文化模式
课文学习台
Patterns of Culture
区分观点、依据、例子与限制，用自己的话准确重建论述。
课文精读第1 / 6段
本课原文与译文
展开完整文本 · 便于查阅与检索
第1段
Anthropology is the study of human beings as creatures of society. It fastens its attention upon those physical characteristics and industrial techniques, those conventions and values, which distinguish one community from all others that belong to a different tradition.
[0A]人类学以作为社会创造物的人类为其研究对象。人类学着眼于那些物质特征、工业技术、常规及价值观念，而这些将一个社区与其他属于不同传统的所有社区区分开来。
第2段
The distinguishing mark of anthropology among the social sciences is that it includes for serious study other societies than our own.…
[0B]人类学与社会科学的一个显著不同，就在于，在严肃研究中，人类学包含了对其他社会的研究。 …
第3段
Now custom has not commonly been regarded as a subject of any great moment. The inner workings of our own brains we feel to be uniquely worthy of investigation, but custom, we have a way of thinking, is behaviour at its most commonplace. As a matter of fact, it is the other way around. Traditional custom, taken the world over, is a mass of detailed behaviour more astonishing than what any one person can ever evolve in individual actions no matter how aberrant. Yet that is a rather trivial aspect of the matter. The fact of first-rate importance is the predominant role that custom plays in experience and in belief, and the very great varieties it may manifest.
一般说来，习俗并没有被视为一个十分重要的研究课题。我们觉得，只有我们大脑内部的运作原理才值得研究，至于习俗，我们总认为，只是稀松平常的行为而已。事实上，情况正好相反。从世界范围来看，传统习俗乃大量琐细的行为，与任何个人在个体的活动中所养成的行为相比，都更令人惊艳，不论个人行为有多么反常。 不过这些琐细行为只是习俗问题中颇为次要的方面。最重要的事实是，习俗在实践和信仰中所起的突出作用，以及可能展现出来的极其丰富多采的形式。
第4段
No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking. Even in his philosophical probings he cannot go behind these stereotypes; his very concepts of the true and the false will still have reference to his particular traditional customs. John Dewey has said in all seriousness that the part played by custom in shaping the behaviour of the individual, as over against any way in which he can affect traditional custom, is as the proportion of the total vocabulary of his mother tongue over against those words of his own baby talk that are taken up into the vernacular of his family. When one seriously studies social orders that have had the opportunity to develop autonomously, the figure becomes no more than an exact and matter-of-fact observation. The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth, the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behaviour. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities. Every child that is born into his group will share them with him, and no child born into one on the opposite side of the globe can ever achieve the thousandth part. There is no social problem it is more incumbent upon us to understand than this of the role of custom. Until we are intelligent as to its laws and varieties, the main complicating facts of human life must remain unintelligible.
从未有人以原始的眼光看待世界。他所看到的世界，受特定习俗、制度和思维方式所编改。甚至在哲学探索中，他也无法追究这些陈规老套；他关于真伪的概念依然与其自身的特定传统习俗相关。约翰·杜威曾郑重指出：习俗塑造个人行为的力量，与个人影响传统习俗的能力相比，就好比母语的全部词汇，与一个人幼时牙牙学语所说、后来被家人采用的那几个词相比。当一个人认真研究得以自发发展的社会秩序时，就会发现，上述比喻其实只是对事实的准确描述。个体的生活史，首先是适应他的社区代代相传下来的（生活）模式和准则。从出生开始，他出生所处社区的习俗就在塑造其经历和行为。等到他长到会说话时，他就是其社区文化塑造的孩子了；等到他长大并能参与各项活动时，社区的习惯即他的习惯，社区的信仰即他的信仰，社区的禁忌也是他的禁忌。每一个诞生在他所处社区的孩子，都跟他有着一样的习俗；而诞生在地球另一边某个社区的孩子，与他相同的习俗不到千分之一。没有比习俗的作用更让我们有责任去理解的社会问题了。在我们理解习俗的规律和多样性之前，我们仍无法理解人类生活的主要复杂的实际情况。
第5段
The study of custom can be profitable only after certain preliminary propositions have been accepted, and some of these propositions have been violently opposed. In the first place, any scientific study requires that there be no preferential weighting of one or another of the items in the series it selects for its consideration. In all the less controversial fields like the study of cacti or termites or the nature of nebulae, the necessary method of study is to group the relevant material and to take note of all possible variant forms and conditions. In this way we have learned all that we know of the laws of astronomy, or of the habits of the social insects, let us say. It is only in the study of man himself that the major social sciences have substituted the study of one local variation, that of Western civilization.
只有在某些先决条件被认可之后，对习俗的研究才有成效。 部分条件也遭到了强烈的反对。首先，任何科学研究都要求对挑选出来考虑的一系列项目，不能有所偏向。在诸如对仙人掌、白蚁或星云性质的研究等所有争议较小的领域，必要的研究方法是汇集所有相关材料，以及对所有可能的变体形式和变量条件予以记录。可以说，是靠着这种方法，我们掌握了天文学的规律和群居昆虫的习性。却只有在对人类自身的研究中，主要的社会科学只以对局部变化的研究，比如对西方文明的研究，来予以替代 （对所有人类的研究）。
第6段
Anthropology was by definition impossible as long as these distinctions between ourselves and the primitive, ourselves and the barbarian, ourselves and the pagan, held sway over people's minds. It was necessary first to arrive at that degree of sophistication where we no longer set our own belief over against our neighbour's superstition. It was necessary to recognize that these institutions which are based on the same premises, let us say the supernatural, must be considered together, our own among the rest.
只要我们同原始人，我们同野蛮人，我们同异教徒之间的区别，还支配着人们的大脑，那么人类学按其定义来说，就绝无可能。我们首先需要具备这样一种成熟的程度：不再把自己的信仰与邻人的“迷信”对立起来、区别对待。我们必须认识到，凡是建立在相同前提上——比如超自然观念之上——的社会制度，都应放在一起考察，其中也包括我们自己的制度。
学完这一课
选一个可以讨论的判断，说明依据，再加上一句限制或不同情况。
译文与解析据吴应时整理资料及本站首轮审校稿；词伙与练习提示为本站学习设计。原PDF第197—204页，2022年2月第2版。