‘Criminals by Instinct’

Leach would depict the creative violation of present social structures as ‘the very essence of being a human being’. Nihilistic violence breaches the surface of civil exchange, breaks the shared forms of behaviour, such that orientation towards it by others, and their development of stable expectations with regard to it, is prevented. Individuals can organise themselves, integrate their behaviours into reliable and joint systems, without developing uniform cognitive maps or possessing equivalent motives but instead by learning that under certain circumstances others’ behaviour is predictable, and can be confidently interrelated with actions of their own. Meeting in terms of common, shared, often formulaic behavioural forms, individuals are able to make meaningful interpretations of their worlds and selves of great personality and diversity. In the days of the Culture and Personality debates in anthropology, Anthony Wallace spoke of ‘the organization of diversity’ which social structure entailed

Biology · Creativity · Criminology · Instinct · Psychoanalysis · Social science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Psychology · Social Psychology · Ecology

• Harmattan

  N Rapport•Anthropological Quarterly•2016

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