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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Men make themselves radically different pictures of reality.
The crucial word in this assertion is ‘radically’. Its full force is not often appreciated. But ‘picture’ also requires some elucidation. The term suggests, like the word ‘vision’, something relatively static. A ‘vision of reality’, a style of thought, a culture, is in fact an ongoing process, and one which contains internal options, alternatives, disagreements. There is no language in which one cannot both affirm and deny. Even, or perhaps especially, a culture which maintains that the big issues have been finally settled within it, can yet conceive of the alternatives which are being denied and eliminated. It must give some reasons, however dogmatic, for selecting that which it does select and for excluding that which it excludes, and thus in a way it concedes that things could be otherwise.
1 Cf. for instance the celebrated work of the late SirEvans-Pritchard, Edward on Nuer Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956)Google Scholar or Lévi-Strauss, C.' Pensée Sauvage (Paris, 1962Google Scholar; English translation, Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1966), or more recently, the arguments of Dr Maurice Bloch, in his Malinowski Memorial Lecture, Man (N.S.) 12 (1977), 278–292.Google Scholar
2 A longer and slightly different version of this paper is also to be published in Comparative Social Dynamics: Essays in Honor of S. N. Eisenstadt, Erick Cohen, Moshe Lissak and Uri Almagor (eds) (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, forthcoming).