexual repression and the subordination of women have not been unique to the Western world. In China, women's feet were traditionally bound to the point of crippling them in the most inhumane manner--and though small, curled up feet were taken as a mark of great beauty, women were not fit upon the same romantic pedestal as they came to be in Europe. In a tradition bound society that values utmost the filial piety of sons who worship their paternal ancestors, women were the servants, caretakers and bearers of the seed and progeny of one's fore-fathers. Though for purposes of taxation residence was fixed, no religious mandate of monogamy held sway--a successful Chinese male could, without violation, take a second or third concubine as a wife, and have several sets of children, while a woman, if caught committing adultery, would be drowned in a river in a pig cage. Inheritance went through the children of the first, legally recognized wife, but no other special stigmas attached to being the concubine of a wealthy landowner or merchant. In Muslim society, polygamy is allowed by the Koran itself, and a man can simply divorce one of his wives by saying "I divorce you" three times but a wife is subordinate to the will of her husband and cannot similarly divorce her husband at will. In the Muslim world, the woman is in many ways the most repressed of all--she is not allowed to show her face in public, or even the skin of her body. Again, in Hindu society, we find a version of the repression of women in which a devoted wife was commonly expected to serenely follow her deceased husband upon a funeral pyre, and a widow could never marry again. An unmarried woman, or a woman in the public spheres of the world, would be considered a temptress without virtue. Indeed, the subordination of women may have been found in all great traditional Civilizations, as well as in the Modern World System.

The theory of the social construction of reality entails the convergence of the three basic aspects of social process--externalization, objectification and reification, and subjective internalization--in the critical moment of the reproduction of society via the processes of socialization. An important theory of the psychological reconstruction of society is implied in the process of secondary socialization, and the rise of discrepancies between "subjectively inevitable" primary socialization involving internalization and superficial secondary socialization featuring identification without internalization, constitutes the principle basis for alternation of social identity and the insufficiency of the total process. Melville Herskovits's theory of cultural dynamics (Man and His Works, 1948; Cultural Anthropology, 1955; Cultural Dynamics, 1964) contains a related version of the cultural construction of reality, and sees in processes of secondary socialization a principle mechanism of change and elaboration in socio-cultural patterning. Socialization is always incomplete; social reproduction remains always unfinished and imperfect.

The working away of the conversational apparatus as the principle mechanism of the maintenance of the subjective plausibility structures of the constructed realities is also an important corollary in terms of the process as an on-going discursive praxis. Social production involves the objective externalization, primarily through language, of structures of knowledge. Social reproduction depends upon the reification of such structures and its subsequent subjective internalization as if subjectively inevitable. Social praxis through conversation is the principle means of reinforcing and maintaining, as well as modifying, this socially constituted, subjective inevitability. It is most important to view the three processes as interdependent, inseparable and dialectically complementary in the transmission of social reality. It is also important to view this perspective as being fundamentally functionalist which asserts that the principle function of social processes of production, reproduction and praxis is to sustain its own function of the social construction of reality. Thus the sociology of knowledge does not step beyond the hermeneutic horizon of its own sociological knowledge.

The discrepancies that seem to exist between the primary socialization of early childhood and subsequent socialization seem to provide the primary basis for the possibility of the partial realization alternative realities. This speaks of separate levels of psycho-social reality--the level of the message, and the meta-communicative level of the total meaning. We can say that the power of words bring with them the possibility for prevarication, illusion and deceit, and authorities may be saying one thing and yet doing something completely contradictory. When the two levels, the signal and the meaning, are contradictory, pathology is the product.

Our theories of meaning lack a theory of pathology as social process. Edward Sapir drew a distinction between spurious and genuine culture, and Howard Stein (Developmental Time, Cultural Space: Studies in Psychogeography,1987) in his elucidation of psycho-geography shows aptly how culture can be a crutch for the crippled, dependent and maladapted, fostering illusions which deny reality as much as it can be a vehicle for adapting to reality. A. F. C. Wallace (Culture and Personality, 2nd Ed. 1970; War: The Anthropology of Armed Conflict and Aggression 1968) also speaks of the training for the mobilization for war, and of cultural maps, or maze-ways as breaking down and becoming in time ineffectual in the mediation of people's daily lives, leading to maze-way reformulation and the beginning of another revitalization movement.

Almost without exception, our theories of pathology posit the source or origin of pathology in the individual personality, in the body, so to speak, which is then sometimes extended in a functionalist manner to the dysfunctional diseased social body. In regard to the "disease" of illicit sexuality and promiscuity, we tend to lay the blame of our own repression upon the female victim of male sexual frustration and aggression. Thus it was that the United States could regularly burn and bomb the body of Vietnam and violate the bodies of Vietnamese women and children in the name of their own perverted sense of justice. The psychology of victimization, of the realization of power by the strong over the weak, demands the blood of its victim--"It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."

In our experience of the world, we come to embody the world, and the world in turn comes to embody our experiences. When we strongly dichotomize and compartmentalize our experiences, when we deny our weaknesses, our hidden desires, our illicit needs, and seek to publicly present and reaffirm our strengths and our virtues, then we must find in the world some counter-reference "other," some devalued, negatively sanctioned, marginalized out-group, upon which to project those very corruptions that we need to deny and repress within ourselves. And we seek collectively to reaffirm what we are individually responsible for. We seek in our bonds of social solidarity and communality the kind of non-aggressive communitas and sanctioned conformity that demands the internal repression, and external projection and displacement of our negative, aggressive tendencies. The greater the degree of internal social cohesion demanded, the greater the need to find some scape-goat, some victim, upon which to vent one's anger. Internal social stratification especially entails the displacement of potential conflict upon out-groups that is inherent in the structural inequalities between members of the same society. Creating and maintaining such boundaries necessary to secondary social order beyond the bonds and bounds of kith and kindred demands just such displacement. Hitler understood this principle of the human animal all to well. The Khmer Rouge transported an entire nation back to the year zero by simply inverting the traditional familial moral order--the fascist true believer is precisely the person who through libidinal displacement has made the country and its cause his own vitally important personal and family concern.

A structural account of social organization makes reference to so-called principles of incorporation upon which a particular social order may be based. In a similar and related way we can make reference to "principles of difference" by which people commonly set themselves off against one another, and these principles function to promote within group social solidarity, stratification, hierarchy and between group distances and boundaries as any other. The basic principles of difference may include race, ethnicity, gender, age, culture, religion, class/caste and clan, tribe, parties, moiety or nation. In any given context, any or all of these principles may intersect in the common ground of a social continuum of human interaction to produce mixed matrices of difference. Within certain situations, one or another principle may nomothetically predominate, yet remain relatively unmarked, while other principles, though marked or highlighted, may be minor themes or effectively neutralized. Differences may sometimes cross-cut one another to contraposed consequences

Complicating the matter are the distinctions that we might draw between a category that we ascribe to ourselves or others, a group with or without a boundary, or a model that may only be ideal, a map or code for belief and behavior, symbolic collective representations, and the labels by which we designate a category, group, model, map or identity, and an identity or reference, which may or may not fit reality.

It is sometimes useful to separate gender identity from sexual identity, and to make analytical distinctions between psychological, social and cultural components of gender identity. But it is also important to see the extent to which categories, models and metaphors converge upon a nexus of symbolically integrated traits, such as "feminine" and "masculine" that can be regarded as poly-thetically constituted and prototypically robust incorporating biological, psychological, social and cultural components.

Many people may readily occupy positions which are intermediate in position between our psycho-social constructs, and all people have multiple components of identity--women of color are not white women, lower class Malaysian women are not upper middle class German women, and wives may not be widows nor mothers whores.

If we search for some primary difference which makes the ultimate "Difference" more basic and upon which all others may be derived, we are likely to be frustrated when we discover that each of the principles may occur somewhat independently of, and at cross purposes with, the others.

A cultural model is a composite, corporate psycho-social construction which exists at the intersection of several different ranges of variation based upon principles of difference. Though changing in its many particulars, it tends to be enduring in its basic dimensions. Though reinterpreted and reiterated on an individual basis, its significance is broadly social, such that its frequency and extent of occurrence is greater than the scope of any individual to comprehend or control. Because of its social corporation, it tends to be reified as if it had a life of its own, in its objectification it tends to acquire a concrete quality that is self-affirming and systemically self-organizing, and because it is widely a part of socialization it tends to become thoroughly internalized and involve deep identification such that they seem subjectively inevitable to the point of naturalness. In social interaction, they become the basis of shared interpersonal and between group stereotypes of behavior and belief.

Such cultural models provide templates for communication and criteria for mutual or complementary expectations. They provide a shared basis by which we may make normative, cognitive and symbolic inferences, predictions, evaluations and decisions regarding others and ourselves in a social world. They constitute the basis by which we frame our understanding of others, and how we react to and interact with others. They serve to reduce and simplify what would otherwise be quite complicated social realities.

Cultural models are constituted in relation to social structural and functional foundations, reflecting, reifying and therefore reinforcing the asymmetries of social stratification and are thus apt to change when structural relations in the world become altered. Models that may have high status or high visibility in one context may have neutral status or minimal visibility in another, or even negative status in certain "anti-structural" arrangements.

Complex cultural models are symbolically integrative of difference, and constitute the basis of psycho-social, status-role identity. They also constitute the basis for a process which might be referred to as social race, categorical, socially sanctioned markers of social identity and difference which serve as the basis for social distance, boundaries, discrimination, labeling, organization, colonization, competition, exploitation, asymmetry and relations of dominance/subordination. Finally, through their internalization such models may become a significant part of our unconscious constitutional personality and character, such that they exist and influence our lives in ways that remain for the most part out of awareness.

Frequently, but not always, such models are found in homologous sets of contra-distinctive associations, such as common social contrasts like jock/burnout, masculine/feminine, white/black, or natural/cultural. It is to post-structural theory that we owe the insight that such contrastive sets may be historically and hermeneutically instituted as "modes of information" and may entail some kind of (implicit/explicit, marked/unmarked, overt/covert, basic/derivative, universal/ particular, denotative/connotative) difference signifying relational inequality between things so designated.

Americans are typically raised upon a somewhat middle class ideology of equality, democracy, openness and mobility which is quite contradictory with a strongly hierarchical and class based social system reinforcing and reproducing itself in the preservation of the status quo. As a dispossessed Edgar Allan Poe so aptly observed, "To be poor in America is to be despised." Our success ethic puts a premium upon achievement of status--the acquisition of those symbols and markers of success defined by the system. Consequently we have a strong taboo for failure and weakness--not only must we repress the possibility of failure and weakness in ourselves, but we must find convenient out-groups upon which to project this side of ourselves.

We may search far a field for basic human differences, without recognizing the very ground of such difference in our own backyard. In talking about class in America, we might look to the riots in L. A. or the high-rise/street-sewer life-styles of New York city, but we are less likely to see it in any small town or city in which the culture and society of Amerikana reproduces itself. To a large extent, our class system forms a vast, unmarked backdrop for much of our discourse about the world, a background that passes mostly unnoticed and unmentioned.

And yet most American's remain enmeshed in a class system which they can hardly escape--a system which by its very nature sets insurmountable constraints and limits to the possibilities of their becoming. It works to critically shape the very contexts in which our lives are spelled out. The net consequences of these shaping forces in our lives are to frustrate human potential and prevent the realization of people's productive talents and capacities. For many, the American Dream remains but a grand materialistic illusion to be played out by daily lottery tickets and weekly trips to Wal-Mart.

Class consciousness in American society involves not so much the competitive, F-scale kind of authoritarianism which is strongly associated with a working class orientation, rather with a more enlightened, paternalistic kind of authoritarianism in which "Father always knows best." Poor people are not capable of looking after themselves, but must always be looked after.

The articulation of class-consciousness in American society is to be found at the precise point, the critical moment, in which the class system reproduces itself through the professionalization of its technocratic elite. To the extent that this system is based upon achievement and mobility, this point of articulation of the class system is to be found in its graduate-training academies.

A simple model for such articulation, one that I have observed as a student anthropologist observing other anthropologists and other students in several different settings, is to be found in the mentor-student relationship. This is a relationship that involves some degree of paternalistic asymmetry, transference, identification of the student with the person of the professor as a legitimate authority symbol, internalization of the professional beliefs and behavior of the professor by the student, a mutual supplication of the professor's and student's ego-identity, a process which can be extended to mutual turf protection in relation to other compeers. The relationship involves some degree of trust, vulnerability and respect, as well as some degree of interdependency which can become manipulative, in which the student is relying to some extent upon the networking prowess and prestige of the mentor as a gate-keeping mediator on her or his passage through the hallways of paradise.

Such relationships are rarely without some degree of social bias, preconceived notions and class prejudices involving the ranking and rating of both student and professor, selective perception and stereotypical labeling of others, class unconsciousness that prestructures and indirectly constrains the relationship (like produces like, in that good game playing conformists reward other good game playing conformists) It should perhaps, but rarely does, go without saying that a pathological, highly asymmetrical social system will tend, with some difficulty, to reproduce itself, at least statistically, for many differently related reasons. Class-conscious paternalism begets more class-conscious paternalism.

In understanding human identity and social difference, it is important to analytically separate the problem of authority from the problem of legitimacy. Authority is specifically a problem of hierarchy, equality and power. Legitimacy involves relative status-role identity, reference, ascription, social positioning, sanctioning, and boundary-maintenance and constraint. Different people may have different sets of identities, and yet share in a common dilemma of authority and authoritarianism.

In general, legitimacy is the unmarked form underlying authority. A person may be socially legitimate and yet lack authority or may be illegitimate and yet hold the power to dominate. Man, lacking the legitimacy that nature accorded to women in their reproductive power and as primary agents of socialization, almost universally appropriated the authority of culture unto themselves.

Neither women nor men are alike free of the problems of authoritarianism or the possible corruption and social pathology that the promotion of empowerment at the expense of others so often entails. Promotion of the recognition of human rights, and of the doctrine of universal equality and nonviolence upon which such rights are ultimately based, entails the acknowledgement and sanctioning of the legitimacy of human identity and difference in the world, but not necessarily authority.

Here lies a basis for false consciousness and ideological hypocrisy that accompanies class snobbery and superiority. When it constitutes a denial of authority and asymmetry, social consciousness becomes false consciousness in relation to an implicit agenda of class-consciousness. Thus a liberal-minded person who presents her/himself as legitimate and personalistic in orientation may for structural reasons remain quite a staunch defender of the status quo of inequality. Being authoritarian does not necessarily entail that we be good haters as well.

Whatever we might wish to be or consider ourselves, we are only partly so. The unfinished business of making ourselves and becoming in the world furnishes us the possibility, the opportunity and liability, for alternate identities. We do not walk in the world without our casting shadows upon it, and because of our shadow-side, we are always something more as well as less in the world than we may wish to be.

We cannot always act in full knowledge of the implications or consequences of our actions, except to know that our actions will possibly have some, unexpected reverberations upon others in the world.

We are often controlled and guided by unconscious motivations, subliminal social messages or situational constraints which we are hardly aware of, and, because they are normally repressed, denied, framed or glossed, or euphemized, they usually remain directly inaccessible and invisible, though their barriers and consequences may be quite transparent and obvious to others.

We can speak of others, significantly and insignificantly, in terms of reference and counter-reference, attribution and stereotype, without recognizing in them our own selves or, yet more reflexively, our own otherness in our selves.

The cultural models, constructs, schemas, concepts we employ to define our experience of the world remains for the most part out of our awareness, transparent and invisible to our critical consciousness. They serve to define us in our definition of the world. They are normally available to us but we cannot but with great difficulty step beyond their scope and purview, unless we suddenly find ourselves immersed in an alien cultural realm. These elements constitute bits and pieces of the cultural constructions of both our selves and others in the world--they are the shadow-side of our world.