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PARTISAN REVIEW
A GRAMMAR OF SOVIET MOTIVES
SOVIET ATIITUDES TOWARD AUTHORITY: An Interdisciplinery Ap–
proech to Problems of Soviet Cherecter. By Mergeret Meed. McGrew–
Hill. $4.00.
Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority
is the product of a
research team, led and inspired by Margaret Mead, which included
distinguished students of Soviet politics, industrial and agricultural
organization, folklore, and pedagogy. The book also includes a report by
David Rodnick, who studied on the spot the phony "unity" election
which followed the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia. The result is,
in terms of content, one of the most interesting and original books yet
written about the Soviet Union; and, in terms of method, new evidence
of the usefulness of the "psychocultural" approach to political problems.
Indeed, the book pertinently opens with a defense of that approach
against Margaret Mead's numerous critics, who have, in giving her
position such names as "diaperology," treated one of the ablest and
most imaginative American field workers as
if
she were an astrologer.
"Diaperology" is, of course, a caricature of the view that the tight
and, for the first year, near-continuous swaddling of Great Russian
infants is part of a non-verbal system of communication between parent
and child-a system whose meaning for both parties depends less on
the swaddling as a mechanical device (other cultures also practice
swaddling, but mean different things by it) than on the totality of the
social setting, just as verbal communication later on-such cross-cultural
words as "love," for instance-has to be interpreted in the light of the
whole socio-economic system of a particular culture_
Dr. Mead's new book bears witness both to the maturity of her po–
litical and institutional grasp of the Soviet Union and to her modesty
about "the" anthropologist's role in the study of complex modern so–
cieties. That role, in cases such as this where field work is not possible
(though many refugees from various social strata were interviewed),
is to emphasize the importance of such cultural evidences as folktales,
fiction, films. The book demonstrates inventiveness in the avoidance of
pat interpretation of such material. Thus, brilliant use is made of Soviet
fiction to exhibit some of the contradictions between the cold effective–
ness required of the factory manager or other leader and the warm
responsiveness to the masses which he is also supposed to display: he
must be both relaxed and tense, sly and candid, cheerful and endlessly
self-critical-a combination of bureaucratic and charismatic man, of
John Bunyan and Paul Bunyan.
