Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good*

Foster, George M.

doi:10.1525/aa.1965.67.2.02a00010

Cited by 742 publications

(169 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…43). Physical scarcity too may turn a resource (e.g., food) into a positional resource, and so ancestral economies of limited productivity would have featured a higher proportion of such goods than later, more productive economies (44)(45)(46). (Ancestral economies also included nonpositional goods [e.g., drinking water in a large lake] and positive-sum games [e.g., sharing food to pool risk (47)], although to a lesser extent than modern economies do.)…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness

Sznycer

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et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Why do people support economic redistribution? Hypotheses include inequity aversion, a moral sense that inequality is intrinsically unfair, and cultural explanations such as exposure to and assimilation of culturally transmitted ideologies. However, humans have been interacting with worse-off and better-off individuals over evolutionary time, and our motivational systems may have been naturally selected to navigate the opportunities and challenges posed by such recurrent interactions. We hypothesize that modern redistribution is perceived as an ancestral scene involving three notional players: the needy other, the better-off other, and the actor herself. We explore how three motivational systems-compassion, self-interest, and envy-guide responses to the needy other and the better-off other, and how they pattern responses to redistribution. Data from the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Israel support this model. Endorsement of redistribution is independently predicted by dispositional compassion, dispositional envy, and the expectation of personal gain from redistribution. By contrast, a taste for fairness, in the sense of (i) universality in the application of laws and standards, or (ii) low variance in group-level payoffs, fails to predict attitudes about redistribution.[M]ore recently the "Greatest happiness principle" has been brought prominently forward. It is, however, more correct to speak of the latter principle as the standard, and not as the motive of conduct.-Charles Darwin (1) W hy do people support social policies? One level of explanation addresses properties of populations that individual minds might process-local practices, shared beliefs and ideologies, collective identities, and recent history (2). A second, independent level of explanation asks which specific psychological mechanisms participate in forming the individual's response to a policy-that is, what interpretive, emotional, and motivational systems are activated by external inputs, shaping the response (3, 4). Here, we explore this second level of explanation. We investigate several evolved psychological mechanisms to see to what degree they pattern the individual's response to economic redistribution. We also investigate the extent to which a taste for fairness shapes support for redistribution.By economic redistribution, we mean the modification of a distribution of resources across a population as the result of a political process. In the case of progressive redistribution (henceforth, redistribution)-a policy for which there is large worldwide demand (5, 6)-the ostensible group-level goal is to even out a skewed statistical distribution by transferring resources from the better off to the less well off. However, it is possible that the public rationale for supporting a policy is distinct from the private or even nonconscious motives of individuals supporting (or opposing) it. It is important to recognize that such a transformation in the distribution of resources does not necessarily entail conservation of a fixed and ...

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Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness

Sznycer

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et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…"Ethnoeugencis" conjures up images of Nazi-like selective breeding to improve human hereditary traits 14 . Depicting mothers as negligent slaves to a "culture of poverty" 15,16 jades our view of them as competent caretakers -a key, not obstacle, to successful child survival programs 11 . It shifts the locus of responsibility (and blame) for deaths from social determinants to grieving mothers, de-legitimizing their loss and suffering.…”

Section: Infant Death Maternal Agency and Accusationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…When she downplays "concrete" social determinants of mortality, conjuring up her own psychologically-driven rational (too reminiscent of Social Darwinism 32 , for my liking), it is interpretive violence. Anthropologists, at least, will recall Foster's 15 analogous argument of the fatalistic "Image of Limited Good" miring Mexican peasants in the muck of poverty -that was vociferously rebutted 16 in the 1960s. Purely cognitive interpretations of human behavior are criticized today, giving way to an analysis of structural violence 33 .…”

Section: Ethnoetiology Of Infant Deathmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infant death and interpretive violence in Northeast Brazil: taking bereaved Cearense mothers' narratives to heart

Nations

2008

Cad. Saúde Pública

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This study investigates bereaved mothers' ethnoetiologies of avoidable infant deaths in Northeast Brazil. It critically examines the anthropological debate concerning "selective maternal negligence" as a relevant explanation for high infant mortality, based on an analysis of preexisting data. From 2003 to 2006, 316 ethnographic interviews collected by the author from 1979 to 1989 in six communities in Ceará State were retrieved. Forty-five narratives of fatal illness and death of 56 children < 5 years of age were identified for in-depth analysis. Despite their low income and schooling, grieving mothers constructed their own explanations for early death. The most common causes were infectious-contagious diseases (37.9%) and dehumanized care by the attending health professional (24.1%). No mother reported maternal carelessness, detachment, or negligence. If there is any "disregard" in the context of poverty, it is by the unjust economic, political, and social system and inhumane public health practice which violates their rights as citizens. To characterize a bereaved mother as "negligent", or worse, as accomplices in her child's death, is an act of interpretive violence, unfairly blaming and demoraling mother-caregivers in Northeast Brazil.

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“…In this respect the studied community to a certain extent contradicts George M. Foster's (1965) idea of 'limited good', for the perception of economic advancement is rather ambiguous in the community. On the one hand, the notion of making progress at the cost of others is an existing idea, and is best expressed in beliefs about drying-up cows.…”

mentioning

confidence: 77%

The Making of a Bewitchment Narrative

Hesz¹

2007

FEJF

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By analysing the formation of one bewitchment narrative, the paper argues that narratives on bewitchment primarily serve as communicative devices by which one can negotiate his social position in the community, even in cases when overt social conflict is not involved. In case of misfortune the local bewitchment theories give rise to several competing interpretations in the community (a Hungarian village in Romania). The different versions also assign different roles to the bewitched: some put them into the position of the guilty while others show them as wholly innocent victims. By following the interpretational strategies applied during the construction of the bewitchment narrative of a family whose social position was shaken, the paper aims to show how the bewitched managed to reach a version which has put them into a favourable position, and how this narrative was employed to 'save their faces'.Key words: bewitchment, curse, discourse, Eastern Christianity, narrative Romania, witchcraft Most of the anthropological, socio-historical and folkloristic studies of witchcraft see the essence of the institution in its function to express and channel existing social tensions by interpreting them as pretexts for certain misfortunes. While this is evidently true for certain periods, communities and cases, the few anthropological studies on contemporary rural witchcraft show that the importance of witchcraft may lie elsewhere than in manifesting social conflicts.The first to challenge the absolute validity of this interpretation was Jeanne Favret-Saada, who in her thorough study on contemporary witchcraft in France (Favret-Saada 1980) argued that in reality witchcraft accusations were mostly targeted at people engaged in a rather neutral affair with the victims (neighbours), instead of being aimed at those with whom the bewitched had tense relationships (relatives). In her view, witchcraft was to be considered a special language constituting a discourse which, putting otherwise unexplainable events to a certain perspective, offered the bewitched an explanation and solution to their problems. During her fieldwork, and in her analysis as well, J. FavretSaada decidedly took the perspective of the bewitched 1 and concentrated on bewitchment narratives as "inner" explanations -explanations that the behttp://haldjas.folklore.ee/folklore/vol37/hesz.pdf

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Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good*

Cited by 742 publications

References 34 publications

Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness

Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness

Infant death and interpretive violence in Northeast Brazil: taking bereaved Cearense mothers' narratives to heart

The Making of a Bewitchment Narrative

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