Political organization appears to be among the most important factors aflecting formal (legal)
INTRODUCTIONT HAS LONG BEEN recognized that I controls over sexual behavior are often among the most important means of maintaining political control. Although the regulation of sexual behavior is characteristic of all societies, there are profiles of controls in this sphere of activity that are found only in certain types of societies. The dependent variables in the analyses to be presented are the laws adopted in societies in connection with nonmarital sexual relationships: the punishments prescribed by law for adultery and incest and for the violation of celibacy. These analyses also contain implications for understanding controls over premarital sexual activity and for the concept of affective austerity, or the Protestant ethic.My purpose here is to explore cross-culturally one of the ways by which the rulers of some nations achieve some of their ends in political control by imposing unique controls over sexual behavior. It will furthermore be shown that such controls are characteristic of only one type of nation. More generally, I will attempt to show that nations do not constitute a single level of sociocultural integration but that it is necessary to distinguish among different levels of integration in their development in order to Accepted for publication 21 November 1968. understand the nature of controls established by each.I will begin with a taxonomy of nations and their state organizations, intended as a framework within which to see the use of sexual controls as instruments of political controls, not as an all-encompassing taxonomy; other dependent variables require other classificatory schemes. I will then discuss the sexual controls and, in that connection, will also briefly discuss the methodology of this research. Finally, I will offer some hypotheses to account for the correlations that were found.
STATE ORGANIZATIONThe concepts of nation and state are inseparable. However, there are various ways of defining them. Here I use the approach that conceptualizes the nation territorially and the state in terms of its political functions. A nation is a society made up of many communities and regions, classes (and sometimes castes), economically and otherwise specialized groups, a variety of daily and other cycles in the life style, and the like, all of which are centrally controlled by a set of interlocking agencies (or bureaucracies) that are more or less differentiated.The latter constitute the state, and they are unified into a single administrative entity devoted to the maintenance of order and con- and is one of the sine qua non of society. By a political system I mean the institutions of society that are devoted to maintaining order within a limited territory and in relations with other groups. A political system is based on the exercise of authority, the legal or rightful power to command or to act. As will be seen, however, different principles of political integration underlie the exercise of...
IH E purpqe of this paper is to illustrate the proposition, through the T analysis of a single sociocultural system, that personality processes manifest in the bearers of a culture a t any given point in time are functions of the history of that culture, and that, similarly, these processes are indispensable to an understanding of the relationships existing between contemporary cultural form and antecedent historical conditions. I n previous publications (1955a, 1955c) I described the culture of a Jamaican community, one of the outstanding characteristics of which is an intense economic and status rivalry centering about individual amassment and retention of wealth. Competition is between individuals rather than between nuclear families, for the ubiquitous individuating forces within the community in general also affect familial ties. The community is further marked by lack of a "sense of community," by a general absence of leadership and authority arising from within the group, by repetitive resort to sorcery ("obeah"), and by perennial accusations and suspicions of sorcery. There is a marked lack of kin-group or other solidarity, and ties are extremely weak and diffuse throughout. These are cultural and structural phenomena, but they are equally psychological and characterological processes which are acquired in the course of socialization. This paper will attempt to demonstrate that many of the significant areas of socialization for behavior in this community are functions of its historically determined structure of family organization.It has long been recognized that the varieties of family organization in contemporary New World Negro cultures represent the end-products of one of the most dramatic acculturative situations in recorded history. Most investigators agree that these family organizations have their primary historical antecedents in the experience of slavery, specifically, in the impermanence of family life during slavery (Frazier
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