Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

368 | HOW THE MIND WORKSdency whatever to cause him to groan or writhe, but does cause him tocross his legs and snap his fingers. He is not in the least motivated to preventpain or to get rid of it.Have anthropologists discovered a people that feels mad pain orsomething equally weird? It might seem that way if you look only at stimulusand response. The anthropologist Richard Shweder points out, "It isa trivial exercise for any anthropologist to generate long lists ofantecedent events (ingesting cow urine, eating chicken five days afteryour father dies, kissing the genitals of an infant boy, being complimentedabout your pregnancy, caning a child, touching someone's foot orshoulder, being addressed by your first name by your wife, ad infinitum)about which the emotional judgments of a Western observer would notcorrespond to the native's evaluative response." True enough, but ifyou look a bit deeper and ask how people categorize these stimuli, theemotions elicited by the categories make you feel at home. To us, cowurine is a contaminant and cow mammary secretions are a nutrient; inanother culture, the categories may be reversed, but we all feel disgust forcontaminants. To us, being addressed by your first name by a spouseis not disrespectful, but being addressed by your first name by a strangermight be, and being addressed by your religion by your spouse might be,too. In all the cases, disrespect triggers anger.But what about the claims of native informants that they just don'thave one of our emotions? Do our emotions seem like mad pain to them?Probably not. The Utku-Inuits' claim that they do not feel anger is beliedby their behavior: they recognize anger in foreigners, beat their dogs todiscipline them, squeeze their children painfully hard, and occasionallyget "heated up." Margaret Mead disseminated the incredible claim thatSamoans have no passions—no anger between parents and children orbetween a cuckold and a seducer, no revenge, no lasting love or bereavement,no maternal caring, no tension about sex, no adolescent turmoil.Derek Freeman and other anthropologists found that Samoan society infact had widespread adolescent resentment and delinquency, a cult of virginity,frequent rape, reprisals by the rape victim's family, frigidity, harshpunishment of children, sexual jealousy, and strong religious feeling.We should not be surprised at these discrepancies. The anthropologistRenato Rosaldo has noted, "A traditional anthropological descriptionis like a book of etiquette. What you get isn't so much the deep culturalwisdom as the cultural cliches, the wisdom of Polonius, conventions in