The Aymara

THE HISTORY that happens to a people is partly a matter of their ethos and world, view since, in fact, it is people who make history happen; that is to say, every social group, in its reaction to the world and to other social groups, must inevitably contribute its own peculiar stamp to the historical transaction. But also and conversely, the current ethos is in turn a product of the past history undergone in common by contemporary members of the society. (Indeed, even remoter history is involved. Thus the history being made by De Gaulle's France is ultimately shaped by the France of Charlemagne, Louis IV, Napoleon, the War of I870, the two World Wars, and Vichy-just as the same history is also contributed to by the England of Nelson, Wellington, Churchill, Waterloo, and Dunkirk.) Thus stated, this may seem to be a tautology, but it is intended rather to emphasize both historic cultural continuity and also the somewhat discontinuous reactions of one generation of persons upon another. Any treatment of history must take into account both patternment and change, that is, both the and its history. Ethnographers commonly become aware in time that the people they are studying have a peculiar style in their behavior by virtue of the reverberant influence of members of the group upon one another. If we emphasize the massive generalities of patterned behavior, more or less present in most individuals at the same time, we find we are talking about culture. But if instead we emphasize the way in which the influence of antecedent individuals has become configurated in the behavior of a specific individual, then we are talking about personality. Personality and are not the same thing. (If they were, then enculturation and culture, socialization and society, life history and world history would also be the same thing, which they discernibly are not. What these diverse abstractions have in common is only their concrete subject matter, specifically human behavior, viewed from different standpoints.) Rather culture and personality are two different methods of looking at the same thing: the psychologically reverberant behavior of humans in society. The social nature of that behavior, its historicity, patternment, geographic diffusion, and subjection to oedipal vicissitude do not impugn but supplement each other. It is only when we confuse hypothesis with data, method with subject matter, that we run into difficulty. Thus, to speak of

Ethnology · Geography · Sociology · Anthropology · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Hispanic-African Historical Relations · History · Philippine History and Culture

• Interrelaciones y percepciones cósmicas andinas

  Open Access•Richard Schaedel, Richard P Schaedel•Histórica•1991

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