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Kardiner then introduced a further complicating number of
considerations. The Tanalese personality with its peculiar sense of
reality was attached to a particular arrangement of institutions and
economy-dry cultivation of rice on communally owned land.
When the exhaustion of the jungle compelled abandonment of the
method of dry cultivation for wet, there was a scramble for the fertile
valleys, private ownership replaced communal holdings, family
organization broke up as a consequence, and the entire culture
began to come apart and collapse. Kardiner's conclusions on these
matters were that, in a culture which conceives of reality along the
lines of the Tanalese nuclear projective systems, there will be a
radical impairment of adaptive capacities. The external world can
be dealt with in a very limited number of ways if it is perceived "in
accordance with the analogy of an all-powerful father and an
obedient child. When the father's power gives out, as it did in
Tanala, only disorganized aggression and panic could ensue. The
individual who deals with the outer world on the basis of obedience
can develop no sense of responsibility for his own fate and cannot
therefore develop those manipulative powers of which he is capable.
The intensity and cruelty of an exacting super-ego is no surrogate for
responsibility for oneself."
Kardiner elaborated these findings in his extended analyses of
other and very different cultures. He composes, for instance, a most
impressive account of the Comanche, which was for a short period a
highly successful predatory culture. Through extremely considerate
child-rearing, the Comanches developed in their braves a character
that was uninhibited, courageous, and full of positive self-esteem.
Yet Comanche action-warfare, conquest, and plunder-was
exercised "exclusively outside the society," and hence the capacity of
that society as a whole to develop was severely limited. Comanche
society could exist "only as long as there were slaves to steal and
cattle to rustle. In other words, this fine ego structure ... was bought
at the expense of criminality perpetrated on others and at the cost of
the complete collapse of the society once this criminality was
incapable of being exercised." It is almost as if Comanche society
had no cultural or transindividual superego when it came to other
groups or societies.
This analysis was followed by a polar contrast, an account of
Alorese society in Indonesia, in which infant and child-rearing
practices were CapriCiOUS, inconsistent, chaotic, neglectful,
arbitrary, unstable, and cruel. These behaviors led to a personality
type characterized by low degrees of organization, aspiration, and
