Nature and Madness

Notes

Notes Preface 1. The Mask of Sanity (St. Louis: C. V. Mosby, 1976). 2. "Psychological Development and Historical Change," in Robert Jay Lifton, ed., Explorations in Psychohistory (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974). 1. Introduction 1. Quoted by Thaddis W. Box, "Range Deterioration in West Texas," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 71, no. i (July 1967). 2. Of these normal human environments, John Calhoun says, "Evolutionary history modifiedphysiologyto demand a given rate of contact in harmony with having lived in a particular group size in a particular habitat. Man is no exception. Through most of his evolutionhe has livedin relatively closed groups of relatively small size. There are reasons to believe that man lies along an evolutionary path on which the optimum group size (of adult members) has a range of seven to nineteen with a mean of twelve" ("Ecological Factors in the Development of Behavioral Anomalies," inJoseph Zubin and Howard F. Hunt, eds., Comparative Psychopathology: Animal and Human [NewYork: Grune & Stratum, 1967]). 2. The Domesticators i. The best evidence for theponderous emergence ofagriculture is the carbon-14 dating of the oldest-known samples of the 131 Nature and Madness various domesticated plants and animals. Most of thecommunity of cultivated forms does not appear in the first seven thousand years (Colin Renfrew, Before Civilization: TheRadiocarbon Revolution and Prehistoric Europe [London: Cambridge University Press, 1979]). Adina Kabaker, "A Radiocarbon Chronology Relevant to the Origins of Agriculture," 957-980 in Charles A Reed, ed., Origins of Agriculture (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1977). 2. Jose Onega y Gasset, Meditations on Hunting (New York: Scribner's, 1972), p. 150. The idea of "attention" overlaps both anecdotal and technical approaches. It can be seen as a cultural style, as in Onega y Gasset, or as an organizing concept in neuropsychological processes. If the hunter's attention was in some sense "superior" then perhaps the question is whether it touches on child rearing for us today.For the scientific end of this spectrum, see MonteJay Meldman, Diseases of Attention and Perception (NewYork: Pergamon Press, 1970). 3. Phenology, like taxonomy, in contrast to the more trendy forms of nature study in behavior or ecology, does not have a livelypress. But it is what the mature naturalist finally comes to. Much of Henry Thoreau's journal in the nineteenth century , like the work of Aldo Leopold in the twentieth, is given to the dates of first appearance—of flowers blooming, the passageofmigratory birds, and soon. It isnot that these topics are actually less dynamic than the more dramatic aspects of nature, but that their liveliness depends on a deeper understanding and a more refined sense of mystery. 4. Place to Australian aborigines isnot a detachable qualityor an abstract way of making location a relative commodity. It is continuous with the identitystructure of the adult. It is embedded there as a result of a combination of daily life and formal ceremony during the first fifteen to twenty years of life. It is not unreasonable to suppose that something like it gave shape to the religious life and the personality of the prehistoric hunter -gatherers of Eurasia and Africa. A major study of the role of place in the mental and emotional growth of the individual among present-day hunters or among American Indian tribes has not, to myknowledge, been done. For the Australians,see Amos Rapoport, "Australian Aborigines and the Definition of 132 Notes Place/* in William Mitchell, ed., Environmental Design: Research and Practice (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972)5 . Defensive personal space is analogous to territoriality in animal breeding space. The most scholarly work on the latter remains Robert Ardrey's The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into theAnimal Origins of Property and Nations (NewYork: Atheneum, 1966). However, since that book, studies of the territoriality of tribal peoples tend to show something rather different from exclusive occupancy of space or warlike stance concerning boundaries, something directed more toward particular resources and symbolic means of avoiding conflict.Ardrey 's leap from typical animal territoriality to human war as equally normal was unjustified: organized human invasion by force isprobably due to the breakdownof human social behavior rather than its healthy expression. Since the "natural" processes associated with social disintegration are psychological , it seems likely that they are also regressive and infantile. 6. The making of boundaries in a deforested terrain is done in terms of familiar landforms or, lacking those, man-made rock piles.Jane Ellen Harrison long ago...