Culture: A Problem That Cannot Be Solved

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Univ of Wisconsin Press, Sep 15, 1998 - Social Science - 328 pages

French historian Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the conflict between the ideals of individualism and community defines American culture. In this groundbreaking new work, anthropologist Charles Nuckolls discovers that every culture consists of such paradoxes, thus making culture a problem that cannot be solved. He does, however, find much creative tension in these unresolvable opposites.
Nuckolls presents three fascinating case studies that demonstrate how values often are expressed in the organization of social roles. First he treats the Micronesian Ifaluks’ opposition between cooperation and self-gratification by examining the nature versus nurture debate. Nuckolls then shifts to the values of community and individual adventure by looking at the conflicts in the identities of public figures in Oklahoma. Finally, he investigates the cultural significance in the diagnostic system and practices of psychiatry in the United States. Nuckolls asserts that psychiatry treats genders differently, assigning dependence to women and independence to men and, in some cases, diagnoses the extreme forms of these values as disorders.
Nuckolls elaborates on the theory of culture that he introduced in his previous book, The Cultural Dialectics of Knowledge and Desire, which proposed that the desire to resolve conflicts is central to cultural knowledge. In Culture: A Problem that Cannot Be Solved, Nuckolls restores the neglected social science concept of values, which addresses both knowledge and motivation. As a result, he brings together cognition and psychoanalysis, as well as sociology and psychology, in his study of cultural processes.

From inside the book

Contents

The Paradoxes of Desire and the Dialectics of Value
3
Spiro and Lutz on Ifaluk Value Dialectics on a Micronesian Atoll
41
Value Dialectics and the Construction of a Regional Identity Max Weber in Oklahoma
74
The Allocation of Value to Gender and the Cultural History of Psychiatric Diagnosis
108
Cultural Ambivalence and the Knowledge Structures of Modern American Psychiatry
161
The Narrative Reproduction of Values in Psychiatric Training and Practice
202
Dialectical Values and Cultural Paradox
270
Bibliography
279
Index
293
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About the author (1998)

Charles W. Nuckolls is associate professor of anthropology at Emory University. The author of The Cultural Dialectics of Knowledge and Desire, published by the University of Wisconsin Press, he is also the editor of The Cultural Construction of Diagnostic Categories: The Case of American Psychiatry and Siblings in South Asia: Brothers and Sisters in Cultural Context.

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