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  3. Custom has not commonly been regarded as a subject of any great moment. The inner workings of our brains we feel to be uniquely

Custom has not commonly been regarded as a subject of any great moment. The inner workings of our brains we feel to be uniquely

admin2015-04-10  19
问题     Custom has not commonly been regarded as a subject of any great moment. The inner workings of our brains we feel to be uniquely worthy of investigation, but custom, we have a way of thinking, is behavior 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 behavior 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 belief, and the very great varieties it may manifest.
    No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. Even in his philosophical probings he cannot go behind certain stereotypes. John Dewey has said that the part played by custom in shaping the behavior of the individual, as against any way in which he can affect traditional custom, is as the proportion of the total vocabulary of his mother tongue against those words of his own baby talk that are taken up into the vernacular of his family. 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.
    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 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. 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.
    Anthropology was by definition impossible, as long as 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 against our neighbor’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.
According to the author, anthropologists can only study human societies objectively if they
选项 A、regard all cultures as having equal values.
B、distinguish between themselves and barbarians.
C、believe in supernatural.
D、have a good understanding of Western civilization.
答案A
解析 作者认为，人类学家只有______，才能客观地研究人类社会。[A]平等看待所有文化的价值[B]将自己和野蛮人区分开来[C]相信超自然[D]对西方文明有良好的了解文章第四段第一句话指出：只要我们同原始人、野蛮人和异教徒之间存在的区别在人的思想中占主导地位，那么人类学按其定义来说就无法存在。这句话的含义是我们不能蔑视别的种族或团体，所有的文化在其价值上不分高低。所以，本题的正确答案为[A]。[B]不够全面。
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