Best of
Humanities

1980

Language and Learning: The Debate between Jean Piaget & Noam Chomsky


Massimo Piattelli Palmarini - 1980
    

New Roots for Agriculture


Wes Jackson - 1980
    agriculture to the edge of disaster. Tillage has hastened the erosion of irreplaceable topsoil everywhere and a technology based on fossil fuels has increased yields for short-term profits, leaving crops ever more vulnerable to diseases, pests, and droughts. Such, says Jackson, is "the failure of success." As high-technology agriculture becomes more wasteful and expensive, more farmers are being forced off the land or into bankruptcy. Jackson's major solution calls for the development of plant combinations that yield food while holding the soil and re-newing its nutrients without plowing or applying fossil-fuel-based fertilizers or pesticides. His new way of raising crops, by working with the soil's natural systems, would keep the world's bread-basket producing perpetually.

Basic Problems of Ethnopsychiatry


George Devereux - 1980
    This unique approach, which differentiates sanity and insanity from social adjustment and maladjustment, provides a rigorous foundation for a general theory of psychoanalytic ethnopsychiatry. George Devereux, a psychoanalyst and anthropologist, discusses crime, sexual delinquency, dreams in non-Western cultures, and cannibalistic drives of parents. He frequently cites case material from his extensive field work with the Mahave Indians of Arizona and the Sedang Moi of Vietnam and from his clinical work with non-Western patients.