Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780674059016)

We began as savages, and savagery has served us well--it got us where we are. But how do our tribal impulses, still in place and in play, fit in the highly complex, civilized world we inhabit today? This question, raised by thinkers from Freud to L?vi-Strauss, is fully explored in this book by the acclaimed anthropologist Robin Fox. It takes up what he sees as the main--and urgent--task of evolutionary science: not so much to explain what we do, as to explain what we do at our peril.

Ranging from incest and arranged marriage to poetry and myth to human rights and pop icons, Fox sets out to show how a variety of human behaviors reveal traces of their tribal roots, and how this evolutionary past limits our capacity for action. Among the questions he raises: How real is our notion of time? Is there a human "right" to vengeance? Are we democratic by nature? Are cultural studies and fascism cousins under the skin? Is evolutionary history coming to an end--or just getting more interesting? In his famously informative and entertaining fashion, drawing links from Volkswagens to Bart?k to Woody Guthrie, from Swinburne to Seinfeld, Fox traces our ongoing struggle to maintain open societies in the face of profoundly tribal human needs--needs which, paradoxically, hold the key to our survival.

Author: Robin Fox
ISBN-10: 0674059018
ISBN-13: 9780674059016
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Language: English
Published: 03/08/2011
Pages: 432
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.59lbs
Size: 9.35h x 6.59w x 1.24d

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 02/11/2011 pg. 14
Publishers Weekly 02/14/2011
Choice 12/01/2011
Reference and Research Bk News 06/01/2011 pg. 62