Suchergebnisse

It is clear that the Government of the Chinese People's Republic is very concerned about national defence and possible foreign attack – especially from the United States, but increasingly from the Soviet Union also. Obviously, such concerns are largely relatable to both historical and current political and military realities – such as 100-odd years of western and Japanese encroachments on China, the Vietnam war, American military bases around China, Chinese-Soviet border clashes, and both ideological and practical political conflicts between China and the United States, and China and the Soviet Union. At the same time, however, these practical realities alone cannot provide a full basis for understanding the nature and strength of Chinese concerns about potential invasion. In the first place, such attitudes are both too deep and too wide. Traditionally, from long before the West became powerful in Asia, China has been concerned to keep foreigners out or at least carefully restricted, and long before the bitter attacks by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on "cultural imperialism" this concern extended to economic and cultural as well as direct military or political influence. Second – more generally, but more fundamentally – political behaviour and attitudes are never so neatly and completely rational and compartmentalized as to depend only on the "real" political circumstances. As with anyone else, both what the Chinese perceive as "real" and as "political," and the significance attributed to these perceptions, depends also on the lenses they use to view the world. And the nature of the lenses used to view international affairs may be shaped by matters that at first seem remote from international relations, and by unconscious and emotional as well as conscious and rational calculations.

Viewing "mental illness" as behavior comprehensible in terms of communication and interaction within social systems—especially the family—rather than as individual "pathology" has recently led to revolutionary developments in psychiatric thinking and practice. Anthropologists have been central in developing the conception of communication underlying this advance and the general ideas about behavior and social interaction involved closely parallel anthropological views, yet there has been little feedback from psychiatry to anthropology during this period. This paper outlines the basic features of this communicational viewpoint, describes its significance for psychiatry, and suggests related potential applications in anthropology.

This article points out and analyzes some overt and implicit family imagery underlying political and economic discussion in one passage by Mao Tse-tung, and discusses the value of such analysis. Along the way, some methodological questions—the significance of form and content in such "content analysis," and verification of the findings—are also considered.