“Cultural anthropologists have gathered exactly the data required to examine this hypothesis for human societies—and their findings are conveniently arranged in R. B. Textor's A Cross Cultural Summary.”

—  James W. Prescott

"Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence" (1975)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Cultural anthropologists have gathered exactly the data required to examine this hypothesis for human societies—and the…" by James W. Prescott?
James W. Prescott photo
James W. Prescott33
American psychologist 1930

Related quotes

Steven Pinker photo

“[I]n the past two decades anthropologists have gathered data on life and death in pre-state societies rather than accepting the warm and fuzzy stereotypes. What did they find? In a nutshell: Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong.”

Steven Pinker book The Blank Slate

p. 95 http://books.google.com/books?id=ePNi4ZqYdVQC&amp;q=%22hobbes+was+right%22 <br class="br">The Blank Slate (2002)

Dana Gioia photo

“The second observation is that poetry is a universal human art. Despite post-modern theories of cultural relativism that assert there are no human universals, there exists a massive and compelling body of empirical data, collected and documented by anthropologists, linguists, and archeologists that demonstrates there is no human society, however isolated, that has not developed and employed poetry as a cultural practice. Most of this poetry, of course, has been oral poetry. Many of these cultures never developed writing. But the fact remains—and it is a demonstrable fact, not mere opinion—that every society has developed a special class of speech, shaped by apprehensible patterns of sound, namely, poetry”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

9-10
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

“…the levels of culture, the aspects of society: military, political, economic, social, emotional, religious, and intellectual. Those are your basic human needs. …they are arranged in evolutionary sequence.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis photo

“In India, there's lack of appreciation of the need to cross-examine data, the responsibility of a statistician.”

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893–1972) Indian scientist

In Quotations by 60 Greatest Indians, Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology http://resourcecentre.daiict.ac.in/eresources/iresources/quotations.html, <br class="br">Quote

Isaac Leib Peretz photo

“Ghetto is impotence. Cultural cross-fertilization is the only possibility for human development.”

Isaac Leib Peretz (1852–1915) Yiddish language author and playwright

Vegn vos Firn op fun Yidishkeit, 1911. S. Liptzin. Peretz. Yivo, 1947, p. 378.
Context: We should get out of the ghetto, but we should get out as Jews, with our own spiritual treasures. We should interchange, give and take, but not beg. Ghetto is impotence. Cultural cross-fertilization is the only possibility for human development.

Jean-François Lyotard photo

“Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter the postmodern age.”

Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) French philosopher

Source: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1977), p.3

Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo

“The arrangements of society and culture are fighting petrified; they survive in the interruption or containment of practical and visionary strife. The more society and culture are organized to increase the distance between our context-preserving and our context-transforming activities, the more these arrangements take on the appearance of natural facts. They appear to us as givens, as our collective fate. Indeed, that is what, in a sense, they then become.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 69

“What ideas are convenient to express inevitably becomes the important content of a culture.”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Ch 1: Medium is the Metaphor, p. 7
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

Manuel Castells photo

“This article aims at proposing some elements for a grounded theory of the network society. The network society is the social structure characteristic of the Information Age, as tentatively identified by empirical, cross-cultural investigation. It permeates most societies in the world, in various cultural and institutional manifestations, as the industrial society characterized the social structure of both capitalism and statism for most of the twentieth century.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: Materials for an exploratory theory of the network society (2000), p. 5

“The weakness of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis… the impossibility of generalizing about entire cultures and then attributing these generalizations to the language spoken …is to leave numerous facts about culture unexplained.”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

Word Play (1974)
Context: The weakness of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis... the impossibility of generalizing about entire cultures and then attributing these generalizations to the language spoken... is to leave numerous facts about culture unexplained. The great religions of the world... have flourished among diverse peoples who speak languages with sharply different grammars.... Cultures as diverse as the Aztec Empire of Mexico and the Ute hunting bands of the Great Basin spoke very closely related tongues.

Related topics